After
Life
Not
Rated
Opens Friday, Sept. 24
If you could choose only one memory to keep forever, what
would it be? For his follow-up to the impressive 1995 debut
Maborosi, Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-Eda
has posed this irresistible question as a way of exploring
memory itself: what we hold dear, how we see ourselves, and
what our mark on the world will be. What's more, he blends
seemingly opposite stylistic sensibilities in order to keep
us focused on the questions at hand.
In After Life there is no heaven or hell. After
death, one arrives at a sort of celestial way station, where
a small staff of caseworkers has three days to help each
soul choose the single most precious memory from their lives.
When one decides on a memory, the staff will film a re-creation
of the event for each to carry into the next phase of existence.
For some people, the most meaningful event chosen is unsurprising:
the birth of a child, the first meeting with a future spouse,
or the horror of war or a natural disaster. Others choose
a tiny moment that means a lot: kindness from a stranger
after being treated awfully by another, or a bite to eat
when starving. But some people can't decide at all, and
they're the ones who become caseworkers.
Hirokazu is not a filmmaker you'd expect to make a fantasy
about life after death. Before Mabarosi, he spent
several years making documentaries for Japanese television.
He's a realist, a filmmaker who favors simple truths and
bare-bones production values that would make the strictest
Dogma 95 member happy. From Powell and Pressburger's Stairway
to Heaven to the recent What Dreams May Come,
most films from this genre have been told on a grand scale,
using elaborate special effects, overwrought music and boisterous
performances to out-duel our imagination and tug our heartstrings.
After Life instead is an odd marriage of genre and
style, and it's clear that Hirokazu knows what he's doing.
By applying no-frills documentary sensibilities to an imaginative
fantasy, Hirokazu is able to pare down the story to its
core. After Life takes place entirely in what looks
like an old rural schoolhouse, yet it feels just as plausible
as any million-dollar studio rendition of eternity. Cinematographer
Yamazaki Yutaka (another documentary veteran) keeps the
camera still and spare. The only music in the film is played
by those onscreen; more often one hears the sound of leaves
under people's feet or the rustling of wind through the
trees. And best of all, the film's centerpiece--the dead's
consideration of which memories to take with them--features
several non-actors describing their actual memories to Hirokazu,
which he uses instead of a conventional script.
The combined effect makes for a potent blend of surreal
fantasy and razor-sharp reality that recalls Lars von Trier's
Breaking the Waves and the work of Stanley Kubrick
and David Lynch. Like those filmmakers, Hirokazu seems to
know that each of these disparate elements reinforces the
others: Fantasy becomes more believable when grounded by
the look and feel of the everyday, while reality takes greater
meaning in a new context. Yet Hirokazu is also his own man.
He brings to After Life a decidedly Japanese sensibility:
more contemplative than rapturous, more introspective than
explosive. His mismatching of genre and style is done to
intensify our focus on the film's basic questions. After
seeing After Life, you're bound to ask these questions
of yourself--and perhaps that's the best compliment a filmmaker
can get.
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Willamette Week | originally
published September 22,
1999
|
