Wandafuru Raifu
Hirokazu Kore-eda (1998)
Monday morning. Three young men gather in a bleak, bare office at the start of a working week. An older man comes in, congratulates them on their last week’s efforts but warns they’ll be even busier for the next five days – with a total of twenty-two people to help ‘pass over’, compared with eighteen the week before. Those twenty-two people enter the grey, ghostly office building and take their seats in a waiting area. Most, though not all, are late middle-aged or elderly, and well turned out, as if for an important appointment. And so it is. Each person is called, in turn, to another room, where one of the young men from the first scene greets them. He checks name and date of birth before confirming that the interviewee has recently died (‘we’re sorry for your loss …’) and the main purpose of the interview. The deceased person is asked to choose from their life just ended a single memory to keep for eternity. Choices to be confirmed by no later than Wednesday.
The bureaucracy of the hereafter is familiar from A Matter of Life and Death (1946). After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second (non-documentary) feature, acknowledges too a more famous heavenly picture of the same year: his film’s Japanese title translates into English as ‘Wonderful Life’. After Life is tonally far removed from either Powell and Pressburger’s movie or Frank Capra’s and formally very different from most of Kore-eda’s own work though it wouldn’t have seemed so at the time of its original release. In Maborosi, his debut feature, death and disappearance are main themes, and the visual style is more poetic than in his later, familial dramas.
As soon as one of the deceased has chosen a memory, the staff of the centre set to work putting it on film. It emerges that these operatives are individuals who, unable or unwilling to select their own memory, have remained in limbo, assisting the passage to eternity of others. The Wednesday deadline is necessary because the filmed memory has to be complete, and the dead person concerned has to have watched it, by close of business on Friday. Once that’s done, s/he can vanish, proceeding to a new plane of existence, along with the single memory. By the time the weekend is over, the next intake of the dead will have arrived.
It is characteristic of Kore-eda that his version of a post-mortem world has plenty of humanity and humour. The time limit on memory selection turns out to be somewhat flexible. Some of the personal tensions between staff of the unit call to mind those in earthly workplaces. The more we see of the dead, the more variously vital they seem. Best of all is a permanently smiling yet somehow heartbroken woman (Kimiko Tatara), dead at the age of seventy-eight, who chooses a childhood memory of dancing for her supper at a café. The team’s screen recreations are amusingly low-tech, including crew members supplying the rocking motion of a remembered tram ride, and the cotton wool clouds seen on an aircraft journey. The typically fuzzy results, reflecting these DIY production values, give the memories the quality of home movies.
There are weightier themes in After Life, though. Some of the dead are spoiled, others starved, for choice of memories to cherish. One young man (Yusuke Iseya), with long hair and leather trousers, refuses to choose anything at all – a means, he claims, of ‘taking responsibility’ for his life. The storyline focuses increasingly on two ‘counsellors’ in the unit, Takashi (Arata Iura) and Shiori (Erika Oda), who are also quasi-romantic partners. Takashi has been in limbo since his death in World War II (he still, of course, looks as he did fifty years previously). In the week in question, he’s assigned to work with an old man called Ichiro (Taketoshi Naito). Video recordings of the latter’s life reveal that Ichiro married a woman called Kyoko, who was Takashi’s fiancée until his death ended the engagement. (Ichiro’s and Kyoko’s younger selves are played by Sadao Abe and Natsuo Ishido respectively. The older Kyoko, played by Kyoko Kagawa, also appears briefly.) Although he gets Ichiro reassigned to a colleague (Susumu Terajima), Takashi can’t get this extraordinary connection out of his head. It causes him to reappraise his life, which Takashi has always seen as devoid of happy memories. Now realising that he represented ‘happiness’ to the young Kyoko, he belatedly chooses a memory and passes on with it. Before doing so, he assures the distraught Shiori (Erika Oda’s bolshy, brittle portrait is one of the film’s highlights) that he’ll never forget her. His place on the staff is taken by the long-haired newcomer who won’t make his selection.
According to the rules supposedly governing Kore-eda’s metaphysical domain, there are obvious problems with Takashi’s choice of memory. Where others have queried being allowed just one remembrance, he opts for a part of his life with the fiancée who became Ichiro’s wife plus the knowledge of Shiori’s love for him plus the recollection of creative working with others in limbo. It’s clear enough that one of the things Kore-eda is aiming to do in After Life is demonstrate the impossibility of creating a fully coherent story set in a world beyond. The almost comically drab, mundane features of the existential way station in which After Life takes place may themselves be recognition of the limits of human imagination of a different order of being. To this extent, you accept the writer-director’s transgressions.
Even so, this literal-minded viewer found the film, as well as ingenious, exasperating. Why did it need the extraordinary connection between himself and Ichiro for Takashi to re-evaluate a life that ended half a century previously? If those working in the halfway house are still in more or less full possession of their earthly memories, how has it never occurred to Takashi that his may have contained good ones, or that the people he left behind have precious memories of him? By the time these questions occurred, others had already been nagging at me as I watched After Life. What’s the guarantee that you won’t get fed up with the single memory keeping you company from everlasting to everlasting? Will you be insulated from regret that you didn’t choose a different one? What happens if the recreation of a memory fails to trigger in the person to whom it belongs the feelings they had in response to the original experience? (That’s a significant risk, given the primitiveness of the limbo crew’s film-making.)
I was left with the sense that asking that last question was missing perhaps the main point of the film. After Life is, as much as a meditation on memory, the expression of a love of movie-making (the Japanese title hints at that), of the sleight of hand that’s essential to the process, and of the endurance of its results. Those unable or unwilling to select a standout memory as a passport to eternity are occupied instead in constructing multiple sights and sounds which, illusionary and imperfect as they may be, are built to last. Takashi won’t part with the memory of working with others in an enterprise that has at its heart the creation of lives on screen.
The BFI programme note included Tony Rayns’s contemporary Sight & Sound review (October 1999) and a longer, more recent one by Kristi McKim, from Senses of Cinema (June 2017). At the end of her very interesting article, which captures the film’s thoroughgoing cinephilia, McKim summarises the audience’s immediate post-After Life feelings:
‘We leave the cinema, close our browser, or shut down our home theatre with gratitude for the fact that we don’t have to choose [our one memory], at least for now. We look up from our screens, come down from our cinematic high, newly-attuned and calibrated for a world toward which we look with open, loving eyes.’
Well, speak for yourself (rather than for ourselves) … I like and admire Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films, this one included, but McKim’s peroration confirmed the suspicion that, in order to engage fully with After Life, you need a deep-rooted devotion to the art of cinema that I just don’t have.
10 December 2019
