Oscar-Winning Departures a Disappointing Trip

After his orchestra suddenly disbands, cellist Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) finds himself both out of work and deeply in debt. Thinking that it will help, he and his loving wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) move to Yamagata prefecture and into the home of his youth, long dormant after the death of his mother a couple of years earlier.

Masahiro Motoki plays on in Stand Releasing's Departures

Looking through the local newspaper, he finds an add asking for help with ‘Departures.’ Thinking it must be for a travel agency Daigo happily goes to interview for the position, only to discover when he gets to the locale that this assumption was drastically wrong. The work in fact pertains to the ceremonial ‘encoffinating’ of corpses prior to cremation, the quiet and unassuming company owner Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki) offering him a job seemingly just for answering the add.

With few options, Daigo takes the job. But he does not tell Mika about it, instead saying his duties are going to involve ‘ceremonies’ and not with the handling of the dead. Soon, however, the young man comes to really like his new job, and even when old friends and community members who knew him as a boy urge him to change professions, Daigo comes to believe the value of what he’s doing far outweighs the negative perceptions those around him might have.

I was extremely curious to see director Yôjirô Takita’s Departures when I noticed in the lineup for this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. This was, after all, the movie that shocked just about everyone to beat heavy favorites Waltz with Bashir and The Class for the 2008 Best Foreign Film Academy Award. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about, this small, intimate-sounding drama having an electricity around it I was relatively eager to experience for myself.

To paraphrase a little from the comments I made a few days back on my 2009 SIFF Blog, sad to say I can’t quite understand how this upset took place. Sweet, sometimes moving and definitely heartfelt, the film is nonetheless a bit of a disappointment, repeating itself far too much and not really going anyplace I didn’t expect right from the very start. The performances are nice, the vibe is pretty much spot-on, but the movie itself almost can’t help but under whelm, none of it ever rising to the level it needs to in order to fully connect.

Kundo Koyama’s screenplay is tasteful to a fault. I can see how in a culture as built on perception and appearance as Japan’s tends to be such a profession could be seen in such indignant light yet the writer never dives into these issues with any sort of emotional ferocity. His insights are all extremely superficial, his antagonistic aggressors strictly one-dimensional, and because of that not once did I ever feel like the protagonist was overcoming obstacles all that difficult to triumph over.

I do oversimplify a tiny bit I must admit. The relationship between Daigo and Mika is entirely believable, and when the conflicts between them arise they ring of honesty and truth. I could feel the cultural push-pull between them, and while the device used to ultimately bring them back together is an obvious one based on what we’ve seen the pair already go through this was one turn of events I could warmly embrace.

The act of encoffinating is also an extremely beautiful and mesmerizing one to behold. The care taken with the bodies of the dead by Daigo and Sasaki is breathtaking, the whole procedure an art form as solemn and as moving as any I could have remotely imagined. There is something to it that made me want to hold my breath, Takita’s camera catching every detail with a reverential intimacy that almost effortlessly brought me to tears.

The problem is, the director doesn’t just show these encoffinatings a handful of times. Instead, there are countless of the procedures in the film, so many that by the time the most important one of the entire drama was finally about to take place I could have cared less about it in the slightest. It all amounts to overkill, Takita so beholden of the process he ends up zapping it of almost all its resonance, beauty and power. 

Don’t misunderstand, Departures is not a total failure. There are some grand moments, while Motoki’s performance has a warm, lived-in resonance that transcends the material becoming something rapturous and sublime. I just don’t think the movie lives up to its potential, too thinly plotted and filled with annoying coincidences that don’t add anything to the story other than length. It’s a mixed bag, at times a downright forgettable one, and the only real emotion I felt walking out of the theater was regrettably one of disappointment.

Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)  

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