AFTER LIFE

6/10

Wandafuru Raifu : Japan 1998
dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
stars Arata, Erika Oda

After Life has so many great things going for it. It's original, touching, unpredictable, funny and subtle, an engaging meditation on mortality and memory. For about an hour or so, you'll be engrossed by the simplicity of the story - newly dead people are given a week to choose one recollection they can take with them into heaven - and charmed by Kore-eda's gentle, unemphatic style of direction. You feel like it's about to take off into fascinating new areas, but it doesn't. Instead, it meanders around and finally becomes somewhat boring, and I found it hard to stifle yawns and the temptation to glance at my watch to see how long there was to go. I'd say that the film is too long at 118 minutes, but I don't think that's really the case - it's just that the final 45 minutes or so could have been used much more effectively, and it's a real shame Kore-eda didn't spend a little longer developing and rounding out his script.

The film is full of silences and gaps, shots of the halfway house, which resembles a slightly dilapidated schoolhouse, and its grounds, and it's in these pauses that Kore-eda achieves a really refreshing kind of poetic cinema. The gaps are also, I think, an invitation for the audience to put themselves in these characters' shoes, and look back over their own most evocative memories. The viewer's input is crucial to Kore-eda's method, and it's a clever way to make us connect with the film in a way which very few directors would even think to attempt.

There are two sets of characters - the newly dead, and the people who guide them in their choice of memories. These celestial civil servants include Takashi (Arata) and Shiori (Oda), whose relationship becomes the main focus of the film, and Kore-eda goes into the minutiae of their everyday "lives." Although no longer alive, these workers still have jobs to do, operating under the guidance of unseen higher figures in the heavenly bureaucracy. The newly dead are played by a mixture of actors and non-professionals whose recollections are genuine, and it's impossible to tell which is which. For reasons which are never specified, the civil servants must make filmic approximations of the new-dead's memories, which are then screened in a cinema-type auditorium - this is the means by which they can go on to the next stage. Kore-eda's metaphorical explorations of the links between cinema and memory are deftly and lightly drawn, as are his more general philosophical concerns. This is one of those films where what you get out of it depends on what you put in, and everything is a matter of interpretation.

Although, as I've said, the film ultimately bogs down where it should really start to soar, it's definitely worth a look. At the very least you'll be beguiled, diverted and rewarded for an hour or so - after that, you're on your own.

by Neil Young

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