Departures (Okuribito)

Departures (Okuribito おくりびと), directed by Takita Yôjirô 滝田洋二郎. This won the Oscar for best foreign film this year. Got lucky and was able to see it in a theater the other day.

Mokkun plays Daigo, a cellist whose orchestra goes out of business. Instead of sticking around in Tokyo and trying to find another gig, he takes his young wife back to his hometown of Yamagata. There he finally finds work as an “encoffiner” (nôkanshi 納棺師), working for Yamazaki Tsutomu’s character.

An encoffiner, as it’s explained, is sort of a subcontractor to the undertaker. In the old days, families would take care of preparing the body for cremation, and then the undertaker would pick up the bodies, take them to the funeral home, conduct the funeral, and arrange for the cremation. But these days fewer and fewer people know how to properly prepare a body for cremation, and they leave it to the undertakers; the undertakers subcontract this work out (at least in this movie) to specialists, the encoffiners.

The encoffiner cleans the body, arranges it, dresses it, and applies makeup to make it look like it did when it was alive, and then finally places the body in the coffin (no embalming, since in Japan basically everybody’s cremated). The whole thing is done with great solemnity and even ceremony, with the loved ones watching.

Daigo gets the job accidentally. He answers a want ad for a place that specializes in sending people on trips. He thinks it’s a travel agency. By the time he realizes what the job entails, he’s hired – the boss likes his looks, says he was born for the job, and won’t let him back out. At first, Daigo is freaked out; it’s one thing to take care of a person recently deceased of natural causes, but what about a body that’s been lying in the heat undiscovered for days?

Gradually Daigo gets used to the job, and in fact comes to appreciate not only its necessity but its beauty. His boss performs his duties with a dignity and an assurance that provides necessary strength to grieving families, and with a loving care that comforts the bereaved. The families are always better off for having seen someone apply such diligence and respect to the arrangement of their loved ones, and Daigo – along with the audience – comes to see the encoffiner as providing something akin to spiritual solace.

This part of the movie is impeccable. Both Yamazaki and Mokkun perform the encoffiner’s tasks with a grace and economy of motion appropriate to a dancer or a tea master. It’s a thing of beauty, and that it’s being performed on dead people makes you feel the essential rightness of it: you really want somebody to take such care with you when you’re dead. It’s easy to see how this can be an emotional experience for the families, and why in the end Daigo finds the job so fulfilling, so much like a calling. (I don’t know what the discourse on undertakers in Japan is, but this part of the movie reminded me of Taguchi Randy’s Konsento, which portrays undertakers in a similar light. This might be a thing.)

The conflict comes courtesy of Daigo’s wife Mika, Hirosue Ryôko. She accompanies Daigo back to Yamagata, quitting her web-design job in Tokyo; she tries to be a good sport about everything, but when she finds out that his new job involves working with corpses (he hides the nature of his job from her as long as he can), she flips and leaves him. “Unclean,” she calls him. Of course she comes back, and in the end comes to appreciate the nobility of what he’s doing. That’s her whole role: to first fail to appreciate, and then come to appreciate, the encoffiner’s nobility.

It’s a woefully underwritten part, and it’s not helped any by the fact that Hirosue, a teen idol who’s long past her sell-by date, is not just a lousy actress, but an annoying presence, cutesy and cloying every moment she’s on screen, except when she’s calling him “unclean.” Of course that moment is the only reason the character exists, but I didn’t really buy it. Yes, Japanese religion/culture involves ideas of ritual cleanliness that mean contact with the dead pollutes you. And so maybe I buy the fact that Daigo’s childhood friend in Yamagata – a hinterland town portrayed as a bastion of Traditional Japanese Goodness – might reject him for what he does. But Mika’s supposed to be a modern Tokyo girl – again, a web designer, for Pete’s sake – and I’m just not sure I buy her blurting out “unclean” when she finds out what he does. “Gross,” yes, but the word she uses (kegarawashii 汚らわしい・穢らわしい) so specifically ties her reaction to notions of ritual cleanliness that neither I nor my native informant (i.e. my wife) are sure this character would really retain to that extent.

