Departures

Overview

Death and taxes are two certainties in life. Good cinema, unfortunately, is not â€" but leave it to the Japanese to make a film about death and everyday tragedies that will make you laugh until you cry, or cry until you laugh, or both in no particular order.

Departures follows Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a cellist in Tokyo who finds himself at a loose end when his orchestra is disbanded.  After moving back to his hometown with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), he answers a job advertisement for a career in “departures” at an “NK agency”.  As it turns out, NK stands for nokan: the Japanese rite of “encoffinment”, which occurs prior to cremation.

From there, Daigo is forced to confront both an instinctive fear of human decay, and the prejudices of his young wife, and society, against those who deal with the dead. Complicating Daigo’s return home further still, memories of the father who abandoned him as a boy are at once omnipresent and painfully inaccessible.

The beauty of Departures is that plenty of comic relief is interspersed among the heavier scenes â€" and it’s not always entirely differentiated. No one in the audience knew if they were supposed to be laughing during a scene where Daigo, Daigo’s employer Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamakazi) and the office secretary  (Kimiko Yo) sit around a table and gorge on chicken wings. While they tear flesh from bones with greasy mitts, it’s hard to know how you’re supposed to feel. Is it an ashesâ€"toâ€"ashes analogy? Is it a parody of the futility of life? Is it simply a light-hearted scene to pass time between funerals?

These questions are never fully answered. Instead, Departures holds its focus and its sense of purpose with the dedication of Daigo in his encoffinments, imbuing a subject so often mishandled in cinema with dignity and wit.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6UFlWO5zhO8