Glowing endorsement for a don't miss film

My husband and I watched the most beautiful movie last night – Departures. I’m going to admit my lack of cultural awareness when I say I had never heard of it, even though it won the Academy award for best foreign language film last year. I picked it up at the library last week because it was made in Japan, little knowing that it would prove to be such a moving story about treating the dead with grace and dignity.

Departures, or “Okuribito” in Japanese, tells the story of a young Japanese cellist, Daigo, whose orchestra is disbanded. Out of work, he and his wife move back to the northern town where he grew up. His mother has died and left him a house; his father abandoned them when he was a small boy. Daigo finds an advertisement in the want ads for a worker in “departures.” He applies without realizing that he is going to be working for a type of undertaker, or “nokanshi,” preparing dead bodies for burial.

Of course it turns out that the old undertaker who hires Daigo is an intuitive man with a great respect for the dead and their families, and a great zeal for life, or at least for food. The film moves from Daigo’s initial disgust for the job to his understanding of its importance and his appreciation for the artistry with which his mentor works.

Not only does the movie provide a thoughtful meditation on corporal mercies, but it also offers great reflections on marriage and relationships between parents and children. In the rituals of death, all the vulnerabilities of life are revealed.

It is impossible to watch this film without wondering if the setting, an idyllic village far from Tokyo in both distance and convention, was destroyed by the tsunami. As far as I can tell from some quick internet searches, the filming location was mostly in Sakata, which is on the coast opposite of Sendai, where the airport was underwater. The film makes you realize what a horror it must be for a culture with such a beautiful casketting ceremony to bury thousands of bodies in mass graves without this reverent preparation for life after death.

I can’t recommend this movie highly enough.

 A beautiful evocation of “Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”