Film review: Departures

Published on Thursday 17 December 2009 18:04

DEPARTURES (12A) ** DIRECTED BY: YÔJIRÔ TAKITA STARRING: MASAHIRO MOTOKI, RYOKO HIROSUE, TSUTOMU YAMAZAKI

THE surprise winner of last year's Academy Award for best film not in the English language (trumping hot favourite Waltz with Bashir), the Japanese film Departures proves that elegant sentimentalism will win out over cutting-edge innovation every time. Directed by Yjir Takita, it's a gentle, comic drama about a 36-year-old cellist called Daigo (Masahiro Motoki), who returns to his hometown after his orchestra goes bankrupt. Applying for a job in "departures", believing it to involve a travel agency, it is, in fact, a job in the funeral industry preparing the dead for burial.

Introduced to the gentle art of "encoffinment" with a gag involving a transsexual, he realises the job comes with a certain amount of stigma attached, but, as he gets over his own hang-ups, not only does he begin to find the same degree of serenity performing these hugely important rituals as he did playing music, he also finds himself coming to terms with the abandonment issues caused when his father walked out on him as a kid.

That supposedly qualifies as dramatic momentum, but stretched over more than two hours of banal whimsy, its funereal themes start feeling a bit too literal.