Japan 340 After Life Reviews
Film Review After Life Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
We all have abundant riches stored in our memories. But, alas, we do not visit these hallowed experiences often enough. Macrina Wiederkehr, a Catholic devotional writer, believes that the soul thrives on remembering. She advises us to awaken and to appreciate the golden moments of our lives as a spiritual practice.
In Kore-eda Hirokazu's extraordinary film After Life, a group of just dead men and women are ushered into a halfway house. Each of them is met by a counselor who explains that during the next several days he or she will need to choose one memory — the most vivid, moving, or pleasant experience of his or her life. Then that event will be reconstructed and filmed in a studio. At the end of the week they will look at the films together and each take one memory into eternity.
As these individuals try to pick their favorite memories, they all struggle in one way or another. One worries that his memories aren't dramatic enough. Another refuses to participate in the process choosing instead to focus upon his dreams. One man is given 71 hours of videotapes of his life to watch in order to jog his memory.
Using both veteran actors and actresses and unprofessionals, Hirokazu (Maborosi, 1995) skillfully mixes documentary and narrative styles. It is fascinating to see what these people choose from the archives of their pasts. One recalls a wartime experience, another giving birth to a child. A teenager changes her mind, dropping a visit to Disneyland for a comforting moment in her mother's lap. A man recalls a vivid train ride as a youngster. A woman emphasizes a dance in a red dress. A pilot recalls the bliss of looking out on white clouds. An elderly woman remembers the joy of a shower of cherry blossoms.
One of the marvels of this after-life experience is that once the golden memory is recorded, everything else is erased so no one is burdened by the past. The irony is that all the counselors work in the halfway house because they were unable to choose a memory. A subplot deals with the way one adviser finds his way to a magic moment once he realizes that he has been a part of someone else's happiness. A young female trainee replaces him when he moves on to eternity.
After Life is one of those exquisite films that lingers in the mind and in the senses for many days. Each viewer will be challenged to feast on his or her own memories from the past. Emily Dickinson once wrote: "Such good things can happen to people who learn to remember." In the temple of your memories, you walk on sacred ground.
A Roger Ebert Review--you can never go too wrong with one of these!
The people materialize from out of clear white light, as a belltolls. Where are they? An ordinary building is surrounded by greenery and an indistinct space. They are greeted by staff members who explain, courteously, that they have died, and are now at a way-station before thenext stage of their experience.
They will be here a week. Their assignment is to choose one memory, one only, from their lifetimes: One memory they want to save for eternity.
Then a film will be made to reenact that memory, and they will move along,taking only that memory with them, forgetting everything else. They will spend eternity within their happiest memory.
That is the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda's "After Life," a film that reaches out gently to the audience and challenges us: What is the single moment in our own lives we treasure the most? One of the new arrivals says that he has only bad memories. The staff members urge him tothink more deeply. Surely spending eternity within a bad memory would be--well, literally, hell. And spending forever within our best memory would be, I suppose, as close as we should dare to come to heaven.
The film is completely matter-of-fact. No special effects, no celestial choirs, no angelic flim-flam. The staff is hard-working; they have a lot of memories to process in a week, and a lot of production work to do on the individual films. There are pragmatic details to be workedout: Scripts have to be written, sets constructed, special effects improvised. This isn't all metaphysical work; a member of an earlier group,we learn, choose Disney World, singling out the Splash Mountain ride.
Kore-eda, with this film and the 1997 masterpiece "Maborosi," hasearned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema. His films embrace the mystery of life, and encourage us to think about why we are here, and what makes us truly happy.
At a time when so many movies feed on irony and cynicism, here is a man who hopes we will feel better and wiser when we leave his film.
The method of the film contributes to the impact. Some of these people, and some of their memories, are real (we are not told which).
Kore-eda filmed hundreds of interviews with ordinary people in Japan. The faces on the screen are so alive, the characters seem to be recalling events they really lived through, in world of simplicity and wonder.
Although there are a lot of characters in the movie, we have no trouble telling them apart because each is unique and irreplaceable.
The staff members offer a mystery of their own. Who are they, and why were they chosen to work here at the way-station, instead of moving onto the next stage like everybody else? The solution to that question is contained in revelations I will not discuss, because they emerge sonaturally from the film.
One of the most emotional moments in "After Life" is when a young staff member discovers a connection between himself and an elderly new arrival. The new arrival is able to tell him something that changes hisentire perception of his life. This revelation, of a young love long ago,has the kind of deep bittersweet resonance as the ending of "The Dead," the James Joyce short story (and John Huston film) about a man who feels asudden burst of identification with his wife's first lover, a young man now long dead.
