 | | |  | | | | | | AFTER LIFE
Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan, 1998
| | | | After Life enjoyed a long run at arthouse theatres on its initial release. Not only because it is a truly great movie but it also had the power to build upon audiences' deep affection for the film. It is an absorbing, reflexive study of the human psyche which asks, what one memory would you take with you and relive for time immemorial? Yet the depth of this question and the film's elegiac nature are treated with such human pragmatism that it never becomes sentimental. What After Life favours instead, is a deeply contemplative and at times humorous depiction of life after death. An open doorway of white light is the only allusion to spiritual arrival in this halfway house between life and thereon after. More akin to a municipal building than a corridor to the after life, the characters wander into the 'waiting room' where a mixed group of clerks ask them about their previous life. But this is just administration (someone has to do the boring jobs), for the newly deceased have only three days to ponder their past successes and failures. For some, the task of choosing one experience appears beguilingly easy, for others the choice is too great and for a small minority even the acceptance of such a task is an impossibility. This is a film which focuses on the individual and asks them to look deep inside themselves and question their interpretation of their experiences. Yet unlike the omnipresence of 'heaven' in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, Koreeda's use of hand-held camera, downbeat setting and despondent workers creates wonderful documentary-style realism. Quietly brilliant, After Life is a mystic treat. Clare Norton-Smith
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