The gentle art of caring for corpses
For a film about corpses says Andrew M Brown Departures is surprisingly invigorating

4 December 2009

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), left, learns the sacred Japanese art of nokanshi, or 'encoffinment', after losing his job as a cellist. He is too ashamed to admit it to his wife

Departures
12a cert, 130 mins

The Japanese director Yojiro Takita's new work Departures (aka Okuribito) is a delight - a beautiful film that reaches the emotions. It's no wonder that it caused such an upset at the Oscars, beating Waltzing with Bashir and even the outstanding French film The Class to win Best Foreign Language Film. At the centre of the plot is the sacred Japanese art of nokanshi, translated as "casketing" or "encoffinment", in which a sombre-suited professional cleans, wraps, shaves and applies make-up to a dead person for burial while the bereaved family watch. The first corpse we encounter is a young man who offended his family by dressing as a girl and committed "suicide by charcoal".

Masahiro Motoki, an actor and a director, spent 10 years researching nokanshi and finding backers for a film project on this unpromising subject, about which even many Japanese know little. He plays the hero, Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist by profession, who loses his job in a Tokyo orchestra and decides to return with his young wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), to his home town of Sakata in the picturesque northern prefecture of Yamagata. His late mother ran a bar in the town after his father abandoned the family.

For Daigo, returning home becomes an exercise in remembering and in reconciling himself to his past.

On arrival in Sakata, the couple rather implausibly answer a classified advertisement for a job in "departures", believing it to be for a travel agent or tour guide. Daigo meets his future teacher and mentor, the chain-smoking Mr Sasaki (Tsutomo Yamazaki), "the boss", who offers him a whopping 500,000 yen per month and reveals that "departures" in the ad was a misprinting of "the departed", meaning the dead. "Dead bodies, you mean?" asks Daigo, aghast.

The director Takita likes to deploy a blackly comic tone. For example, Daigo's first job is to act as a model for Mr Sasaki as he makes a training video. Nokanshi is a painstaking procedure, full of loving care and delicacy, and the deceased person is always protected from exposure, apart from the face, by carefully draped sheets. Still, the process inevitably involves indignities, such as the need for a roll of cotton to be pushed into the cadaver's anus in order to prevent seepage. For the instructional DVD, Mr Sasaki demonstrates this on Daigo.

Actually, a theme of squeamishness runs through the whole movie. You see it in the revulsion of Daigo and Mika when they receive an octopus as a gift and find it's still moving. Then, soon after Daigo has started the job of nokanshi, Mika presents him one night with the chopped-up corpse of a chicken, "fresh killed this morning". It's another neighbour's gift, but one that strikes Daigo now as grisly, complete with head, wattles and feet.

The human bodies that Takita shows undergoing nokanshi look immaculate and youthful, but obviously it's not always like this. On one assignment Daigo and Mr Sasaki are called by police to the apartment of an old lady who remained undiscovered after death for two weeks and whose corpse has severely decayed. Daigo retreats to a public bath house to try to scrub away the stench. He can't go home smelling of death, because to begin with he is too ashamed to admit to Mika what it is he is doing for a living.

Even though nokanshi is presented as widespread in the community, neither Mika nor Daigo's friends consider it a respectable job. They cannot understand why he would work all day in a job no one else would willingly do. Only when sad events intervene and they have cause to see him at work can they marvel at the calmness of nokanshi, the precision and the gentle affection. Finally they appreciate how devoted he is to the craft Mr Sasaki has taught him and see that nokanshi is a serene and lovely way to send somebody on to the next stage.

Takita presents death, without any particular fuss or pretentiousness, as a kind of journey in which the end of life serves as a gateway to something else. A wise old crematory attendant puts this idea into words. The film also suggests that nokanshi, although a product of Buddhism, is acceptable to followers of other religions, including Christianity.

Departures is, I suppose, a "soft" movie in contrast to those other, tougher Oscar contenders I mentioned. It does not challenge us unduly; the ending contains a touch of sentimentality, perhaps. And yet, the gatherings of the bereaved to say goodbye to loved ones, or the bereft husband saying of his dead wife that she has never looked more beautiful - these are intensely moving moments. For a film about corpses, it's surprisingly invigorating.