Director Yojiro Takita gets a little mawkish toward the end, and he allows "Departures" to be about 30 minutes longer than necessary, but the Japanese tale, which won an Oscar for best foreign language film, is always beautiful, often breath-taking, mostly fascinating in the way people approach death.
Masahiro Motoki, calm and handsome, is Daigo, a cellist with a Tokyo orchestra, heavily in debt because of his valuable instrument, deeply in love with his beautiful and loyal wife, Mika (nice performance by Ryoko Hirosue). And in an ironic touch, after a concert that reached a powerful climax with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its "Ode to Joy," the orchestra is disbanded on a moment’s notice and Daigo is out of work.
The couple returns to Daigo’s boyhood home, a small town in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and he answers a help-wanted ad that turns out to be a position as an assistant, and probable heir, to Ikuei Sasaki (a wonderful portrayal by Tsutomu Yamazaki), who prepares bodies for cremation in a traditional manner, involving washing and wrapping the corpse, often in the presence of relatives.
This disturbs many, including Daigo’s wife, but through Takita’s earnest direction, we see how the task brings peace to the wrapper and the family, and Joe Hisaishi’s music, though occasionally banal (Brahms’s "Lullaby," for example), often is charming. It’s a sweet film, and while I preferred "The Class," from France, and "Waltz With Bashir," from Israel, two other Oscar candidates, "Departures" tells an interesting story.
At the Plaza Frontenac.
-Joe