"After Life" considers the kind of delicate material that could be destroyed by schmaltz. It's the kind of film that Hollywood likes to remake with vulgar, paint-by-the-numbers sentimentality. It is like a transcendent version of "Ghost," evoking the same emotions, but deserving them. Knowing that his premise is supernatural and fantastical, Kore-eda makes everything else in the film quietly pragmatic. The staff labors against deadlines. The arrivals set to work on their memories. There will be a screening of the films on Saturday--and then Saturday, and everything else, will cease to exist. Except for the memories.
Which memory would I choose? I sit looking out the window, as images play through my mind. There are so many moments to choose from. Just thinking about them makes me feel fortunate. I remember a line from Ingmar Bergman's film "Cries and Whisper." After the older sister dies painfully of cancer, her diary is discovered. In it she remembers a day during her illness when she was feeling better. Her two sisters and her nurse join her in the garden, in the sunlight, and for a moment pain is forgotten, and they are simply happy to be together. This woman who we have seen die a terrible death has written: "I feel a great gratitude to my life, which gives me so much."
Excerpts from an Interview of Kore-eda (K) by Aaron Gerow (G):
K: Actually, that's what formed the framework of my current film, After Life ("Wandafuru raifu"). This film too has the theme, "people share memories with others." In a word, it's about the discovery that the self is not just something internal. That's something I discovered concretely through the making of Without Memory, but it's also something that I'd already realized in the script for After Life, which I wrote ten years ago. Those ideas that I had when I wrote a script as pure fiction took on clearer form through my experience on a documentary, and became the motivation for making this film.
G: It seemed to me when I watched the film that Mochizuki, the character played by ARATA, was a kind of reminiscent of you as a documentary filmmaker recording other people. Was that deliberate?
K: Hmmm . . . I didn't think about it that deeply when I was making the film, but now when I watch it, that meaning is in there somewhere I think. I'm not that good-looking though (laughs). At the point when I made it the job of the people working there to make films, their words and behavior reflect a lot of my suffering and discoveries in the ten years I've been associated with film and television production. In a sense it became an extremely private film. I've recently become embarrassed at the thought of it being released to the public (laughs). Weird, isn't it?
G: I agree that you could call it private. I think After Life is also very much a film about image and memory. In Without Memory too, when you give Sekine the camera and ask him to film something, perhaps you're exploring whether that can become an support for his memory or not, but in the end the image cannot become a prop for memory and the experiment ends in failure. As for After Life, in the end memory is recreated in the form of an image, people see it and feel that it is real. On the one hand the image is useless, on the other hand the image has potential: on which side of this divide do you stand? That is, what do you think about the relation between image and memory?
K: Sekine was a special case. Ordinary people can use a photograph or some other image to recall all kinds of things. There are many aspects to the role the image plays in memory. In this film we can see many levels of images. There are at least the three kinds of image in the film: people describing their lives, "objective" video records (completely unreal of course) of their lives, and images that recreate the reality shown in the videos according to the person's memories. To divide them simply, the personal narrations are a type of documentary, even though some of the people are telling lies, and the recreated images are a kind of fiction. The fictional images also have extremely low production values. That's partly because of the low budget, but it's also because they're not real. I didn't think they needed to look real when I made the film. I made those unrealistic fictions collide with the narratives, bringing out emotions that did not appear in the narratives, and details of memories that couldn't be talked about. That's what I personally wanted to get at. I also thought the facial expressions, the comments about memory, and the actions that came about after being filtered through those fictions made up a kind of documentary.
The images from the video player are the opposite of that: they were images of real events, but you can't tell from whose perspective they are taken; images in which the subjects don't know they are being filmed. I included them in an attempt to show, "This is what I think a documentary is not." I wanted to include in that film a bold statement of my personal beliefs about documentary, that in order to become a documentary those kind of emotions and human relationships are necessary.
G: That's how I read the film (laughs)-I think you got your point across.
K: Thank you.
T: Speaking of image and memory, apart from seeing, you also remember hearing, taste, smell and so on, don't you? In Maborosi ("Maboroshi no hikari," 1995), the old man always has the radio on. It's as though no matter how many years go by, you'd always remember him whenever you heard the radio. I thought it was extremely interesting how the film makes the presence of the old man felt not through sight but through hearing. Compared with the use of sound and other senses, what are your thoughts on the image, or on vision?
K: In After Life I interviewed many ordinary people, asking them what they would choose as their most important memory. Actually, a sound or a song was the most common response. They also mentioned scents and tastes. Those senses leave an even more intense impression than images do. Surely sound is closer to the human essence than images. That's not a pleasant thing for someone involved in the image business to hear, but it doesn't seem right to me to think of the two as divided like that. In After Life, the middle-aged guy who chose the city tram as his favorite memory recalls a wealth of experiences after he gets on the tram and listens to a tape of its sound. I think people recall images that are evoked by sounds, and recall sounds that are evoked by images. I'm fascinated by images, so that's what I make, but I don't make such a rigorous a distinction between the two.
