all that remains

semi-weekly film recommendation

AFTER LIFE (1998)

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

With: Erika Oda, Arata

Written by: Hirokazu Kore-eda

The premise of After Life may sound cutely novel or even like the subject of psuedo-philosophical quandaries considered by intoxicated college students. It goes something like this – after you die, you go to a way station, where you have a couple of days to decide on one memory from your entire life, the memory that you will take with you on into perpetuity, and once you’ve selected, you recreate the memory on film, view it, thus ending your life, and that, as they say, is that. However, simple and innocent it comes across as on paper, it is executed by Kore-eda with much more layered complexity and subtlety than the charming quaintness of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). After Life resists the temptation toward Capraesque sentimentality, which elevates the film to something more than the limited novelty of its central question would otherwise allow for. That said, the original Japanese title literally translates as Wonderful Life, a none-too-subtle homage.

For many, it may be enough to ponder which memory they would pick as they drift in and out of watching the characters in the film go through the same struggle. Indeed, two hours can fly by, when one is considering such a choice. However, for me, the film succeeds, more than anything, as a love letter to film, itself. (And quite a different ode to film than David Lynch’s love letter to the cinema, Mulholland Drive (2001).) The method that the mostly melancholy bureaucrats, who run the way station in limbo, employ to recreate the memory for each recently departed is to dramatize it and shoot it, as you would a short film. Film imitates life, triggering the memory for the viewer, and sating them for eternity. A metaphor any cinephile or average filmgoer can appreciate. What is more, one character, who struggles to think of a single memory, is granted access to videotape of every waking moment of his entire life, to assist him in his plight. Video, a cruder medium, but relevant and helpful when requiring a protracted attention to detail that film, due to its more costly nature, simply cannot provide. Ah, the cinematic metaphors just keep on a-comin’. I love it.

Finally, one of the most lasting images for me in the film is of the moon – sort of. (Vague metaphor spoiler warning!) One of the station clerks (how perfectly Japanese, by the way – after you die, there’s still a certain amount of bureaucracy you’ve got to go through to get to the great beyond), comments to another how much he likes looking up at the moon from a certain spot in the hallway. Later on, in the middle of the day, the other attendant looks up in the same spot, and is startled to see the moon just being light projected through a hole in the ceiling, and not the lunar satellite, after all. Where one person sees the moon, another a trick of light. Where one person sees a soul-soothing and pleasant memory, another sees a filmstrip of someone else’s life.

It’s a wonderful film.

After Life is readily available on DVD at most internet retailers.