Ghost
Sonatas
by
Howard Schumann
If subtlety and nuance are what you are looking for in
a film, Yojiro Takita’s Departures may
not be your cup of tea. If, however, you are willing to overlook the
film’s overly broad strokes and focus on its quiet dignity and
the inner strength of its characters, it may strike a responsive chord.
Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, Departures
is about the ritual of "encoffinment," the preparation of
corpses before their cremation. While it teeters between serious drama
and outright farce, and often seemingly can’t make up its mind
what genre it belongs in, it is a film of understated elegance that
will leave audiences in a mood of contentment.
In the opening
sequence, a cello player in a Tokyo orchestra is shocked when the orchestra’s
owner announces after a poorly attended concert that the group has been
disbanded. The cellist, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), has been
playing the cello since childhood and knows no other profession. To
compound his distress, he owes over $100,000 U.S. which he borrowed
to purchase his cello, a purchase he now reveals to his wife Mika (Ryoko
Hisosue) for the first time. With little choice, he sells the cello
and moves back with Mika to his hometown in northern Japan to the house
left to him by his deceased mother, a house that has many memories for
Daigo, still embittered by his father’s abandonment of the family
when he was only six years old.
Daigo answers
an ad for a job in “departures” that does not require any
experience. Thinking he is applying for work in a travel agency, he
soon finds out that he will be an assistant to Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki),
a master “nokanshi” who tells him that he works with the
“departed”—washing, dressing, and placing the deceased
into a coffin in the presence of bereaved friends and family. In a segment
of physical comedy, Daigo must strip down to a pair of adult diapers
to participate as the corpse in a training video. After that, he is
initiated in the difficult task of casketing the body of an old woman
who has been dead for more than two weeks, a most unpleasant task.
Gradually,
Daigo learns the profession, utilizing the creative, artistic skills
he learned as a cellist. Though “encoffinment" is an ancient
ritual, apparently there is a stigma attached to working with the dead,
and Daigo is rejected by a childhood friend Yamashita (Tetta Sugimoto),
and then by Mika, who discovers the training tape and packs her bag
to return to Tokyo, telling her husband that she will return when he
has a “normal” job. Starting to play the cello again after
he discovers the first cello his father gave him as a child, Daigo is
shown with his cello playing in the countryside surrounding his home
and also plays “Ave Maria” for Sasaki and his secretary
(Komiko Yo) at Christmas time.
Departures
has its share of clichés, but touches the heart and has a calming
effect. At first put off by the work he is asked to do, Daigo learns
to appreciate the value of ritual and how comforting it can be to the
loved ones of the deceased, and he personally comes alive when seeing
how his work touches others. Competing with summer blockbusters filled
with bombast and brutality, it is good to see a film that offers compassion
and respect for the dignity and worth of all people.
*
Atom Egoyan’s
Adoration weaves a complex tale of a young
man searching for the truth about his family by perpetuating a lie in
order to witness its consequences. Simon (Devon Bostick), a young high
school student, tells his class that his Lebanese father Sami (Noam
Jenkins) was a terrorist who attempted to blow up a plane with a bomb
carried by his pregnant wife, Rachel (Rachel Blanchard), a talented
violinist. In his presentation to the class, Simon says that he is the
unborn child, his mother was the innocent being led to her demise, and
his father was the killer out to murder 400 innocent people to promote
a cause. The only problem with the story is that it is not true. The
incident never happened. The film exposes the ease with which people
are willing to accept what they are told without question and how modern
technology has become a useful tool for those eager to disseminate falsehood.
According
to the director, the film is “about people dealing with absences.
He (Simon) imagines having a father who is a demon; he wants to go as
far as possible into what that might mean.” Adoration
begins with an indelible image–a young woman standing at the end
of a pier overlooking a river playing the violin while her husband and
young son watch in awe. Moving forward and backward in time with great
ease, the film slowly constructs the events which have led to Simon’s
school confessional. The key player is Simon’s French teacher
Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) whose own family was killed in Lebanon
by a terrorist attack. Sabine reads an article to the class about an
incident that occurred in 1986 in which a Jordanian man, Nezar Hindawi,
sent his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in
her handbag, of which she had no knowledge until it was discovered by
Israeli airport security.
Heavily
influenced by his bigoted grandfather Morris (Kenneth Walsh) to believe
that his father intentionally caused his mother’s death in a car
crash, the vulnerable Simon constructs a parallel between the article
read by his French teacher and the death of his parents. On his own,
Simon posts his fake story on the Internet and has to deal with emotional
responses from holocaust victims, holocaust deniers, students, and professors
talking about terrorism, martyrdom, and heroism. It is a discussion
that often sinks to the level of victimization, as in a character portrayed
by veteran actor Maury Chaykin, who blames the bogus airplane incident
for "ruining" his life. Simon’s uncle, Tom (Scott Speedman),
who raised the boy after his parents’ death, acts as a mediator
between his nephew and the teacher who encourages Simon to tell his
fake story in the school auditorium. Tom is a tow truck operator with
a short fuse who harbors a deep resentment against his father for the
way he was treated as a child and his encounters with Sabine contain
some of the film’s most intense moments.
Aided by
a tenderly evocative violin-prominent soundtrack by Mychael Danna, Adoration
is an intelligent and imaginative study of family conflict and reconciliation
that serves as a compelling probe into human behavior and the ability
to distinguish between fact and fiction. Though it contains a great
deal of ambiguity, and character motivations tend to be somewhat mystifying,
Adoration is a very involving film with performances that are
uniformly excellent, particularly Arsinee Khanjian as the emotionally-damaged
teacher and Speedman and Bostock, who provide enough tension to keep
us riveted throughout.
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
