AFTER LIFE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Artistic License Films Director: Kore-Eda Hirokazu Writer: Kore-Eda Hirokazu Cast: Sadao Abe, Natsuo Ishido, Erika Oda, Kazuko Shirakawa, Susumu Terajima, Sayaka Yoshino
Much as we like to push such questions to the fringes of our minds, we can't help thinking about what happens to us after we die. Is there a heaven and is there a hell? If so, would the latter be a more interesting place to spend eternity, as some revisionists half-jokingly claim? No one put the inquiry in better literary form than Shakespeare, whose suicidal Hamlet chose to live after fearing what would happen "when we have shuffled our this mortal coil." No wonder, then, that directors and screenwriters have let their imaginations run freely as they've conjured up comedies and dramas about life after death, the splashy American entry, "What Dreams May Come" being the latest commercial venture into that crowded field.
Films about the afterlife are a natural for the cinema, the most visually kinetic of the art forms and so well suited to flights of fancy. What, then, got into the head of Kore-Eda Hirokazu in his second directorial feature, "After Life," which has to be about the most static film ever made about the subject? What a rejection of the most basic concept of film, the principal factor that separates it from books. Film is a visual medium. Don't tell me; show me. Talking heads are more suited to the stage and even in the legitimate theater, directors typically exploit technology to bring the page to life. Hirokazu makes the same mistake as had Mike Nichols in choosing the inert "The Designated Mourner" as his first acting vehicle.
What is particularly surprising is the near-hysteria that greeted the introduction of the film at various festivals, evoking sell-out crowds and rave reviews online critics like David Dalgleish, who called this "a masterpiece...warm, intimate, direct" and Richard Scheib, who decided at the Vancouver International Film Festival last year that this is a "marvelous little Japanese film...that kind of creeps up on you." De gustibus non disputandem est, as they say, or in other words, thank goodness critics' opinions on any given movie run the gamut of else a lot of writers would have to look for jobs.
Director Kore-Eda Hirokazu was induced to make this film by his grandfather's senility. As he states in the production notes, the poor old man suffered from Alzheimer's disease, gradually forgetting even that he had eaten (he requested a dinner just after completing a meal), could not find his way home, and failed to recognize the people of his family or even himself. "I now understand," thought Hirokazu, "How critical memories are to our identity."
"After Life" focuses on the importance of memory by presenting an allegory about people who have just died and are at a half-way house between earth and heaven. There is nothing elaborate about the space: a dilapidated building that resembles a New York City public high school houses a mostly young staff who interview a barrage of the newly deceased each Monday, giving them three days to make a decision. They are told that heaven does not exist as any of them now believe the place to be, but that a substitute is currently available. Each of the clients is to think of his or her single fondest memory. That is the recollection that will be filmed, and then the subject could repeat the episode for eternity. There's more. All the client's other remembrances will be deleted as easily as this computer can expunge this entire review, as though Alzheimer's has claimed all the bad memories and guilt trips. Sound good? Not to the Western mind, perhaps. We--at least in America--believe that variety is the spice of life and that anything, even the most enjoyable experience, can become like a hell woven from Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" if reproduced day in, day out. Think of the Malcolm McDowell's character in "Clockwork Orange" having to listen to the glory of Beethoven's Ninth once, twice, thrice, ad infinitum.
Those who are enamored of this film will probably point to the humor and poignancy of the newly dead who are being interviewed by the staff. One old lady, asked to conjure up her favorite memory, simply stares out of the window or lines up figurines on the table. A young punk who died at the age of 21 defiantly refuses to make a choice. A girl of about the same age recalls her trip to Disneyland and the kindness of a friend who gave her a couple of pancakes when she did not have the money to buy her own breakfast. A disreputable- looking man of late-middle age talks only about sex, confirming what so women believe that this is the only thing that men think about. Of all the patrons, the most involving is one 70-year-old fellow who, like several others, has had a life so banal that he can barely think of a single memory he'd like to preserve for all time. He has to go through quite a few videotapes which had recorded his life, one tape to a year, and even then has difficulty eliciting a single, truly pleasurable moment in three-score and ten years.
Online critic David Dalgleish reports that he was immeasurably moved by an interview with an elderly woman who recalls a dance she attended to a song called "The Red Shoes." A young girl stands in for her and performed a brief recital which, Dalgleish insists, "move me, inexplicably, to tears." Did we see the same film?
Hirokazu's principal claim to imaginative fame is that he interweaves a film with the looks of a documentary into a fictionalized, allegorical drama, using real people he recruited from such places as nursing homes along with professional actors. The film does possess tenderness and gentle humor, but while the fable would make for a fine piece of literature, on the screen it lacks the very life claimed by its title.
Not Rated. Running Time: 118 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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