Daigo Kobayashi finally finds a job as a cellist in an orchestra, but then it is dissolved due to a lack of audience. He sells his cello, leaves Tokyo and moves with his wife Mika to his hometown. He finds a job at a funeral parlor run by Sasaki and his secretary Yuriko, in a process called encoffinment, where a corpse is covered in sheets, cleaned and given make up before the funeral. He hides this job from Mika, but when she finds out, she leaves him because she is uncomfortable with death. Daigo stays and continues with his job. Mika eventually returns upon finding out she is pregnant. One day, Daigo is informed that his long lost father, who abandoned him when he was a kid, died. Daigo insists on doing encoffinment on his father. He also finds a small stone in his dad's hand, which he gave him when he was a kid.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, "Departures" is a gently ironic and refreshingly restrained film that refuses to treat the dark topic of funeral business and death too seriously. The emotions are, luckily, measured and subtle, refusing to go overboard into melodrama (except for maybe two scenes), whereas the characters are sympathetic, making it easier for the viewers to engage in their actions, even during prolonged, uncomfortable sequences of the funeral preparations. The film starts off with a symbolic "death" of the protagonist's career, when his dream job as a cellist in an orchestra is abolished, causing him to contemplate: "I should have realised the limits to my talent", and to move to another city to find another job: "What I'd always taken as my dream maybe hadn't been one after all", which already foreshadows the film's theme—every ending is in a way a new beginning. On the ashes of the "funeral" of his old job, Daigo and his wife Mika start a new chapter in life. It also starts with an awkward, inappropriate real funeral prelude when Daigo cleans the body of a dead woman, but then stops randomly half-way and informs his boss the woman has a "thing", a penis, revealing the woman was actually transgender. This scene doesn't work—what difference does it make if a deceased was trasngender? It should have no role in the procedure. The director Yojiro Takita inserts a lot of warm humor into the story, to show the humane side of the rarely talked about funeral business. Some of which does get rather grotesque at times, though (in order to wash the smell of the corpse from his body, Daigo applies soap all over his face, even inside his nose, takes a sip of water and then spits it out through his nose). Ryoko Hirosue as Mika and Kimiko Yo as the secretary are wonderful in their roles. However, the ending doesn't work as a natural conclusion. Predictably, it involves Daigo's long absent father, but the "reconciliation" doesn't really make sense, nor does it transmit a sort of a wise point as it should have had.
Grade:++
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