Afterlife
1998 – Hirokazu Koreeda
PG: 118 minutes
Vault Rating: 8.5
The Japanese cinema evolved from traditions very different than in the West. Evidence of this permeates the best of Japanese film even today. Such films just feel different.
There is a reflective quality in stories like today’s that look inward for their power and depth. Hirokazu Koreeda has become one of Vault’s absolute favorite directors by building on just such strengths.
His films, to my experience so far, deal with the different facets of loss and emotional recovery. A few years ago, I discovered Koreeda’s marvelous “Maborosi” and wrote to you about it. In it, supermodel (and actress) Makiko Esumi is faced with a sudden shock and — like a branch emerging from a tree stump — she slowly begins to grow again, but changed forever.
Today’s films are more sweet and sorrowful themes on the same melody.
“Afterlife” takes place in a way-station somewhere between heaven and earth. The dead check in and are assigned caseworkers who have a week to help them sift the details of their lives. It turns out one of the realities of the afterlife is that each person may only retain one memory that they carry with them throughout eternity.
It is a beautiful conceit that instantly forces the viewer to introspect. Think of sifting through your life that way. What would be your seminal moment? What do you throw out forever?
Interesting not only for the many recently departed who arrive, the film by necessity focuses on the caseworkers and the greater mysteries of the hereafter. Is the staff here some branch office of Heaven? Are they angels? What are angels? Are they stranded for some reason in some kind of purgatory? What’s God really like? And what about that other place?
The dead prove to be tricky, sometimes troubling or troubled, and the bright pallet of humanity shines through in an otherwise drab, dimly lit, or maybe even abandoned office complex. The place itself seems to reek of faded memory. Still, caseworkers sometimes don’t get along with their clients, then again, once in a while they have things in common too.
Of course, by film’s end it is the caseworkers’ lives that come most sharply into focus. What a beautiful film. Koreeda’s prints seem always to bear his calming fingerprints. His camera doesn’t move unnecessarily, setting up on a space that actors enter, interact in, and then move on, lending to a sense of passing time.
Nobody Knows
2005 – Hirokazu Koreeda
PG-13: 141 minutes
Vault Rating: 8
In today’s second helping of Koreeda we observe a story about an unusual woman who secrets her four children inside a Tokyo apartment and leaves them to fend for themselves.
We are told the story is based on actual events.
Here, a very strange kind of growing up is observed as Akira, a resourceful 12-year-old boy, manages the money he is left while caring for his younger brother, Shigeru, and sisters Kyoko and Yuki.
Akira, who once attended school, now schools himself and his mother, Keiko, blithely dismisses school for the other kids. They observe strict rules in their new home so that they remain undiscovered by even their landlord. Their world is a small apartment and a mother who comes and goes at increasingly long intervals.
Keiko is obviously an odd woman. Attractive and youthful, she is cheery, but it is clear she is lying to her kids and we begin to wonder if she is a drug addict, a prostitute, or is somehow or other on the run. Something in this woman’s character does not add up.
Her kids’ plight is an interesting adventure at first. They hold up nicely while we wait for answers. Over time, though, we begin to wise up. Akira has long stopped looking for answers. He is a wise boy, obedient and cautious. As he stretches the dollars his mother leaves, we feel he is somehow capable of overcoming the situation. When the money runs out, though, colder realities set in.
Akira bears his mother’s responsibility yet longs for a normal existence. He encounters friends on the outside, a group of boys of questionable integrity and a compassionate girl, but these friendships are strained.
Koreeda stretches time inside the apartment in cleverly simple ways such as in the eventual breaking of a prized toy or in the slow wearing away of once new paint on a toenail. Simple joys, like a day at the park for the kids or a chance baseball game for Akira, come once in a great while like tiny dollops of sunshine on otherwise drab days that stretch endlessly into months.
Almost unseen, during this slow, patient, uneventful buildup, a certain unease creeps into the film. By the later stages of the film, we have gone from curiosity and hope for these children to being afraid for them. What we see are four stunted souls. A girl who never gets to play the piano. A toddler who knows nobody but her older siblings.
We are struck once again with Koreeda’s long running struggle with loss. This time, the loss is about the absence of a parent and the corresponding loss of innocence. This emotional void sets the unique conditions for everything that transpires in “Nobody Knows.” In Koreeda’s world, it is simply a matter of survival that best reveals the human condition.
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