Departures
Directed by Yojiro Takita. Written by Kundo Koyama. With Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo, and Takashi Sasano. (PG-13)
You can be sure that Departures, the Japanese film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film this year, has something going for it by looking at the field it beat out, which included Israel's Waltz with Bashir, a film I thought would take home the statue. At the time, I wrote that Departures was "a film even less likely to be seen." I hope I was wrong.
The film stars baby-faced actor Masahiro Motoki as Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist in a Tokyo orchestra whose 18 million yen investment in his new instrument goes up in smoke when the orchestra is disbanded. Unable to find work in the city, he decides to give up his dream, sell his cello and return with his wife to his boyhood home in Yamagata.
There they make a home in the house his mother left him while Daigo scours the job listings. When he answers an ad for "assisting departures," he imagines he might be working for a travel agent; instead, he finds himself roped into a position assisting with "encoffinment," which involves preparing the dead for viewing and burial. A jittery Daigo, whose first assignment involves a body found two weeks after death, sticks with the job despite his initial revulsion—he can't afford to lose the check.
Part of what makes the film interesting to American eyes is its portrayal of funeral practices in Japan—an engaging mix of the familiar and the just slightly different. What we might never see—the preparation of the body and application of makeup that gives the illusion of life—is here made part of the ceremonial farewell each family bids its deceased. As he learns the deeper meaning of his job and its healing effect on families, Daigo finds himself drawn to its finer points, much as a musician constantly refines his technique. (Not coincidentally, he also finds himself picking up his childhood cello after work.)
Less happily, an entrenched societal disapproval of his profession—an old friend shuns him after discovering Daigo's new position, and his wife is disgusted—leaves Daigo isolated, brooding on thoughts of the father who deserted him during his boyhood. But Departures is anything but a heavy movie, even if it is occasionally tinged with sadness and regret. Instead—like the best funerals—it is filled with the uplifting sense of quiet joy that comes from reflecting on a life well lived.
Enlighten Up
Directed by Kate Churchill. Written by Kate Churchill and Jonathon Hexner. With Norman Allen, Alan Finger, Sharon Gannon, B.K.S. lyengar, and Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. (NR)
One wonders if Kate Churchill, the writer/director behind Enlighten Up!, really believed the film's premise—that yoga will change the life of anyone who practices it, and "deliver you to every dream"—or if she simply saw that a film that follows a wisecracking skeptic on a global yogic journey might make a good documentary. The first question is still up in the air, but Churchill has made a good case for the second.
A devoted practitioner herself, she sets out to prove her thesis using unemployed journalist Nick Rosen as her guinea pig. She immerses him in a months-long project that takes them and their camera crew from New York to Hawaii to India, with many stops along the way to visit a variety of yogis teaching a wide range of the art. (Including former pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, whose Yoga for Regular Guys teaches that "My yoga is not about namaste. It's more like T&A!") One of them, she hopes, will stick.
Nick, a stubbly, good-looking guy who tries to sneak away from the cameras to pick up girls, is a game subject. He dutifully attends the long string of classes without indulging in fits of eye-rolling, even when a yoga center in India strikes him as being a "bit of a cult situation," or he's asked to practice "laughter yoga" with the Guru of Giggling. Along the way, he keeps daily notes about his (mostly) lack of progress, and there's a bit of friendly frisson as Churchill begins to get frustrated over what she sees as his less than serious attitude.
One of Rosen's main questions—one that none of the yogis really answers—is whether the practice is really a spiritual one, or mainly a physical endeavor. Though he says that spiritual awakening is a concept he "cannot even relate to," he comes to admit that the practice has had its benefits: a heightened sense of compassion, more patience and the chance to see himself from a different perspective. Though given some of the contortions on display, he might have meant that last one to be taken literally.
*
Also this week: Also opening at Pleasant Street this Friday is Easy Virtue, director Stephan Elliott's (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) take on Noel Coward's sly, wry comedy about repression and clannishness in the English aristocracy. Set during the 1920s, the film stars the versatile Kristin Scott Thomas (most of whose better roles have lately been in French imports) and the reliable Colin Firth as Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker, father to scion John (Ben Barnes), a good-looking young man looking for adventure.
He finds it in the bewitching Larita (Jessica Biel), who to his snobbish mother's shock is not only American—that would be bad enough—but also a famous race car driver whose lifestyle is fodder for the tabloids. Firth's Jim, however, finds something of a kindred spirit in the brash young woman whose modern ways breathe life into his stuffy household, which also includes his two daughters. As the barbs fly, Elliott mines the period-piece tradition and enriches it: in addition to '20s fare like "Makin' Whoopee," his soundtrack includes a '20s-style cover of the Tom Jones classic "Sex Bomb."
Across the bridge in Amherst, the Israeli film Lemon Tree opens this weekend after winning awards at the Berlin Film Festival and the Israeli version of our Academy Awards, where Hiam Abbass took home the Best Actress prize. Abbass, who was so impressive as the dedicated mother in The Visitor, here plays Salma, a Palestinian widow whose finds a livelihood in tending to her father's lemon grove.
What seems like a peaceful existence is interrupted by the arrival of her new neighbor, an Israeli defense minister who takes one look at the lemon grove and the woman who runs it and declares the operation a security threat. Unwilling to cede to government pressure even as she forges an unexpected friendship with the minister's wife, Salma takes her fight to the Israeli Supreme Court. Based on a true story, Lemon Tree is a delicate, nuanced look at the often fractious collision of personal history and political conflict.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
