Departures: Review By Love & Napalm

With every passing year and every passing Academy Awards ceremony I still find myself asking, why can't foreign language films be eligable for Best Picture? I'm sure there's a reason, but sadly it's no excuse.

After it's much desevered Oscar win for Best Foreign Film, Departures has been re-run in Japan with English sub-titles which has finally given me the chance to absorb it in all it's beauty, and that's what makes this film so amazing.... beauty.

There is a profession here in Japan where the recently deceased are prepared for cremation. Usually held at the families home with the family watching bodies are prepared in the most moving and beautiful manner for their casketing. So when an out of work cello player finds himself moving from Tokyo back to his home town with his wife to use the families home left to him by his deceased mother he answers a newspaper ad for a postion entitled departures. This turns out to be a misprint as the ad was meant to read, the departed. So with a simple miscommunication and his need for money he finds himself thrown into the funeral business. The first few minutes of this film play out more like Death at a Funeral with the preparing of the body for casketting having a very comic twist. With our two professional casketers discovering infront of the watching family that the recently deceased girl has "a thing". Yes the dead girl is not a girl. Now Japanese cinema goers are the sort of crowd that sit and watch a film. Rarely do they express themselves while watching films, but everyone was in uncontrolable fits of laughter. This film shows us that death can be celebrated as well as mourned and that death is a beautiful and powerful experience not just for the families but also for those people who care for our loved ones when they've passed on.

All the characters in this film are finely crafted and our attachments to them are genuine. It soars to majestic heights through an amazing cello lead musical score and settles like the cherry blossom floating down a river. It also puts the final reality in life smack in your face, "The last purchase in life you make you'll never know about" a coffin.

"We eat the dead to live" - Departures (2009)

Oscar Winner, Best Foriegn Language Film.