There are films that have exquisite cinematography or are examples of great storytelling or blend visual and soundtrack to perfection or draw us to consider spiritual aspects. Every so often, a film comes along that is the whole package—that accomplishes everything that transforms a movie into a true work of art. Departures, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, is such a film. It is a beautiful film at each level—visual, aural, emotional, spiritual, plot. As a whole, Departures stands as a sterling example of what film can be.
Daigo is a cellist whose orchestra has just disbanded. He has devoted his life to music, but now has nowhere to go with it. He and his wife, Mika, return to his hometown to live in the house his mother left him when she died. Reading the want ads, he sees a job working for an agency named Departures and assumes it is a travel agency so applies for the job. He is hired on and discovers it is really a company that performs ceremonial “encoffination” of corpses before cremation. The objective is to prepare the dead for a peaceful departure. In earlier years, families did this themselves, but now undertakers hire companies like Departures to do the preparation with the family present. Daigo is so uncomfortable that he doesn’t even tell Mika what his job is. But he is a natural at it. He understands that what he does is of great value. His preparations bring solace to grieving families. In time it will bring solace and closure to his own life and losses.
Handling corpses does seem like a repugnant profession. After his first job he spends a great amount of time in the public bath scrubbing himself before he even goes home. When Mika does find out what he does, she demands he quit, and returns to Tokyo when he won’t. His friend from childhood avoids him and tells him he should get a real job. There is a sense of being “unclean” just as biblically people are made unclean through contact with corpses. This may belie a bit of our aversion to death. We don’t even want to touch that which death touches.
We try to push death away in many ways. Departures pushes us to consider the interaction between life and death. The food we eat, Daigo’s boss Sasaki reminds him, is made from corpses. Death is always close by, though we usually are blind to it. The attendant at the crematory reflects that he’s seen so many come through, but he always thinks, “Off you go. We’ll meet again.” But there is more to it than just the knowledge that we all will die. It is embracing death as an important part of our lives. Sasaki says at one point that he is afraid of dying, but he is not afraid of death. Most people fail to understand the difference.
There is something about their culture that gives Japanese filmmakers an advantage in exploring the borderlands of life and death. Perhaps it is the Buddhist influence that recognizes the transience of life. Films like Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life, and Masayo Kakei’s Accuracy of Death (aka Sweet Rain) all inhabit that realm where death and life flow into one another. Rather than viewing death as something fearful, these films show how closely life and its meaning is tied to mortality, and how death and its meaning is tied to life. In one scene as Daigo sees a body and the personal possessions (this is a key person from Daigo’s past), he wonders what it says about this person’s life that he lived seventy years but only has a box of stuff to show for it. But Daigo goes on to surprising discoveries as he prepares this body.
The film makes this point in various ways. Obviously the story itself leads us to consider the beauty involved in both life and death. But the film shows us beauty in the very presence of death. As Sasaki and Daigo perform their rituals with the body, they are somewhat reminiscent of a stage magician with graceful movements. One of the tasks is to disrobe and the body and dress it in fresh clothing without the family ever seeing the exposed body. They also have to do some rather disgusting tasks, but they do it in such a way that it all looks beautiful to the family watching. These scenes of the preparation of the bodies are entrancing. The process looks so flowing and exquisite; yet like a magician’s illusion, what we see is only part of what is really happening. We know that we are in the presence of death, but we only see beauty.
The music of the film also adds to this sense of life and death meeting. Daigo still plays the cello and the sound is mellow, mournful, emotive, and joyous all at once. The pieces he plays could be heard as dirges or dances. At times we just hear the music as Daigo plays in an open field, the earth coming to life all around him even as he spends day after day with death.
While various cultures and religious traditions have different understandings of death, it is always a matter of importance within each tradition. Whether we see death as a gateway to reincarnation, as the wages of sin, as oblivion, as the precursor to resurrection, or as a great unknown, each time we come across death in our lives life takes on new meanings because of the encounter. Departures reminds us that even that which seems so bleak and even unclean can hold beauties we never expect.
