AFTER LIFE (1998)
"I would like you to choose the most important memory of your life."
4 out of ****
Starring Abe Sadao, Ishido Natsuo, Oda Erika, Terajima Susumu, Naito Takashi Written & Directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu Cinematography by Yamazaki Yutaka and Sukita Masayoshi
It begins with a great hook. Several men and a woman gather in a room, discussing their workload for the week to come. Each is assigned several cases--people, presumably patients, maybe in a hospital, maybe in a mental institution. But the workers discussing their cases wear ordinary clothes, and the building seems more school than hospital. The people--patients, if that is what they are--are greeted in a reception room, and then directed to the person handling their "case." Everyone is amiable and courteous. The "case workers" lead their "patients" to a private room, sit them down at a desk, face them squarely. They then inform them that they are dead, and in a few days they will pass on to another realm, beyond self-awareness.
So begins the second fiction feature by Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, whose previous work, MABOROSI, was one of this decade's more impressive debuts. But that movie, sublime as it was, is surpassed in all regards by AFTER LIFE. MABOROSI was a strikingly beautiful film, but austere and formal: it required patience. To appreciate it, you had to bear with it. AFTER LIFE requires no such act of faith: it is warm, intimate, direct, and it is a masterpiece.
The building, then, is neither hospital nor school nor institute: it is limbo, the doorway to heaven, the threshold of nirvana, any or all of the above. The men and the woman are not case workers, they are advisors, they will guide the dead on their final voyage. Their task is simple enough to describe, but difficult to perform: they must help the dead choose a single memory, their most cherished memory, and when they have done so, they will pass on to a place where they will dwell in that memory forever, forgetting all else. In a splendidly conceived literalization of this task--and a self-reflexive comment on the task that AFTER LIFE itself undertakes--the guides also have to stage a reenactment of each chosen memory, which will be filmed for posterity. (This leads, amongst other things, to a clever scene staged like a pre-production meeting, in which they discuss how to recreate individual memories: clouds rushing by the cockpit of an airplane in flight; cherry blossom falling like snow.)
The dead--who look, talk, and act as they were just before they died--ask the kind of questions we might ask. There is no heaven and hell? No, there isn't. Can they choose a dream instead of a memory, or a vision of the future instead of a recollection of the past? No, they can't. Once they have established the parameters, they begin to pan the rivers of memory, sifting the rocks and the sand and the mud, looking for the precious glint of gold, the single instant that sums up who they were. The process is as much self-definition as recollection. Much of this part of the film is done in "talking head" documentary-style interviews: the camera, fixed, faces the characters head-on, and lets them talk. Nothing else is needed: listening to their reminiscences, feeling their emotions as they try to capture the essence of themselves in a single moment, provides all the drama and passion we could want.
There is an authenticity about these reminiscences that goes beyond fiction, beyond acting, that seems to capture something raw and true. I was not surprised to learn, after I had seen the film, that many of the cast members are non-professionals, real people recalling real lives. They were selected from over five hundred interviewees, found more or less at random, in nursing homes and parks and temples in Tokyo. What these people have done in this film is remarkable. It is not acting, but its opposite: they have stripped away pretense and artifice, and bared their souls.
We learn much about them, but as they talk to their advisors, we also start to learn about the advisors, too. There are many quiet revelations, each fitting perfectly into the overall scheme of the film. We are treated to the details of the advisor's jobs, the logistics involved in the mock-up recreations, the formalities that provide a send-off for these people as they pass into easeful self-less sleep. Some details are left deliberately obscure--we never learn how anyone died, we never learn the boundaries of this spiritual halfway house--but we eventually find out who the guides are, and why they do what they do. The more I think about it, the more profound and reassuring that revelation seems.
The same can be said for the whole movie, but one sequence in particular affected me beyond all reason. An older woman--who I am convinced is one of the non-professionals, remembering genuine lived experience--is describing her chosen memory. She recalls dancing as a young girl to a song called "The Red Shoes." As she talks, details return to her: the dance steps, her red dress, a gesture made with her handkerchief. There is nothing in my own experience that connects me with these things. She is a woman; I am a man. I have never been to her homeland; she, probably, has never been to mine. I have never heard a song called "The Red Shoes," and I don't like dancing.
Yet this scene, this simple, unpoetic remembrance, moved me, inexplicably, to tears. I can count on one hand the number of times I have felt so choked up by a single scene in a movie. The only thing that this woman and I have in common is our humanity. One of AFTER LIFE's many lessons is that, in the end, that is enough. We are all bound by our mortality, and it is that bond which makes it bearable.
A Review by David Dalgleish (November 30th, 1998)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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