Departures

People in the death trade are often cagey when asked what they do for a living. Perhaps, after seeing Departures, they'll feel more proud.

Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a cello player in Tokyo; after a particularly undersubscribed performance of Beethoven's Ninth, the orchestra he works for is dissolved. Moving with his wife back to his picturesque hometown, the unemployed musician answers an advertisement for a mysterious job in ‘departures'. He's never even seen a dead body before, but the pay is good and the undertaker has a good feeling about him. Kobayashi takes the position, but decides to keep quiet about its exact nature to his wife and any old friends he bumps into around town.

Of all the instruments, the cello is the most like a human being: similar size, comparable shape, same sad sounds coming out of it. The cellist soon finds that he can coax a kind of music from the rituals of cleansing and preparing corpses, and that audiences of mourners appreciate his efforts. Rather than making him "unclean", working with the dead allows Kobayashi to flower as an artist. This lovely and surprising film won the Foreign Language Film Oscar, and deservedly. Nick Dent

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