This movie has garnered lots of accolades recently, with the biggest prize of them all, an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It has attracted lots of attention, not only among movie-goers but also critics. Since this film is having a sneak preview this weekend, I decided to catch the Friday midnight show and see what the hype is all about.Motoki Masahiro plays Kobayashi Daigo, a celloist who loses his job when the orchestra he belongs to is dissolved. As a result, he decides to give up playing the cello and return to his hometown. His wife, Mika (Hirosue Ryoko) who is a webpage designer follows him back to Yamagata without any complaints although she is feeling unsure of what lies ahead for them.
Back home, Daigo finds a job with incredibly good terms and unwittingly becomes a full-time employee at NK Agent. NK stands for noukan which means preparing a corpse before he or she is placed into the coffin. Although Daigo is apprehensive about this job as he has never even see the casketing process nor taken part in anybody's funeral, he decides to go ahead without Mika's knowledge while learning the ropes from the boss, Sasaki who started the business with his first case - his late wife. As Daigo starts to get used to the idea of casketing being a profession which treats the departed with dignity and prepares them for their after-life journeys, Mika realizes what he is doing and pleads with him to find another job...
This movie offers a look into this little unknown business of casketing and the meaning behind this profession. Everyone dies, it's only a matter of time. And casketing prepares the person for the last event of his/her life before he/she begins a new life in the other world. One particular line I liked was this, "a coffin is the last purchase everyone would make in their lifetime and yet this decision is made by someone else. Isn't that ironic?" True, this movie shows a lot of ironies in life. Casketing is shunned by the living because it deals with dead people and we definitely don't know much about this profession. Precisely because of this lack of knowledge, the ignorance breeds fear. However, everyone forgets that they will all need this service someday. It isn't until you actually see your loved ones going through it then you will realize the importance and meaning of this procedure.
Sad to say, this movie started off on a really high note but the ending didn't do justice to the momentum it had carefully built up. The beginning of the story was filled with lots of humour even though it was supposed to be a sombre scene of Daigo and Sasaki doing the casketing. And throughout the movie, there are lots of funny developments interwined with the serious scenes. However, things started to be draggy towards the end. The final scene of Daigo doing the casketing for his dad who had been missing for years was too slow. In fact, I heard people snoring in the cinema which goes to show how the pace of the later part was. And the ending was too abrupt. It's as if the movie hit a climax slowly but everything just went down the drain in a matter of seconds. That is why this movie could have been much better.
Acting-wise, Motoki Masahiro and Yamazaki Tsutomu shine. Their teamwork was good and their characters stood out easily from the rest. Right at the beginning when they showed the casketing, they were so funny when they discovered something unusual about the deceased. You've got to check it out for yourself. Hirosue Ryoko looked too young for Motoki in some scenes but generally, the two of them played a couple quite convincingly. Yo Kimiko looked a few years younger with her black long hair and trendy fashion. One thing worth noting is that the actor who plays Daigo's father, Minegishi Tooru had passed away while the movie was showing in cinemas. It was such an uncanny coincidence that after playing a corpse to be casketed, he passed away. Nonetheless, I don't think the movie had anything to do with it. It just so happened that Minegish was already struck with lung cancer since 2008.
Do watch this movie for yourself to see if it deserves all the hype from Japan and the Oscars. I feel that this was a high-quality work but it was certainly not an all-rounded production yet.
And my ratings for this movie...
Story: 8 out of 10 (It could have been better if the pace didn't slow down so much at the end and more effort was put into the ending.)
Acting: 8 out of 10 (The cast did reasonably well especially Motoki.)
Theme song: 7 out of 10 (Mostly instrumental classical pieces. I don't think I've heard that so-called theme song by AI in this movie.)
Visual effects / Scenery: 7.5 out of 10 (Great scenery in Yamagata and there was a lot of effort put into the casketing scenes.)
Teamwork / Chemistry: 8 out of 10 (Kudos for the combination of Motoki Masahiro and Yamazaki Tsutomu)
Total: 38.5 out of 50
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