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After Life By John Pavlus Director: Kore-eda Hirokazu 1999 Japan The brow-furrowing question Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu asks is this: If you could take one memory with you for the rest of eternity, what would it be? It's disarmingly simple, yet unsettling in its implications; it aims to examine the soul through a microscope and a wide-angle lens simultaneously. The same can be said of the film itself. Deceptively ordinary and quietly spectacular, "After Life's" probing profundity won't smack you between the eyes so much as gently tap your shoulder and wait for you to notice. The film takes place in a dilapidated waystation between the mortal and immortal-- eternity's "green room," if you will--where a crew of caseworkers will spend one week with a group of the recently deceased to prep them for the beyond. Each new arrival is told to choose one memory which they will relive forever, then works with a staff member to discover which recollection is the best choice. Once the memories are chosen, a film crew recreates each one on a soundstage as a short film. On the last day, the short vignettes are screened for their owners--and when the house lights come up, each one is gone, having passed with their cherished memory into the next realm. Instead of relying on the celestial production design and topical comedy of other post-mortem fables, "After Life" explores the territories of self-reflection with an almost documentary-like earnestness. No white robes or winged angels here--these employees look and act more like overworked guidance counselors, chatting and griping as the camera casually trots with them through the facility's dorm-like hallways. Some of the characters admit that it all seems a bit anti-climactic, but it makes total sense: how could you honestly reflect on your life if your jaw was constantly hanging open in a state of awe at your surroundings? But such details are beside the point. This film is about candidly coming to terms with one's existence and choices; if it's glib sight gags and ironic laughs you want, go watch "Defending Your Life." " After Life" has plenty of humor ("You died yesterday afternoon...We're sorry for your loss," deadpans one worker to his new client), but it's appropriately understated in favor of revealing the characters' poignant emotional epiphanies. And as for characters, this film's got them in spades. Out of the 22 that we meet via informal interviews (10of which are convincingly played by non-actors), some notables include: a ditzy teenager whose top choice memory is her day at Disneyland; an aging prostitute who tries to pass off a "memory" that never actually happened; an average man convinced that his long life contained not one exceptional instant; an old woman who's never progressed past the mental age of 9; and a defiant twenty-something punk who decides that "this whole setup is stupid" and refuses to choose. And then there's the staff members themselves, whom Kore-eda sketches with equal and compelling depth--from the middle-aged father who misses the daughter he left behind, to the sullen 18-year-old whose patience for her often-banal job is wearing thin. Inevitable questions arise: How do they spend all their free time? And how did they get their jobs in the first place? To the former: mostly by reading (one is working through an encyclopedia) and grousing about the new batch of souls. To the latter: watch the film and find out for yourself. A master of structural pacing, Kore-eda keeps his characters' stories succinct and believable while plumbing extra depth from their juxtapositions and intersections. One man's grinning obsession with sex, comical at first, assumes a subtly darker tone when cut against the prostitute's tale. And upon receiving an (after)life-changing revelation from a client, one staffer discovers that some connections extend beyond the boundaries of death itself. Like a cinematic loomworker, Kore-eda slowly and deftly blends each narrative strand into a quietly emerging pattern whose shadings can best be apprehended from a distance. Images that appear superfluous, even random, are often vital parts of the composition. Threads that dead-end often have merely submerged, resurfacing when their placement in the tapestry is most affecting. Some critics are comparing the director to the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, but viewers need look no further than the flotsam of their everyday lives to understand and fully relate to the film. In combing one's past for that most precious instant , one must examine them all, and Kore-eda's sublimely uplifting point is that *every* one has the potential to be *the* one. Aristotle believed that one's happiness could only be evaluated at life's end, when the events of one's past stretch out behind like footprints, clearly marking the history of the journey. Whether this is true or not, moments worth savoring forever may only emerge when viewed in the proper context. The metaphor of the final screening expresses this sentiment with gloriously humble poeticism. To one unhappy guest, "forgetting...really is heaven," but in this afterworld, true bliss is only discovered in the remembering. The new arrivals don't possess this knowledge; neither do some of the workers. But by the end of "After Life," they all do. And so do we. But we're luckier--we didn't have to die to get it. John Pavlus is a senior film production major at Ithaca College. |
