Movies You Ought To See: After Life
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This entry was posted at
19:18 GMT on 03 June 2003
(Sheesh, the last MYOTS I did was in March? Lazy bum.)
It seems, on the surface, to be arbitrary. It is based on no religion or mythology that I am aware of. Yet the question posed by the recent Japanese film After Life strikes a deep emotional chord and produces a quiet, geniunely moving little film from that.
It begins simply. People walk into a darkened hallway from the bright outside.
They are gently told that they have recently died, and they will be spending the next week here, in what is apparently an empty school building. Each one has that long to decide which single memory from his life he wishes to relive for the rest of eternity (or until he is reincarnated, as is implied by one character).
The rest of the movie is, by and large, the various characters coming to terms with their lives and selecting which memory to live out. You also find out about the how the people who work in this place got here, why they do this.
After a memory has been chosen, the workers mock up a movie set for the background of the memory. The person is then filmed re-living the memory. When the film is screened, everyone watches, and after the screening is done, that person is no longer there, gone into the memory.
Reportedly, director Hirokazu Koreeda traveled across Japan, interviewing hundreds of people asking this question, and making use of some of these stories for most of the characters' stories in the film.
Every character, however, is portrayed by a professional actor.
Nearly all of the stories are touching, to one extent or another, and only one feels trite or cliched, a middle-aged man who keeps insisting on choosing a memory of one of his many sexual conquests. Even that is carried off well, so it does not jar too much with the rest of the film.
There are no special effects. There is only one location. And there is much food for thought, as you are invited to contemplate your own life, and consider which memory, if any, is worth living out forever.
Why does this question have such resonance? I'm no philosopher, I just know that it does.