Departures is a new Japanese film about a man, Daigo, whose dream to be a concert cellist fails because he lacks the necessary talent, and so is forced to make other plans. He moves from Tokyo back home to a small town, where news seems to travel surprisingly slowly. Untrained in any profession other than music, he answers a classified ad in the newspaper for a job in “departures”, thinking he is applying to work at a travel agency, only to discover it was a misprint and a job about “the departed”. The job interview lasts 2 minutes; the interviewer asks Daigo if he will work hard, Daigo responds “yes, sir!”, the interviewer tells him he’s hired and hands him a pile of cash. When Daigo discovers the job deals with dead people, he is hesitant, having never seen a corpse before or had to deal with death. Nevertheless, upon discovering how well it pays, Daigo decides to accept the job.

And so Daigo enters a world of ritual for the dead, performed for the living. His job consists of carefully cleaning the bodies of the dead discretely in front of the family, safeguarding family members from the sight of skin, in order to prepare the body for the coffin.

The beginning of Daigo’s dalliances with “the Departed” is filled with a lot of good humour. On the first day of his job, Daigo participates in a promotional video; he has to wear a diaper, have a powdered white face, and must play a corpse. His first encounter with a dead person involves finding a woman in an apartment filled with bugs and the strong stench of her decaying body. Sad, disgusting, and for Daigo, incredibly shocking events are happening, but they are shot with such light humour that we can’t help but laugh at Daigo’s confusion and initiation. When he is no longer a neophyte, he still encounters new and bumpy ground, including discovering, in the middle of the ceremony, that the person he was preparing, who looked like a woman, happens to have a penis. These scenes are genuinely funny and a whole lot of fun; they are also dealt with in a delicate, caring fashion so that we are not laughing cruelly or poking fun at this ritual. We experience the same amusement as the other characters in the film.

Soon the job is no longer a burden for Daigo but a refuge. There are three people in the company, all misfits in some way, who find comfort in each other, and in well-cooked gourmet food. One of the most interesting and disgusting images in the film is watching these three devour meat, as the tendons, the muscle, the flesh of the food is shown in close-up detail. As the boss of the business puts it “everyone is meat, and we eat the dead in order to survive”. These three take comfort in one another, but also in the ritual that they daily perform, bringing comfort and closure to the lives of the family members who have just experienced such loss.

As we watch Daigo grow comfortable in this new profession, I started to wonder how long he would stay in this job. Performing this the ceremony, he gets to play the role of observer or helper to the outside world. But to me, it seems that this outsider status should be transitional. This is the job you are supposed to do while you figure out what you are going to do next. It is not the job you do for a lifetime, because it means not living your own life, only making guest appearances in the lives of others. And in Japan, to be the one that performs this ritual, is to be ostracized from social life, condemned by one’s peers, even though the ritual is so valued. Daigo seems to never move on, content to help others move on without living himself.

The film also explores some interesting, though perhaps not fully satisfying ideas regarding Daigo’s relationship with his wife. When he loses his job as a cellist – the orchestra he was playing in gets shut down – he declares he wants to move home and she consents with a smile, without argument. And she continues with a smile, like a young girl, a small child, except that she is a grown woman. Although his wife works as a web designer in Tokyo, she seems content to be without a job in the middle of nowhere, or perhaps she is working remotely, but there is no acknowledgement of her situation either way.

One of the most interesting character points in the movie is about the way in which Daigo deals with crisis, both now and in his past, and what this means for his masculinity and why he behaves the way he does. As a young child, his father left him and his mother. As we learn from the lady that runs the local bath house which Daigo frequented as a small boy, Daigo refused to shed a tear in front of his mother. But when he came to the bath house, she [the owner] would see him cry like a baby when alone, a story which she recounts with motherly affection, perhaps the bath house was really his second home. Now grown up, Daigo will cry in front of his wife, but he will tell her nothing of why he is crying, which she seems to accept with too much ease. After encountering his first corpse at his job, he comes home, and reduces to tears in front of his wife, crying into her bosom, taking comfort in her, yet he never tells her what his job is or why he is crying. She asks but seems content with his silence. Yet there is something disturbing about this scene in which Daigo first asks to be held by his wife, much like he must have wished his into something very confusing and somewhat degrading: standing in the kitchen, crying, hugging her, he begins to undress her, undo her pants, feel her up. Why can’t he just mourn? Why must comfort turn into sex? And why is his wife willing to tolerate this behaviour, though she does tell him “no”, without demanding an explanation, a conversation.

Unfortunately, rather than exploring the interesting issues which I have raised, the film decides to embrace every cliché imaginable, throughout the second half, which drags and drags. The woman at the bath house dies, Daigo gets an opportunity to see his father right after his death and cope with the loss and his lost memories from childhood by finally performing the ceremony he has learned on his own loved one that he has forgotten. And somehow, his wife learns to accept the career that Daigo has chosen, even though she first thought it very “unclean”. Every possible clichéd setup is embraced, and you can see every scene and its resolution coming from a mile away.

Despite the path that Departures chooses to take, embracing cliché without remarkable insight, there are moments of greatness, or at least pure entertainment or interesting explorations of philosophy. There is a wonderful glimpse into this practiced Japanese ceremony, though watching it time and time again gets repetitive and dull, it does cause interesting meditations on the importance of ritual, and how we deal with difficult events. Unfortunately, too much of the film is mired in cliché, so by the second half, it grows slow, weary, and occasionally painful. Nevertheless, the first half of the film, when Daigo starts to learn the tricks of the trade in “the departed”, is fresh, funny, vibrant, and at times shocking.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Film, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.