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After Life Director: Hirokazu Koreeda Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Letterbox Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 118 minutes Studio: New Yorker Films Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2000-08-29 Buy from Amazon |
 "Beautiful lovely and gorgeous"Everybody needs to at least see this gentle, inspiring, important film at least once. It's a very lovingly made, humane and humanist piece (yes I have to group adjectives in threes. Got a problem with that?) that you don't want to end, and leaves you valuing your own life and the people around you more. The atmosphere and formality of the film are really effective, while showing a uniquely (I think) Japanese sensibility, the actors are pitch-perfect, with the interviewees who are possibly "real people" being especially memorable. I just hope this really is what happens after we die! "A Beautifully Understated and Thought Provoking Film"The idea - moving through the transition from this life to the next - is not a new one, and there is plenty of room for imaginative storytelling. But compare the simplicity and understated elegance of writer/director Hirokazu Kore-Eda's AFTER LIFE to the gaudy, superficial, and star-studded Hollywood production DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, and you will see the difference between cinematic art and cinematic entertainment. I have watched AFTER LIFE three times and enjoyed it more each time I've seen it. Not only does it leave you thinking about your own life, it fills you with an almost Zen-like appreciation for life's unique small pleasures, the ones most easily overlooked or forgotten in the crush of everyday life. The basic story line is simple. After dying, the deceased migrate in small groups to special facilities where they have three days to choose a memory from their life that is particularly meaningful to them. They will be permitted to carry that one memory into the next life. The staff at each facility assists them in choosing and prepares a short film that replicates each person's special event to strengthen the memory just before they pass to the other side. AFTER LIFE presents one week's group at one facility, ranging from a teenage girl who wants to choose Disneyland to an old man who can't seem to choose anything. Mixed into this group are several elderly women, a rebellious young man who refuses to choose, and an older man who insists from the beginning that his choice will involve having sex. Kore-Eda uses a pseudo-documentary style, complete with unsteady camera movements and obvious jump cuts in the personal interviews. The background is anything but celestial, looking more like an abandoned prep school dormitory or army barracks, complete with bare walls, peeling paint, and the most Spartan of furniture. Seasons change, flowers bloom, snow falls, the moon rises, and cars even pass by this not-very-ethereal place, as if the location of this limbo was just an out-of-the-way corner of a big city that no one happened to notice any more. The choice is masterful, allowing us to focus entirely on the deceased group and the consultants who assist them (all of whom have never been able to choose their memory and have thus stayed behind). Of all possible weeks, Kore-Eda presents this group for its special relationship to Michizuki, one of the staff consultants. Although he appears to be just 22 or 23, Michizuki died 53 years earlier, shot in the Philippines during World War II. Although he is the object of another consultant's affections, the young Shiori (a Japanese Meg Tilly look-alike), Michizuki discovers that he has a romantic connection through one of the people in that week's group to a woman who died several years earlier. When he learns the nature of the deceased woman's feelings for him from the memory she chose to take to her afterlife, Michizuki finally finds the reason and the courage to select his cherished memory and move on to his next life. AFTER LIFE is a wonderfully uplifting story, filled with likable characters who are remarkable for seeming so average. Despite the subtitling, this is a movie you can hardly help but fall in love with. Kore-Eda's message, and the self-reflection he evokes, is as powerful as any Sunday sermon you're likely to hear. Of course, you'll inevitably find yourself trying to answer the movie's central question - what single memory of your life would you take with you to whatever comes next? "Haunting and beautiful"What a wonderful story. The simple story poignantly wraps the meaning of life into one moment of our memory. I cannot recommend this enough. "Very Inspiritional"This movie was very moving with ones emotion on the thought of choosing just "one" memory to take with you and relive over and over. It is very deep with the characters on what they want to choose and those that still have not decided. "refreshing, delicate and profound"This is a slow and delicate film that touches human life at its core. It makes you stop and ask: What am I living for? WHat is important in my life? What have I learnt? in other words.... What would I like to take with me when I go. The actors act with an immediacy that is direct, refreshing and sweet - there is little self-consciousness usually involved in "acting" ... possibly also because the Japanese are much less obsessed with the "self" than us Westerners. In any case, the director did a superb job in coaxing the actors to be real, and he did it with VERY little money. If yu want to see a movie that will touch your heart and make you stop, and actually become aware of your life and its path, see After Life. |
