2008 Winner, Departures

 Departures

 

Director:  Yōjirō Takita 

Distributed by:  Shochiku 

Released:  September 2008 

Country:  Japan

My guess is that of all the foreign films I have watched in my lifetime (subtracting the Best Foreign Films), 80% have been Japanese.  That’s because a few years ago I discovered Akira Kurosawa and began obsessively watching all of his movies I could find.  So I was looking forward to this film to see if it would measure up to any of the great films made by him or by the other two famous Japanese directors of his era, Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi.  What I found was that this was no Seven Samurai or The Tokyo Story in terms of tone or scope, but was quite different, and in a good way.

An encoffinment ceremony

The story focuses on Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist with a two-bit orchestra in Tokyo.  When the group goes out of business, it’s “Cello, Goodbye” for the young Daigo, and he and his and his fiancé move back to the town he grew up into in the little house he inherited from his mom.  Daigo’s dad ditched him and his mom way back when, which is a detail that will become a major focus of the story later.  Daigo scans the want ads for a job, and sees a cryptic one that asks for someone for “assisting departures.”  Daigo assumes he will work for a travel agency, but after getting hired, he learns his new employer has bamboozled him with an epic bait and switch.  Turns out the word “departures” wasn’t what he thought—it actually referred to departing from this world into the next.  Daigo was unknowingly hired to assist in ceremonies of Buddhist encoffinment, preparing the body in a ritualistic way for cremation.  In Japan, the vast majority of the dead are cremated, and the preparation of the body—the cleaning, the clothing, etc., was once normally done in front of the departed's loved ones.  Nowadays, this is a rarity—hence, the difficulty in finding an assistant to hire.

Excuse me?  You got a job doing what?

This film doesn’t neatly fit into the category of drama or comedy—the subject of death is ever present, but one can imagine the fish-out-of-water merriment that might ensue when a guy is picked off the street to clean dead bodies.  And there are some genuinely funny moments, like when Daigo helps out in making a training video for future encoffinment hirees.  Understandably, Daigo doesn’t want to give his pretty fiancé the heebie-jeebies, so he keeps the details of his new gig from her for a while.  Oh boy, when she finds out!

Daigo soon learns that he is more talented at fiddling with dead carcasses than with the cello, and . . . . kinda likes it (weird!).  But just as he gets used to his new job, he is thrown for a loop—the next dead guy on the slab is none other than his old man!  Daddy issues rise to the top here, so basically this movie is a carbon copy of Field of Dreams, except we are in Japan and not Iowa, and the subject matter is encoffinment and not baseball, and just about every other detail is different.

 

Departures is a simple film, really.  No fancy camera work but well shot, and I found the ritual scenes to be quite captivating.  Again, this movie is so very different from the ones of the great earlier Japanese masters, yet it shares a theme common with them—that of a passing Japanese culture, one moving from the religious to the secular, from the traditional to the modern.  It is a bittersweet theme—sad, of course, to see our traditions pass as our loved ones do.  But at the same time, if we embrace the today, we can see the beauty of the new.  Departures doesn’t look like the wonderful Japanese cinema of Kurosawa's day, yet it’s okay to let go and look at the modern and enjoy it for its beauty in its own right, all with respect and appreciation for the past.

Yo, Jimbo, there's more to Japanese cinema than just samurai films.

The Title:  おくりびと, literally, “one who sends off.” The title is the joke, in part—the ad wasn’t for departures to another country but into the next life.  But it is also about departures from what one expects of life, or from what one has held as fundamentally important, onto something different, and possibly greater.

The Culture:  The dying art of encoffinment in the Buddhist tradition is shown with beauty and dignity.  Whenever you learn a little thing about a culture in a movie like this, it’s an unexpected treat.

Agenda Danger:  Nothing slightly political.

Best Picture that year:  Slumdog Millionaire

Rating:  A film with comedy that isn’t over the top and has drama at the right tone.  Believe me, you are dying to see it.

2009 Winner, The Secret in Their Eyes

The Secret in Their Eyes

Director:  Juan Jose Campanella

Distributed by:  Sony Pictures Classics

Released: August 2009

Country:  Argentina

Director Campanella has directed a bunch of American TV drama shows, most notably 17 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes and a couple L&O: Criminal Intents.  In watching The Secret in Their Eyes, this makes perfect sense—this movie comes off a bit as a long detective show with the twists of your average L&O.  There is something satisfyingly prosaic about this film, like turning on a decent cop show and knowing the formula, and enjoying it not in spite of the formula, but in part because of it.

Benjamin Esposito is a retired police detective writing a novel about a case he caught a quarter of a century ago.  He probably planned that when he retired, he would have some great stories to tell/sell, but like a lot of you (us), when he started typing, he realized he couldn’t write for shit.  So he calls up his old boss from those days hoping to see if she can give him some insight.  Yes, I said “she”—Ben’s old boss, you see, is Irene, and Ben certainly had quite the thing for her way back in the days they worked together.

The Big Leer

Most of the movie is told in flashback:  The case was a doozy—a young, engaged girl raped and murdered shortly before her wedding.  Her fiancé is distraught, but of course, he’s the prime suspect.  Benjamin’s rival detective solves the case pretty quickly, but only because he beat the snot out of a couple of innocent bystanders in order to get their damning testimony.  Ben doesn’t believe the witnesses are telling the truth, and keeps digging because that’s what good detectives do.  In looking at the vic's family photos, Ben keeps seeing one pretty sketchy character in the background giving the murder victim The Big Leer in every picture.  He seems awfully creepy.  Could the secret be in his eyes?

What makes this story different than the L&O episodes Campanella directed is that in the American criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders.  In 1975 Argentina, you can rape and kill whomever you fancy and get off scot-free, as long as you are working for the Perón government.  Benjamin likes the the leering guy in the photos for the crime, but this suspect works for the right people and walks.

They'd have solved it in under 60 minutes, with commercial breaks

The whodunit aspect of this film might have been a bit flimsy, but I really liked the connection of the murder story to the stunted romance between Benjamin and Irene.  See, he and Irene never quite made a go of it back in the old days.  But Ben stayed in love for 25 years and he knew that all along, despite her saying no and marrying another guy, the secret was in her eyes that she really wanted to be with him all along.  Ben makes a few too many assumptions about the eyes, if you ask me, but actor Ricardo Darín plays him as a likable, if flawed, regular guy--sort of an Argentinian Gene Hackman.  I’ll leave it unsaid as to whether he was right on the killer, or Irene, or both with the eyes thing.

The Title:  El secreto de sus ojos.  This was remade recently starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Nicole Kidman (not in 12 Years a Slave, I don’t think).  I haven’t seen it, but the reviews and box office receipts weren’t kind.

The Culture:  Argentina was a pretty corrupt place under the Peróns, and most of the film takes place at the tail end of the last Perón's presidency (the President was Juan Perón's third wife, Isabel).  The opposition was made up of leftist thugs, though, so neither side were the good guys.  But letting a guy off for rape and murder because he works for the government seems wrong.

Agenda Danger:   Seems like Isabel Perón didn't worry too much about police ethics or in trying to get her own musical, like Perón's second wife did.

Best Picture that year:  The Hurt Locker

Rating:  Fun to watch, like a good cop show.