G: What do you feel are the main differences between techniques for shooting documentary programs and feature films? The reason I ask is that in the documentaries of yours that I've seen you seem to like using close-ups a lot. Faces, or just an eye, or especially the film on Hirata where at the end you repeatedly use a big close up of just his mouth. But in Maborosi there are almost no close-ups like that. Why is there this difference in style?
K: Hmm. There certainly are a lot of close ups in the Hirata film. To put it simply, I guess you could say that I liked his face. When I was making Maborosi, I deliberately eliminated a lot of things. If you heard only the story-a woman loses her husband to suicide, takes the child she is still breast-feeding and remarries, moving to a harbor town on the Noto Peninsula-you'd expect to hear enka (old-fashioned emotional songs) on the soundtrack. Like something Shochiku would make. Even though I liked the novel itself, when it came time to turn it into film I thought about what to do to make it something I would want to see. I thought I'd try to limit the expression of emotion, to create a different kind of emotional expression that didn't depend on close-ups of crying faces to communicate the character's feelings. I was experimenting to see how much I could communicate of the characters' feelings by making the light and shadow and sounds that the central female character experiences reverberate within the frame. I was the one who made the rule, and unfortunately I obeyed it, even though when I got to the shoot and saw Esumi Makiko, there were so many times when I thought, "I'd like to film that expression." Looking back, I regret it-it would have been better if I'd broken the rule. So this time I thought to go to the shoot without preparing a complete storyboard in advance and just point the camera at what I find interesting. I said to the cameraman, "Let's choose techniques from both fiction and documentary without distinguishing between them." The only rule I decided on was that we should use the same approach regardless of whether the person in front of the camera was a professional actor or an amateur.
from: http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/13/box13-1-e.html
Some comments on Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Like Father, Like Son’: It's a Thing of Quiet Beauty
Review: 'Like Father, Like Son'
Jan 16, 2014 12:22 pm
It’s no surprise that director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son” picked up the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and that jury president Steven Spielberg promptly bought the rights to a US remake. This trenchant and humane family drama bears the mark of a master craftsmen whose sharp cinematic style never overshadows a sensitivity to the inner lives of everyday people.
Though the setup, like the title, smacks of melodrama, the story unfolds believably as two sets of parents living in Tokyo learn from a blood test that their children were accidentally swapped at the hospital. For six years, Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama), a workaholic architect, and wife Midori (Machiko Ono) have raised young son Keita (Keita Ninomiya). But he was never theirs to begin with.
Keita biologically belongs to Yudai and Yukari, two shopkeepers who have Ryota’s real son, Ryusei. Kore-eda wisely skirts the obvious cultural commentary on class division that a more sentimental director might have developed.
Legal counsel advises that the couples “exchange” children as soon as possible before they start kindergarten. So instead of making an outright choice, the families begin sharing time together, attempting some unorthodox mixing and matching, until they find themselves literally bartering over their children.
Since the early 1990s, Kore-eda has directed films of quiet, contemplative rhythms that explore unusual family dynamics. His intensely moving “Nobody Knows,” 2004, centered on four young siblings’ struggle to survival after their single mother flees their tiny Tokyo apartment without warning. Though “Like Father” more directly focuses on the plight of the parents, the Japanese director knows how to direct children, and to situate his films from their point-of-view.
The preternaturally gifted young Keita Ninomiya gives a wondrous performance as Ryota and Midori’s six-year-old son. Like Onata Aprile in 2013’s “What Maisie Knew,” he understands the delicate balance of childlike wonder and knowing necessary to anchor such a role.
Tokyo rarely looks as lovely and melancholy as it does in front of Kore-eda’s camera. First-time DP Mikiya Takimoto brings pictorial beauty to the film, exploiting the power of rack focus to carefully deliver information to the audience. Ryota and Keita will both be in the frame, but the focus might shift from one to the other across cuts to indicate from whose POV we’re meant to interpret the scene.
While their metaphors may be far from subtle, the city’s lonely skyscrapers, downcast street lamps and seemingly endless panes of glass look utterly lovely, with the nimble keystrokes of pianist Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations supplying measured lilts of sadness.
By opening a window into the simple days and ways of ordinary people faced with problems of cosmic significance, the film raises broader questions of nature vs. nurture, and how one parental misstep could irreversibly impact youngsters. “Like Father, Like Son” is as tightly crafted as a haiku, and like a good poet, Hirokazu smartly dwells in the specific and the particular to achieve universal truth.
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