Departures

It is difficult to imagine someone making a full length movie about the care and dressing of bodies before they are cremated. Difficult but not impossible. A Japanese director,Yōjirō Takita, has taken the bold gamble in a lyrical piece of film-making that leaves the audience simultaneously uplifted and in tears. It was a full house when I saw this movie and there was nary a dry eye in the audience. (It is also the winner of the best foreign feature film at this year’s Academy Awards.)

“Departures” tells a simple story of Daigo, a young cello player who loses his job and returns with his wife to his village. Here he finds employment as one who prepares dead bodies for their viewing and subsequent cremation- a ritual known as "encoffinments". The details of the "encoffinment" are fascinating with as much attention to detail as in a tea ceremony. A "departures" specialist comes to the home of the diseased, discretely cleans the body ("Wash away the weariness and pain of this world"), changes the clothes of the deceased, poses the body and puts it into the wooden coffin that will be burned. This is done in full view of the family, yet no part of the body can be shown save the face.

But Daigo's new job is considered "unclean" by society and so unacceptable that he dare not tell his wife about it.He visits the bathhouse each night after work to scrub off "the smell of death." But despite ostracism from his friends,Daigo continues and slowly finds a new life ministering to the dead. He realizes the deeper meaning of the rituals of wiping down the body and clothing it in silk. And of restoring beauty for all eternity before the family to say their final goodbye. “Everything” reflects Daigo “done peacefully and beautifully". Departures is a loving tribute to the Japanese way of death. It shows us a place where death and the dead are treated with a respect the rest of the world should envy.

At another level, the film is also about death and the dignity that it should inspire. Death, the movie says, is a great leveler- whether you are a child or an old lady, a beloved wife or an estranged daughter, a grandmother with a taste for stockings or a son who chooses a life of woman. All need to be treated with love and dignity at their final moments. Strangely haunting in the way it lingers in the mind and heart after it’s over, Departures’ amazing achievement is in being a film about death that is truly beautiful, joyful and life-affirming. The repeated depictions of the careful and respectful honoring of the deceased’s passage to the afterlife gain resonance with each successive scene.It is a moving, powerful experience.

“The dead appear to me as serene, even beautiful” says Shinmon Aoki, author of “Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician,” the basis for “Departures, “During their lives I don’t know what right or wrong they might have done, but it seems to have no bearing on them now. It doesn’t matter whether their beliefs were thick or thin, whether they belonged to this denomination or that, whether they were interested in religion or not. Nothing they have done goes to making the dead wear such gentle faces.”

At another level, the movie is also a subtle morality tale and social commentary. It says no job is unclean especially if its objective is to help families to say goodbye to their loved ones. The hero is ostracized by his friends when they learn of his occupation and even his wife leaves him calling him impure, though they finally return. There is social criticism, too, particularly for the Japanese audiences. It is a little known fact that deep prejudice exists in Japan against those dealing with the dead, the untouchables, also known as burakumin. The burakumin — ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese — are descendants of Japanese who, according to Buddhist beliefs, performed tasks considered unclean. Slaughterers, undertakers, executioners and town guards, they were called eta, which means “defiled mass”, or hinin, nonhuman. Since death was considered unclean, they were outcastes. Although they were legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system, this did not put a stop to social discrimination. The long history of taboos and myths of the buraku left a continuous legacy of social desolation. The topic of the buraku remains Japan’s biggest taboo, rarely entering private conversations and virtually ignored by the media until a movie like “Departures” comes along.

Another interesting side note to the movie is the possibility of a burakimin actually becoming the prime minister of Japan in the elections being held in August this year. For Japan, the crowning of Hiromu Nonaka as its top leader would be as significant as America’s election of its first black president.

And finally it tells you that whatever you do, you must do it passion and with grace and professionalism. It is necessary to accept that impermanence, grief and loss are basic conditions of every life. This unorthodox original story about literally touching death is a brilliant catalyst for the movie’s message of celebrating life.

And then there is the music. Here is an excerpt which will give you a sense of the haunting beauty of the entire movie.And also here and here