After Life (Wandafuru raifu, 1998)

Koreeda Hirokazu

Cast: Arata (Takashi Mochizuki), Oda Erika (Shiori Satonaka), Naitô Taketoshi (Ichiro Watanabe)
Runtime: 118 min
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese (English subtitles)

Review © 2002 Branislav L. Slantchev

Rarely has there been so much room for a good story and such botched realization. This film and its director consistently get all appendages up from the nation's top critics. So much so that one wonders what schlock they have been consuming lately to declare this work a masterpiece. The premise is intriguing enough: when people die, they go to some unspecified place (which looks suspiciously close to my high-school building), where they get to stay for a week, in which they have to choose one, and only one, memory of their life (first three days), which the staff then films (the rest of the stay) with rather antiquated equipment. Everyone present then gets to see each other's best/defining memory (why weren't the screenings private?), and then off they go, presumably to heaven, with only their one memory to relive for an eternity. Or so it goes.

The potential for drama is near the boiling point. What is it that defines our lives? Kurosawa's Ikiru asked a similar question and gave a different answer. Here, you are dead, so you only get to pick an appropriate moment, you don't get to create one. Those who refuse are doomed to working in the operation, helping the dead choose theirs. (At this point, I have to say that I'd rather stay one of these.) Of the memories that are suitable (invariably, these are deep and emotional), how much is truth, and how much is fancy? Again, Kurosawa intrudes here with Rashomon, and again, with a better answer: the "truth" is in the eye of the beholder. Not so here, where everything in one's life is recorded on VHS! Objectively! I think Koreeda may have missed the point on this one.

Then, there's Mochizuki, who has not been able to choose a memory because he died young. When he finds out that "he has been a part of someone else's happiness," (that is, his young lover, who had gotten married, and died much later but had chosen a memory with him) he is ready to depart! The young Shiori, who does not want to choose a memory, and who falls for her mentor, the same annoyingly aloof and "correct" Mochizuki, is left alone to absorb the experience and presumably "learn" from it. But what to learn? The interview with the director reveals that there was much that he wanted to say, it's just that he did not say it in the film.

February 8, 2002