Change Your Image
PH!L!IP
Reviews
Wandafuru raifu (1998)
One of my favorite movies, ever.
I'm not going to bother summarizing anything; at this point, the other 22 comments have done a pretty exhaustive job of that.
I want to point out an element of this film's appeal that hasn't yet been emphasized in this forum: its modesty. (I don't know if anything I'm about to discuss could be taken as a "spoiler," since this isn't a very plot-driven movie, but if you don't want to take that chance, please don't read further.)
Yes, you could certainly see many of the characters' cherished memories as hopeless cliches, and the soundstage on which they're filmed is in fact pretty damn rinky-dink. I can't argue with that. But I will say that such a dismissal of this movie's content seems to me to indicate a real failure of empathy: Are folks so hung up on novelty, on the extraordinary, that they can't see any beauty at all in a perfectly humdrum life? (What about your life, or mine?) Are the only people worth caring about all full-color glossy hundred-foot-high superstars?
For me it's not boring or disappointing that, say, the indecisive gentleman chooses to sit on a park bench for eternity with his wife. Return to his decision in your mind for a moment: What is it saying? I think it's a comment not on the afterlife but on just how little will do in the here and now, how little we'll wake up for in the morning, how absolutely unkillable our hope for ourselves is, how abjectly we devote ourselves to enduring our lives even when there's no reward waiting for us. It's saying that any tiny moment, no matter how empty it may seem, can contain enough to sustain us forever.
Can contain enough what? I can't say, exactly. Under this movie's quiet surfaces, it seems desperately urgent to answer that question: Enough what? Yes, yes, it says, this is what your life is made of! Frowning at newspapers and sitting on trains and eating hundreds of breakfasts in silence. This is it! So what does it mean? What is it for? Better make it mean something, because no one else can do that for you. Nobody's waiting to buy the film rights to your last fight with your girlfriend, father, roommate, whatever. Nobody cares what your favorite song is. Nobody cares how you feel whenever you walk past that one willow tree, where the two of you kissed for the last time.
That's the mercilessness at the core of this otherwise very tender and beautiful story: You mean nothing. Nobody means anything. You have to look inside yourself and choose to cherish something, any damn thing, because otherwise you might as well be dead already.
I don't know. I'm just running off at the mouth. I'm not going to convince anybody to see this film, I don't think. It's an obscure Japanese number, and the subtitles are often hard to read (white text against snow--ouch). But for what it's worth: "After Life" will reward your patience. It's sweet and understated and funny and deeply moving. For once, you may cry at a movie without resenting it later.