Film review: Departures

Published on Tuesday 15 December 2009 13:19

DEPARTURES (12A) * * *

An Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, this unpretentious minor key drama stars Masahiro Motoki (Shall We Dance?) as Daigo, a cellist with a struggling symphony orchestra in Tokyo which disbands amid the economic downturn. Daigo and his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue, below) move back to live in his late mother's house in a beautiful backwater. A job in the local paper is headed "Departures", so he applies, assuming the position has something to do with the travel industry.

However, when he's hired, his job is to assist the taciturn Mr Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki) in sprucing up corpses before cremation. It's a job so unacceptable that he doesn't even tell his wife about it for most of the film. At first he's disgusted by the work, then discovers that he's good at it. The real task at hand is to give death some dignity, respect to the deceased and consolation to the bereaved, and it is hard not to be moved by this. Director Yojiro Takita uses the changing seasons to reflect the characters' moods; the soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle) has a suitably sweep; and the Japanese seem to have a profound, unsensational acceptance of death. True, the film is a little predictable but it's rather touching too, despite some broad attempts at humour and a surprisingly high death count for such a small place.