Review: ‘Departures’

An unemployed cellist finds his true calling as a corpse cosmetician in the moving new Japanese film DEPARTURES. A smash hit in Japan, DEPARTURES, a film about death, life, and forgiveness, was an upset winner for best foreign film at this year’s Oscar ceremony and it’s easy to see why this sentimental art-house crowd pleaser won over the political favorite WALTZ WITH BASHIRS and the more challenging THE CLASS. DEPARTURES is a well-acted and smartly directed drama that manages to be emotional without feeling manipulative. It is slightly overlong and slow paced and, despite the Oscar, I doubt that it will find much mainstream cross-over appeal. With DEPARTURES, director Yojiro Takita has created an engrossing film that is sweet, sad and funny, a portrait of a young man coming to terms with abandonment by his father and learning about himself through the process of his employment.

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a 30-ish cellist in a Tokyo orchestra has just invested a fortune on an expensive new instrument but his pride is short-lived when he finds out the orchestra is disbanding and he is unemployed. Crushed, he and his perky supportive wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), move to the rural village where he grew up and into a rent-free home left to him by his deceased mother. Seeking a new vocation, Diago spots a newspaper ad offering a job “working in departures,� Daigo assumes it’s a travel agency but discovers it’s actually a type of funeral parlor where the “customers� are on a one-way trip to the hereafter. The position is actually as an apprentice “encoffiner�, a uniquely Japanese occupation that involves ritualistically preparing and washing the dead in the presence of grieving family members prior to cremation. He’s hired on the spot by the philosophical master Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who believes that fate has delivered Daigo to him. Like Amy Adams in SUNSHINE CLEANING, another film that tackles the subject of morbid occupations, Daigo is at first repulsed by his new job, especially when his first “client� is a putrifying two-week old corpse, and he’s ashamed of the stigma that he feels is attached to working with the dead. Gradually, Daigo learns the profession, losing focus of the gross side of the job and utilizing some of the creative skills he learned as a cellist. He finds himself moved by the reactions his work elicits from the mourners and realizes he has discovered his calling. But Daigo has his own troubles at home including a wife he has to hide his profession from and a father he can’t forgive for abandoning him as a child and complications arise when Daigo suddenly gets word regarding his estranged father.

Much of DEPARTURES is spent examining the artful way the encoffiners perform their elaborate rituals. These are almost magician-like performances, shifting layers of fabric as they undress, wash, and reclothe the body in silk without exposing the skin. In some ways Diago is back to performing, this time a symphony to the deceased played out in front of their devastated families. The beauty of these simply-filmed scenes is undeniable and they’re fascinating to watch but the ceremonies are presented at length, pushing the film past the 130 minute mark. There are many moving moments in DEPARTURES but most are in these scenes where watching families are suffering and infighting often surfaces under the pressure of bereavement.

Occasionally DEPARTURES becomes a bit corny and self-conscious: I could have done without the scenes of Diago playing his cello in picturesque fields in front of snow-capped mountains, but it is very well-made, especially in scenes depicting the grief and loss of surviving family members. There’s also some rich humor in DEPARTURES such as the scene where Diago is hired to play a corpse in an instructional video that Sasaki is producing and another scene when a young suicide victim turns out not to be the girl Diago thought he was. DEPARTURES is the rare film that earns its tears from audience members honestly unlike so many Hollywood movies that drag the viewer by the hand into forced emotions (the nauseating SEVEN POUNDS is a perfect recent example). Masahiro Motoki is a former teen pop star in Japan and he solidly anchors a story in the role of Daigo. Tsutomu Yamazaki as Daigo’s boss and mentor is outstanding and has all the best deadpan comic scenes. Jo Hisaishi’s showy, cello-heavy score is one of the most meorable in recent memory and adds greatly to the film’s success. DEPARTURES is an excellent movie that I highly recommend and I’m glad that it won that Oscar!