Main Cast: Arata, Erika Oda, Susumu Terajima, Takashi Naito, Kei Tani
Release Year: 1998
Country: JP
Run Time: 118 minutes
Plot
Like his previous drama Maborosi (1995), Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life is a brilliant meditation on death and memory. The premise of After Life is simple: over the span of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a way station (which looks like an old junior high school) between life and death, where they are asked to choose just one memory to take into the afterlife. The new arrivals include an elderly woman, a rebellious dropout, a teenage girl, and a 70-year-old war veteran. Once they have chosen a memory, it is recreated and filmed by the staff of the way station, using all the tricks and illusions of cinema: cotton balls are used to mimic clouds, a fan is used for a summer breeze. In preparation for this project, Kore-eda interviewed 500 people from all walks of life about their memories. The film freely cuts between footage of these interviews, actors improvising, and actors reading scripts. Just as Kore-eda fuses documentary elements with a fictional narrative, we see over the course of the film how memories are distorted, improved on, and revised; and it is these subjectively constructed memories that the new arrivals value most. This film is not a typical Hollywood feel-good film; but its unhurried pace and lack of melodrama, like its subject, may linger in the memory long afterwards. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
A peculiar and uniquely moving examination of life after death, Hirokazu Kore-Eda's After Life dispenses with conventional notions of punishment and reward and offers instead a version of the hereafter dominated by reflection and contemplation, death as a moment in which to come to terms with all that's come before and move on. Kore-Eda turns what could have been a parlor game exercise -- the issue of choosing a memory to preserve for eternity -- into a profound examination of what matters most. That his afterlife counselors largely reserve judgment reveals the director's (and the project's) documentary roots, and that evenhandedness only enhances the meditative tone: If our heart isn't free to dwell where it likes in death, when can it be free? After Life also, almost incidentally, serves as a meditation on filmmaking, both as an activity and as a means of representing human experience. In re-creating the past, its characters employ the selectivity of the most detail-oriented director in a film whose gentle humor almost obscures the low-key profundities beneath it. ~ Keith Phipps, All Movie Guide
Like Giuseppe Tornatore's A Pure Formality, Koreeda's After Life is set in a waystation where the souls of the recently deceased are processed before entering heaven. "Heaven," for the film, is a single memory from one's life.
The movie is set in a structure resembling a decrepit travel lodge or social services institution. A group of people who have just died check in at the beginning of each week, and the "social workers" resident in the lodge explain to each guest their situation. The newly-dead have until Wednesday to decide what the single happiest or most significant memory from their life is, and then for the rest of the week the workers make short movies to recreate each person's chosen memory.
At the end of the week, the movies are shown in the screening room. As soon as each person sees his or her own memory, he or she vanishes to whatever unknown state of existence lies beyond and takes only that single memory with them into eternity.
The story revolves around two of the counselors, Takashi (Arata) and Shiori (Oda). Takashi has been assigned to help an old man, Ichiro (played by Naito Taketoshi), select his memory. Takashi reviews videotape of Ichiro's life and learns that Ichiro had married Takashi's former fiancée after Takashi had been killed during World War II. Takashi has Ichiro assigned to another counselor, but is still troubled by his memories, causing both him and his quasi-romantic interest Shiori to re-examine their (after-) lives.
Koreeda got his start directing televisiondocumentaries for TV Man Union. Much of the action in After Life is shown as interviews conducted with the recently deceased regarding their lives. Some of these interviews were scripted, but many were done impromptu, with real people (not actors) reminiscing about their own lives.
