After Life

by Pat Holmes

"I see dead people."

t's probably the most famous line from any movie this past summer, or even this year. But in Kore-eda Hirokazu's exquisite film After Life, it's just a job. You might say it's a living, but there's not a living being among the film's two dozen or so characters. Dead people are all there is to see.

The film begins in what looks like an old school or government building, gray, drab and official. It's a Monday, and a supervisor congratulates a trio of civil servants on their previous week's work, 18 clients serviced, and warns them of a slightly heavier caseload, 22, coming this week. But he's confident they can handle it, so the caseworkers gather their files and settle at their desks to await their clients. They see dead people.

The place is a kind of way station between earth and eternity. The clients are the recently dead. They will be there a week, they are told, the first three days of which each client will spend choosing one particular memory from their life. The chosen moment will then be filmed and shown to the client, and will be the only thing the departing spirit takes to the afterlife. It is truly the decision of a lifetime, and it's just another day at the office. It's taking the measure of existence in a moment, and it's business as usual.

It's also a breathtaking fantasy with the plainly straightforward look of a documentary, the most ordinary of stages upon which to contemplate the extraordinary. It's the smallest, most intimate consideration of the greatest, most important questions. It's a quiet, modestly scaled film of slowly-dawning astonishment, gently whimsical and dead serious.

Few movies blend reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, history and invention, so ingeniously—because, as it acknowledges, it is only human to blend them all the time. The "clients," for example, are both professional actors working from a script and nonprofessionals ("real people," if you like) actually choosing their own moment. A war veteran picks the moment when, as a nearly starved prisoner, he was given rice by his captors. Another man chooses an early morning summer breeze while riding a trolley. A girl in her late teens prefers part of a visit to Disneyland (until, in private, an intern her own age hints that an alternate choice might be nicer, since some 30 recent clients picked Disneyland). A small, round, almost preternatural serene old woman barely speaks and seems to have chosen her moment and occupied it long ago. A spiky-haired youth, in the eternal spirit of rebellion, refuses to choose, then later asks if he can pick a dream instead.

ne case emerges as the film's chief focus. An old man (Naito Taketoshi) cannot decide, finding his life so unexceptional that he must watch it unfold on videotape—one tape for each year; 71 in all—to try to find something. His young caseworker (Arata) takes a deeper than average interest, partly from his realization that he is, or would have been, the same age as his client. He then makes another discovery that links the two even more closely, resolving his own decades-old case (the caseworkers are former clients who could not make their choice). His involvement in this particular case is frustrating to a sullen teenaged intern (Oda Erika) with an obvious crush on her coworker.

This is the second feature from writer/director Kore-eda, whose previous film, Maborosi, was a lovely, somber and formal study of a wife dealing with the suicide of her husband (notable, among other things, for its total lack of close-ups, a near impossibility in these TV-oriented times). The atmosphere of After Life obviously grows from his background as a documentarian, while the idea itself had its origins in memories of his Alzheimer's-plagued grandfather, who forgot his life before his death and linked loss of memory with death in the mind of his grandson. Among the most rewarding aspects of the film is its sense of discovery for both filmmaker and viewer. According to Kore-eda, one of his own most startling discoveries of the 500 individual "cases" he surveyed to create his script was "how often people chose upsetting experiences." In the film, one middle-aged, defeated-looking man who can find nothing worth remembering in his miserable life, chooses a moment of darkness in a childhood hiding place and says, when he is assured that he will forget everything else, "then it really is heaven." It is both funny and heartbreaking, in keeping with the film's unusually delicate but rich emotional texture.

Another of Kore-eda's discoveries, and ours, is reflected in one character's realization that his true significance lies in his place in the memories of others. This notion—that memory, and so identity, is shared, a sign of our connection rather than our individuality—is part of what may be the most fascinating of the film's explorations. That is the meaning of and connection between memory and movies, movies being our collective memory. When the kid asks if he can pick a dream to film, it's a reasonable question; our dreams have been filmed for over a century now. At a movie, we dream together and share a memory.

In the final section of After Life, the caseworkers become filmmakers, collaborating with their clients on the recreations, making the most of low budgets and limited resources (this is only heaven, after all, not Hollywood). The process has a kind of blissfulness about it—talk about personal filmmaking, these are truly films that no one else could make—as the memories that have taken shape are given form, as imagined truths are documented. Like all good filmmakers, these characters are trying to create sights, sounds, feelings—in a word, emotions (as one good filmmaker, Sam Fuller, once said)—that will resonate with viewers and among viewers.

The memory-movie connection is subtly and beautifully elaborated (heaven help it if Hollywood does a remake) and comes complete with a nifty mystery. What happened to memories before movies? Are movies, have movies somehow always been, the future of memories; were they waiting at that ethereal way station even before they came to await theater audiences a hundred years ago? Does that make memory the ultimate preview of coming attractions? There's a marquee: "Coming Soon—Your Past."

Memories await you at Cinema 21 (616 N.W. 21st), beginning Sept. 24 and playing, appropriately enough, for one week (starting Friday, though, not Monday). After Life goes on long after the lights go up. You won't forget it.

—Pat Holmes

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