There’s a whole subplot involving Daigo’s relationship with his estranged father, too – his father ran away when Daigo was a child, and they haven’t met since. You can probably imagine how this plays out in the movie, and you’re right. I found this subplot pretty uninvolving.

Which means that the peripheral stuff – the conflicts, the subplots, in fact all the characters besides Daigo and his boss (and his boss’s secretary, a trashy/sexy Woman with a Past, played to perfection by Yo Kimiko) – doesn’t really work.

What does work is the central depiction of Daigo and the job he does. This is handled so well, with just the right mix of poignancy and black humor, that it makes the whole movie worthwhile.

Mokkun is excellent, by the way. Another teen idol, just like Hirosue, but he’s as full and deep a presence as she is vapid.

Mizuki Shigeru: Sôin gyokusai seyo!

Speaking of Mizuki Shigeru, here's one from the vault:

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Sôin gyokusai seyo! 総員玉砕せよ！ (Die Gloriously - That's an Order!) Originally published 1973. Kôdansha Bunko 講談社文庫, 1995.

This is a manga about the author’s experiences as a soldier on the island of New Britain during the war. Mizuki has always been obsessed, evidently, with his war experiences, and has done a lot for the peace movement and to keep the memory of the war alive; he’s written a bunch of short manga stories about it, but this seems to be the only, or at least the first, full-length manga “novel” he did about it.

It’s only semi-autobiographical: here, everyone in the unit dies, whereas in real life Mizuki himself survived. Names are changed, too, though not places, and the minor incidents seem very sharply observed. He’s clearly writing about life in the army from an insider’s perspective.

The main character and Mizuki surrogate is named Maruyama, but he drifts in and out of the narrative; it’s less his story than that of his unit, which is completely destroyed over the course of the book. At first it’s the dangers of the jungle—illness, animals—then it’s enemy attack, as the Americans close in on the island, and then it’s the stupidity of the unit’s leaders, as its commander has this romantic notion of sending them all to a glorious death rather than letting them retreat to the hills to fight a guerilla action. This is the idea of gyokusai, to die like a jewel being crushed, and it was common rhetoric during the war. It’s Maruyama’s misfortune that his commander bought into it: he orders them all into a suicide charge. Some survive, though, and wander north to where the main body of the army is. This is an embarrassment to the higher-ups, though, who feel that to survive a suicide charge is to bring shame on the army. So they pressure the survivors into either offing themselves right then and there or girding up for another suicide charge. Maruyama takes the latter option, but before this charge can get going an American attack blows the whole encampment to smithereens. The end.

Yes, it’s very dark. But it’s leavened with some humor—very dark humor, of course—and more than that with a cynicism toward war and bushido that refuses to make heroes out of anybody. They’re all victims of a stupid war, fought stupidly.

The story is told in an almost haphazard fashion. It’s really hard to tell the characters apart and keep them straight, and even figure out the organization of the various units involved—but I think that’s kind of the point, the idea that all these guys are more or less interchangeable. Certainly the army thinks they’re totally expendable.

One of the recurring motifs is the physical abuse of grunts by officers—the habitual slapping of rookies, making them wash their superiors' loincloths, cook their superiors' meals, etc. Not only are the conditions awful—soldiers are always hungry and half sick—but the treatment is dehumanizing. Thus much of the story is told in the form of little incidents that serve to illustrate the life of the soldiers, rather than a constantly-building tension as the end approaches. In fact, the end kind of approaches out of nowhere—each step is a surprise, just as much of a surprise as any enemy bombing raid must have been to these guys.

The art is fantastic. Most of the time it’s cartoony, but he’ll shift into a hyperrealistic style for key scenes—most noticeably at the end, when everybody’s dead and he gives us very real-looking sketches of piles of dead soldiers.

This is an important comic.

