Departures and other films

Perhaps the most critically successful Japanese movie of the last twelve months or so has been Yojiro Tokito's recent film, Departures. It's been storming the film festivals, took the Japanese Oscar, and I believe the Oscar for best foreign language film.

It's the story of a professional cellist who gets made redundant and on doing so, realizes that he'll never be in the front line of cellists. To make ends meet, him and his wife leave Tokyo and go back to his parents home, somewhere in the country, and he starts looking for another job.

Unfortunately, he isn't qualified to do anything, and when he stumbles into an interview without knowing what the job actually entails, he's very relucant at first. However, the high pay soon wins him over. But the position is so stigmatized, he initially keeps his new job from his wife -- and when she does find out, she's not at all happy.

Departures is a fine example of what the Japanese call a 'family dorama' -- the family is really the subject of all of the best Japanese films, and at the root of this story is the fact that handling the dead was regarded as something that was only done by the very lowest castes -- the Japanese version of India's untouchables. But of course, when she comes to see him laying out somebody that she cared about, the wife is eventually won over.

It is a very good film -- very Japanese, compelling because of how different their lives and their culture is to ours, and beautifully shot.

However, there's a recent film on a very similar subject called A Hardest Night that I actually much preferred.

Many things in Japan still work on the old apprenticeship system of Master and Acolyte. This includes funeral directors, as in the previous movie, Departures, but it also includes comedians.

And so when an old master of a form of comedy called Raguko is dying, all of his pupils gather around to support him in his passing, and to mourn his loss.

Raguko might be termed 'Sit down comedy' as opposed to stand up comedy. The performer sits down in traditional kimono on a pad, armed only with a fan, and tells a long, convoluted shaggy dog story. It may be that there are only so many stories and everyone knows them -- the art is in how the performer tells it and makes it his own. But I'm far from expert on the subject having seen just two films.

Anyway, the opening few scenes of this film -- in which one of the acolytes believes that the master wants to take one last look at a woman's pussy before he dies -- is one of the funniest things I've seen on screen for a very long time.

The subject matter of both films is very similar -- both are centred around death and the formal mourning of the dead. And both are very good films indeed. But of the two films, if I had to recommend just one, I'd go with A Hardest Night every time.

And while I'm here, there's another recent film about Raguko that's worth a watch as well. Talk, Talk, Talk (2007) is a film about the relationship between a Raguko comedian and his acolyte that's also well worth watching if you ever get the opportunity. It's pretty unlikely that you will, but if you're ever around at my house, I'd love to show any of them to you.

As an afterthought, here's a raguko story made into an animated short:

Atama Yama