After Life
The people come into view out of pure white light, like a bell toll. Where are they? A plain building is surrounded by trees and an unknown space. Staff members meet them and explain, nicely, that they have died, and this is a way station before whatever comes next.
They will be here for a week. They are to choose one memory, one only, from their lives: One memory they want to keep forever.
Then a film will be made to reenact that memory; they will move on taking only that memory with them forgetting everything else. They will spend eternity in their happiest memory.
That is the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life,” a movie which quietly reaches out and asks us: What’s the single moment in our own lives we treasure the most? One of the new arrivals says he has only bad memories. The staff urges him to think harder. Surely spending eternity in a bad memory would be what should I say? hellish. And spending forever within our best memory would be, I suppose, as close as we dare hope to get to heaven.
The film is completely matter of fact. No fireworks, no celestial choirs, no angelic hoo-hah. The staff works hard; there are lots of memories to process in a week and many movies to make about those memories afterwards. There is practical planning: Scripts must be written; sets must be built; special effects must be improvised. It’s not all metaphysics; we discover that somebody from an earlier group chose Disney World and especially the Splash Mountain ride.
Kore-eda now joins Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema by following up his last film (the 1997 masterpiece “Maborosi”) with another work which embraces the mystery of life why are we here? and asks what makes us truly happy.
In a time when so many movies survive on irony and cynicism, here is a man who hopes we will feel better and smarter when we leave his film.
The method of the film creates the magic. Some of these people, and some of their memories, are real (we are not told which).
Kore-eda interviewed hundreds of ordinary people in Japan. The faces on the screen are so alive, the characters seem to be remembering events they really lived through, in a world of simplicity and wonder.
Given that there are many characters in this movie we have no trouble keeping them apart because each one is unique and irreplaceable.
The staff members have a mystery of their own. Who are they? And why were they chosen to work at this way-station instead of moving on like everybody else? The answer to that question is contained in revelations I don’t want to discuss since they come about so naturally from within the film.
The moment in “After Life” where a young staff member finds out that he is related to an elderly new arrival is one of the most emotional moments. This old man can tell him something that will change his whole perception about himself. The fullness of this revelation, a long ago young love; has the same profound bitter sweetness as the ending of James Joyce’s short story (and John Huston film) “The Dead,” where a man suddenly realizes he shares his wife’s first lover, who has long since died.
Sappy sentimentality could ruin “After Life.” It is very fragile, Hollywood likes to remake such movies with crude, happy ending mushiness. It’s like an elevated “Ghost,” which evokes similar feelings but deserves them. Kore-eda knows his premise is supernatural and fantastical; everything else in this movie becomes quietly practical. Staff work under deadlines. Arrivals work on their memories. Films will be shown Saturday then Sunday will be gone, along with everything else. Except for the memories.
Which memory would I choose? Images flicker through my mind as I stare out the window. I have so many moments to choose from. Just thinking about them makes me grateful. I remember a line from Ingmar Bergman’s film “Cries and Whispers.” After the sister dying painfully of cancer dies, her diary is found.
She recalls a day when she was feeling better during her illness. Her two sisters and her nurse wheeled her out into the garden, into the sun, and for awhile they forgot their pain and were simply happy together. The woman who had died such a terrible death wrote: “I feel great gratitude towards my life which gives me so much.”
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