Departures

Any tendency to over-laud other countries' movies arises from the commercial reality that foreigners only get to see, rent or buy a nation's exportable best products. Even Japan produces trash movies, surely. Its movies cannot all be as critically successful as Departures (Okuribito).

Its 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar win gave director Yojira Takita unexpected international acclaim to offset its initially cool treatment in Japan. The subject matter - death - is a taboo topic, obliging the production team to tread tightropes. Adapting an autobiographical volume (Aoki Shinmon's Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician) Kundo Kojama crafted a screenplay both ironic and sensitive, comic and sad, manipulative and touching.

An unemployed orchestral cellist mistakenly applies for work at "Departures", a company he thought was a travel agency. Instead, he learns to care for the departed as an "encoffineer", providing a corpse with a symbolic public choreography of respectful washing, dressing and facial make-up, enabling the departed to go to heaven looking good and peaceful.

Lead actor Masahiro Motoki was a member of a top boy-band in the 1980s, and still sports a deliberately cute social awkwardness which didn't match my image of an over-ambitious cellist with a young wife (Ryoko Hirosue, simpering sweetly and silently sobbing in mildly irritating traditional housewifely style).

However, Motoki was totally convincing as a sensitive naif finding an outlet for a natural talent and artistic feelings in ritual ceremonies. His facial concentration and bodily grace rightly won him five Best Actor awards, his best haul since Masayuki Suo's comedy Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (1992). He'd also rated well for Takashi Miike's The Bird People in China (1998). Inevitably, there are a couple of gratuitous scenes allowing Motoki's fans to see him in non-frontal nudity, reminding me of a well-preserved younger version of Hong Kong's Alan Tam.

Director Takita got his start in the 1980s working on the "Molester" series of comic softcore pornographic movies (Japan's defunct "pink film" industry), and was previously best known for the satirical The Yen Family. He steps neatly along the cinematic tightropes, slipping gently from comic interludes to tear-jerking moments, relying on the excellent cast of extras (grieving families, corpses and the standard bath-house old-timers) to push the audience past the screenplay's incredibly long sequence of dramatically convenient coincidences. Notably, veteran Tsutomu (Tampopo) Yamazaki is a central pillar of the production as the self-taught master of funeral rites, personifying traditional Japanese surface taciturnity and deep emotions.

At the end, though, discretion is abandoned. When the encoffineer's socially-embarrassed wife returns to him (happily pregnant), his aged bath-house friend dies, and his long-lost destitute father's body turns up in a nearby port, the production releases all floodgates on its tear ducts. Tears stream, hover at nose ends, and the movie ends with a symbolic smooth rock linking three generations.

It's all too much, but it works splendidly. Just like the elaborate funeral beautification rite it honours, the movie is a visually enchanting display of graceful technique and professional TLC.