Departures (2008)

Departures arrives with the quiet authority of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the reputation of a Japanese domestic drama that made grown men weep into their funeral programs. A cellist loses his orchestra job, returns to Yamagata with his wife, and takes work as a nōkanshi, preparing the dead for encoffining. The film treats this ritual with reverence and a certain comic tenderness. It is a story about mortality, fathers, small towns, and the shame that clings to those who handle the dead. It is not a story about contemporary social reform.

The social ostracism Daigo faces is real within the film's cultural setting. The taboo against death workers has deep historical roots in Japan, and the screenplay uses it as organic texture. No character pauses to deliver a lecture on representation. The wife, Mika, leaves and returns pregnant, urging her husband toward a respectable job; the resolution comes through ritual and reconciliation, not a feminist awakening. The film has no interest in the contemporary crusades. It does not sermonize about identity, ecology, economics, or the body. Its emotional appeals are familial and mortal. They are not ideological.

Adapted loosely from Shinmon Aoki's memoir Coffinman, the film sands off the source's Buddhist metaphysics in favor of a humanist arc. That choice annoyed the author, which is perhaps the most political thing about it. Otherwise, Departures is content to show a man learning to wash a body with care. It never scolds. It never demands that we examine our complicity. It simply asks us to sit with grief and a cello score. In the current cultural climate, such a film feels almost extraterrestrial. It has no modern progressive pulse. It is a warm, sad, beautifully acted null set.