Film: After Life
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Japan (1998)
Psychological Drama/Fantasy
11 parts/115 minutes
In Japanese with English subtitles.
Synopsis:
The premise of After Life is simple: over the span of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a way station between life and death, where they are asked to choose just one memory to take into the afterlife. The new arrivals include an elderly woman, a rebellious dropout, a teenage girl, and a 70-year-old war veteran. Once they have chosen a memory, it is recreated and filmed by the staff of the way station, using all the tricks and illusions of cinema: cotton balls are used to mimic clouds, a fan is used for a summer breeze. In preparation for this project, the director Kore-eda interviewed 500 people from all walks of life about their memories. The film freely cuts between footage of these interviews, actors improvising, and actors reading scripts. Just as Kore-eda fuses documentary elements with a fictional narrative, we see over the course of the film how memories are distorted, improved on, and revised; and it is these subjectively constructed memories that the new arrivals value most.
Review:
A peculiar and uniquely moving examination of life after death, Hirokazu Kore-Eda's After Life dispenses with conventional notions of punishment and reward and offers instead a version of the hereafter dominated by reflection and contemplation, death as a moment in which to come to terms with all that's come before and move on. Visions of the after life in the Western world tend to emphasize doughy clouds, robed figures, and large, deep-voiced men with flowing beards. Kore-eda's After Life, on the other hand, willfully evades such baroque conventions, portraying the hereafter as a rather cold and grey bureaucracy. Here, social workers probe the memories of the recently deceased to find the one reminiscence that they would like to take with them to eternity.
Kore-Eda turns what could have been a parlor game exercise -- the issue of choosing a memory to preserve for eternity -- into a profound examination of what matters most. That his afterlife counselors largely reserve judgment reveals the director's (and the project's) documentary roots, and that evenhandedness only enhances the meditative tone: If our heart isn't free to dwell where it likes in death, when can it be free? After Life also, almost incidentally, serves as a meditation on filmmaking, both as an activity and as a means of representing human experience. In re-creating the past, its characters employ the selectivity of the most detail-oriented director in a film whose gentle humor almost obscures the low-key profundities beneath it.
Kore-eda's notions of the after life therefore address many of the familiar connections between death, memory, and the cinema -- the newly departed are asked to revisit their fondest recollection as though it were a scene in the movie and (in the film's single mystical gesture) are at that moment transported out of the movie theater to live that memory for eternity. This device echoes Pasolini's observation (made in a quite different context) that film editing "performs on the material of film ... the operation that death performs on life" -- that is, giving a sequence of uncertain and unstable events a coherent form and meaning. Thus, Watanabe reviews what he finds to be a dull and uneventful existence (with the assistance of the unfiltered, unstable, and "live" medium of video) only to realize that there was some measure of worth in his life after all. With its meditative, humanistic tone, After Life is the cinematic reminiscence of limbo itself, this transitional space of contemplation and nostalgia.
Loading...
10:12
After Life part 3by alchemistkx3,597 views
Link to this comment:
All Comments (0)