A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

You arrive at a sort of waystation. The people working there give you a room, they provide food, and they tell you what has happened.

You’ve died.

Also, you’ve got three days to choose a memory of yours. The staff will take that memory, turn it into a short film, and that will be what you are left with, and what is left of you, for eternity.

So, go ahead. Choose. It can’t be all that hard, can it?

After Life (1998), the second feature film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and the first he made as a writer-director, is both something of an oddity in the director’s oeuvre and a very typical example of his work. It has many of the trademark qualities of Kore-eda’s films: it delves into some heavy themes, but it does so with a lightness of touch, kindness and a gentle humour, without ignoring the underlying sadness. It seeks to console without shying away from the harsher, less forgiving aspects of life. It is understated, feeling no need to spell things out. But After Life is also a film that addresses the metaphysical head-on, where Kore-eda’s films are usually set recognisably in the real world (except for Air Doll, in which an inflatable sex doll comes to life and which I’ve not seen yet).

The afterlife of Kore-eda’s film, however, is nothing if not realistic in all the respects we expect from the real world. The dead aren’t immaterial ghosts, the staff at the waystation isn’t made up of ghouls, demons or angels. The bureaucracy of death isn’t the satire of, say, Brazil, it is overworked but decent people trying to do a decent job with the means at their disposal. The beyond at which the dead have arrived is mundane to a fault, it is dilapidated, but not in the way that dead things are: it simply looks like the afterlife as imagined by Kore-eda and his cast and crew isn’t particularly well funded.

And the same is true for the decidedly pre-digital filmmaking resources at the disposal of the people working at the waystation. They have some props but limited technology that they can use to try to recreate the memories their clients choose. It’s easy enough if that memory is of a conversation with a loved one on a park bench, but when someone wants their lasting memory to be of flying a plane through clouds, they must rely on imagination and ingenuity rather than on impressive visual effects. White cotton on strings against a blue background will have to stand in for real clouds. But is that a problem? Are memories photo-realistic? What you remember is never the same as what happened: it’s the story you tell yourself about what has happened. And the films made of the clients’? guests’? memories are the stories they choose to be told for the rest of time. Which nonetheless leaves the key conundrum: what memory do you pick? What if you have too many to choose from? What if you don’t have a single memory that you want to be represented by forever? Is this an act of finding the one moment that encapsulates your life, a final act of self-expression, both of these and other things besides?

Verdict: I love Kore-eda’s films, and even after all these years I think I might love After Life best. To my mind, it is his most original film, and while it looks simple enough on the surface, it’s structurally and thematically one of his most complex, albeit in an understated fashion that never gets in the way of the story he is telling and the characters he uses to tell that story. I love the layers that After Life reveals: there are the dead and their choice, there are the people working at the waystation, social workers of eternity, who are deeply human and react to the dead and their foibles the way anyone might: they’re frustrated with the teenage girls who think that a ride at Disneyland is the memory to go with, the old men who use their three days to brag about their impressive (and, probably, made-up) sex lives, the young rebels who want to take a stand against the system, man, by refusing to choose – but in spite of their frustrations they endeavour to serve these people for the last time ever. They are counsellors working for an unseen authority, but they are also artists, collaborators on a final, modest work of art. The director’s conceit is deeply poetic, but Kore-eda never insists on this poetry. His work reflects the filmmaking we see in After Life: gentle, respectful, kind. While I don’t know that I would want to end up in this particular afterlife, the idea of your life being turned into what amounts to a home movie, made not with money and resources but with care and respect, is a beautiful one. Kore-eda’s film is just as beautiful.