Departures [DVD] [2008]

This film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards ceremony in 2009. It is certainly unusual, and I rate it very highly indeed. Daigo Koboyashi loses his job as a 'cellist in a Tokyo orchestra, and he and his young wife, very charmingly played by Ryoko Hirosue, are forced to go back into the country and stay in the small house left to him by his mother. He needs work and gets it - as the assistant to an aging but highly expert 'encasketer' - that is, someone who prepares a dead body for burial, a ceremony conducted in the presence of family and friends. The ceremony, to Western eyes unfamiliar, is carried out with great dignity and care, and is an opportunity for those close to the departed to say farewell and to express their grief. The advert. for the job has been vague (partly the result of a misprint) and Daigo does not know what he is letting himself in for. For a while he faces many difficulties and eventually his marriage is under strain, but he stays with the job and comes to admire the skill and professionalism of his employer and to value highly the service they give to the bereaved. There are many other plot strands in the film, but, for those who have not seen it, I cannot write about these, except to say that eventually the work comes very close to Daigo personally, and when that happens, the film is extremely moving - the cinema in which I saw it was hushed, and some of the audience were in tears.

But it is also very funny. There is a bizarre side to the work (as, for example, when the encasketers discover - in front of the family - that the corpse - a girl, it would seem - has a penis) and there is a good deal of black humour in the earlier part of the film. All of the principal characters - Diago, Mika (his wife), the encasketer and his female secretary - are sympathetic characters and it is very easy to empathise with them, so that as the plot moves on, we become involved. Its quaintness is a plus too. Not only is the encasketing ritual intriguing, the town in which Diago and Mika stay, the bathhouse they visit, the very beautiful countryside (sometimes snow-covered) are all visually absorbing. Far on in the film, Diago is filmed playing his 'cello on a raised bank by a road with a snow-covered mountain in the background, and this is striking, even if it is also impossible to believe that he ever actually did this.

The film is quite long and I thought might outstay its welcome, but just at that point there was a splendid coup de theatre (in a fishing village) which really struck home - and then it ended. It was thoroughly enjoyable, beautifully acted and directed and, in its strangeness, memorable. I recommend it with enthusiasm.

Hollywood mastered the construction of emotional roller coasters long ago but endless repetition inevitably results in cliche. Departures uses similar techniques, but manages to avoid feeling contrived because the cultural underpinnings are fresh and unfamiliar, to Western audiences at least. This film is a small gem that will make you laugh and cry, providing that you are still on this side of the Styx. Highly recommended.

This is such a good film that it has to be in my top 30 movies. I originally saw it at a film conference at Glastone's Library a five muinet clip. There are not many films that treat death and how the dead are respected as this film dose. The sense of dignity that is there is worthy of a closest examination. With gentle humourn the film showsnthe dignity of preparing for peoples departure, not (and this is not a real spoiler) for their holiday but following their death. In the UK in the past it was the community mid wife who prepared the body for the funeral director to come and collect - laying it out washing and dressing it. A friend who's husband recently died said this was done by a couple of the carers who again did it with a great deal of dignity.
Departures is a great film the humour makes it lighter and the acting is superb, the direction well orchestrated and the music will haunt you until you look it up on the web.