Departures (2008)

Departures (dir. Yojiro Takita) opens with a meaningless transphobic scene involving a funeral ritual and a bunch of bereaved relatives who fight about the deceased person's life. That didn't give me much hope about the movie. But the quality of the film improved for a while, so I watched the whole thing. It turns out that the main character is not the person in the coffin, but the young man, an unemployed cellist, who is preparing the body in the ritual. We learn that he has returned to his home town and applies for a job despite not knowing what the job is about - it has to do with "departures", maybe a traveling agency. When he is in the know, it's too late - he was hired on the spot by his elderly boss. In Japan, we learn, this profession is considered to be shameful and the young man doesn't even reveal the nature of his job to his wife. The film follows his initiation into the profession: this is by far the best part of the film where we stick to the work routines and the small workplace. The last part of the film takes a dramatic turn and the movie goes down the drain as there is an attempt to tie all threads together into a neat bundle. Departures is interesting while it observes the Japanese rituals of preparing corpses for death in the presence of the close family and it shows how gracefully and skillfully these two deal with the deceased. I start to think about the strange reasons for why their profession, undertaking, is taboo - in the ritual, death itself is not at all taboo as the corpse is prepared in front of people and they get to say their goodbyes. Here, the film was a quite subdued affair and kept close to its subject: the young man gets accustomed to his job and learns to develop a professional attitude towards it under the guidance of his wise and experienced boss (I liked their scenes together - moving, somehow). But apparently this topic alone was not relied on - something more dramatic seemed to have been called for (why? I don't see this) and at this point Departures assembles the Big Musical Score and the Panoramic Nature Images in order to drive home the points about family secrets and forgiveness.