CSI: Miami and color

Bored on a Monday night, in the mood to be couch – what’s a lazier tuber than potatoes? yuca? – we were being couch yucas, grazing through our basic cable channels, we landed on CSI: Miami, as we often do.

Often, because in our house police procedurals rate a bit higher than most reality shows and all sitcoms. As police procedurals go, CSI: Miami is pretty lame, but it’s not completely useless.

We’re unrepentant fans of the Vegas CSI. Not regular viewers, but we’re always happy to run into a rerun. I think Dana Stevens nailed Grissom’s appeal, and the show’s in general. The characters are pleasantly wry, even when they’re skating over deep waters, and Grissom’s bemused but sympathetic acceptance of all human behavior is a pleasant relief from the reactionary tone of most cop shows. Even with him gone, the show’s still doing alright: Morpheus is holding his own.

Such as is displayed on the Miami and New York CSIs. The NY one I’ve only managed to sit through a handful of times. There’s nothing remotely interesting on it; it lacks the pithy writing of the original, and the striking visual style of the Miami branch. All it has are some tired and annoying New York stereotypes, and these aren’t enough to outbalance the sheer banality of setting the show in New York. A huge part of CSI’s appeal is its unconventional Vegas setting; Miami wasn’t quite as original a choice, but as a setting it’s still nowhere near as overworked as New York.

What CSI: Miami really has going for it is the most inventive visual style I’ve seen on a television drama. It’s all about color. And I mean that literally: you can ignore the story altogether (I usually do) and focus on what they’re doing with color, and have yourself an intense hour of viewing.

It didn’t start out that way. For the first couple of seasons they were presenting the show in a slightly more saturated version of the Vegas show’s steely blues and blacks. But then they got wise to the potentials of their tropical setting, and ever since it’s been a wonderland of cool candy colors.

I’d love to sit in on their planning sessions. Sometimes it seems like they pick a specific color to focus on for an entire episode, and everything will be coordinated around it. The detectives’ shirts and ties, the backlighting in the labs, cars, scarves, flowers… The episode I’m currently half-watching, for example: everything is organized around splashes of yellow. But I’ve seen them do lime green episodes, ocean blue, lavenders, oranges.

I sound like either a stoner or an art critic when I say this, and I’m neither, but I’ve never seen anything quite this visual on tv before. It’s not like, say, Ugly Betty, using bright primary colors to create a comic or comic-book atmosphere. CSI: Miami is gauzier than that: instead of brightly colored things, we often get almost abstract floating patches of color. And because the overall tone is more realistic, it gives the radical color-coordination an almost surrealistic dimension. Really: have you ever seen detectives dress that sensitively? Have you ever seen a police station with lighting that artistic?

It’s mesmerizing enough to keep you from noticing how awful the writing is.

I mean, just boneheaded. Take the viewer by the hand and lead them through the plot awful. Some of the storylines evince a little ambition – the South-Florida-requisite drug gangs and amoral nouveaux riches – but the dialogue is so baseball-bat-to-the-head obvious that it kills any potential interest these plots might have.

Which leads me to what we currently love about the show: Horatio Caine’s koans. David Caruso has become justly famous for his delivery of these one-liners, his desperate longing to be Clint Eastwood saying “make my day.” But Caruso can’t claim all the credit. The writers do their bit, too.

Take this one, selected at random from the rerun we were just watching. He’s interrogating a Miami madam, and she muses about how the risk of murder is an occupational hazard for women in her line of work. It’s time to cut to commercial, so Caine draws himself up and says, “Don’t I know it.” Ooh! Zinger! He sure shut her up, didn’t he? But wait – what can he possibly mean by that? How long has Caine been a prostitute, that he can speak of his firsthand knowledge of the violence facing sex workers? What does he know, or don’t? What can he know? Nothing.

It’s not just Caruso’s overacting that makes these bon mots so delicious: it’s the fact that they make no sense. Like I say, they’re koans. Ponder them long enough and I’m sure you’ll reach some kind of enlightenment.