The surprise Academy Award winner in the foreign-language film category is, for awhile, something like a Japanese Six Feet Under. Happily married but unhappily laid off (from playing cello in a bankrupt, second-tier Tokyo orchestra), timid Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) returns to his hometown and half accidentally takes a job “encoffining” the deceased. Some of the early scenes are played for laughs, as when Kobayashi’s first job turns out to be playing the deceased in a training video. Gradually, the humor gives way to a sort of circle-of-life vibe, as we see how the job—one heavily stigmatized in Japan—is not about caring for the dead so much as comforting the living. Probably the sequences in which Kobayashi performs his rituals could be edited a bit more tightly, and the story arc is predictable, but the setting is novel and the actors playing Kobayashi’s calm boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and chipper wife (Ryoko Hirosue) are appealing. The movie works a little hard to be “moving,” but, aided by the Joe Hisaishi score, actually is at times.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/24/09
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