Touches You

A Masterpiece!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The dead arrive at a way station where counselors guide them to choose one memory to live with for eternity. The place is an overgrown administration building. After the counselors help the arrivals pick their memories, the film crew recreates the memory and the arrivals watch the tape. After watching the tape, they disappear into the next stage. The counselors await for the new week and the next arrivals.I love this idea. It's got great potential. However it feels a little like watching some kind of government bureaucracy. No matter how touching it gets. This has a DMV type of pacing. There is one fun section where they are recreating the memories. It could funnier but I like that section. I love this movie idea but two hours is a stretch.

This was a perfect film for watching on a quiet Sunday morning. It made me reflect on my own life, and realize that I would probably be one of the counselors in the afterlife.It was brilliantly written and directed and one of the most innovative stories I have seen on screen. After death, you spend a week in a way-station to reflect on your life and take one memory with you. It is not an easy process as I discovered.I was interested in the fact that some people can remember all the way back to the womb. Picking a happy memory before I was an adult is almost impossible for me, so I cannot imagine going back that far. Most people remember only to age three or four.I was fascinated with the man who wanted to leave behind some evidence of his existence. One man could not remember any happy memories in his 70+ years, so he had to sit through video tapes, one for each year of his life, to help him. It seems that there was a connection with one of the counselors and this played out in an unusual way at the end. Choosing your best memory as the fact that you were someone else's best memory and that you made one person happy.Most of us fall into the category expressed by one man. "I had a so-so education, a so-so job, a so-so marriage, and a so-so retirement." How do you pick a happy or important memory from that? I also liked one man's response when he picked his memory after lamenting that most of the memories of his life were bad. After being told he would forget all the bad memories, he exclaimed, "That truly is heaven." An unusual film that will be in my memory for a long time.

I saw After as part of the Hirokazu Kore-eda retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival. This film should be compulsory viewing for film students. It proves that a good story put together inventively is all it takes to produce a compelling film. With scarce resources and mostly non-professional actors, Kore-eda has ingeniously contrived an alternate reality, where people go at the time of death. No pearly gates, no angels, no hell-fire - just bureaucrats in government buildings (or so they seemed to this writer), processing the dead, and extracting from them their lives' fondest memories to be made into videos.This idea is almost comical, yet it works beautifully. Clearly there's a humorous element, but Kore-eda plays it matter-of-fact serious, almost like a documentary. For me it strongly recalls some of the early fiction films of Kieslowski (like Camera Buff) which evolved out of the documentary format. The film shares the beautifully raw aesthetics of Camera Buff and Blind Chance and with the latter's metaphysical exploration. Having seen at MIFF all but one of Kore-eda's films (Distance, which I plan to see on Tuesday), this is my favourite so far. But each of the films I have seen thus far are very different in content and style to each other. This film is both enjoyable and moving.

What happens after one dies? Does one's soul ascend to heaven, descend to hell, or is it reincarnated into yet another earthly form? Does an individual simply cease to exist after he or she dies? In Kore-eda's second feature length film Afterlife one goes to a way station where one selects his or her favorite memory to be filmed and then one takes that memory and that memory alone to one's final destination.In order to help individuals decide which memory to keep counselors help individuals comb through their lives to find important memories. Many of the individuals, of course, select times from their childhoods as their best memories. One man selects a summer day in which he rode a tram and enjoyed the scenery and the cool breeze that blew through the window. A radiant older woman chooses a time in which she was dressed in a red, Western dress and danced for her older brother and dined on chicken rice afterwards. One bitter man chooses a time in his life when he had a small fort and was able to hide away from the world.On its surface Afterlife might seem a bit hokey and one wonders why spirits have to create videos of their memories, they also eat and drink, to take to the next world. However, isn't it true that are life experiences are nothing but memories and besides the current moment we live everything else is a memory? Kore-eda, whose other feature length films Maboroshi and Distance focus on death and memory and memory as well, delves into mankind's worry of being forgotten. One character in the film, an older man who considers every aspect of his life to be so-so, is reluctant to select a memory because he does not believe that he had a life affirming moment that will be remembered by others, but, as one of the counselors states very few people do.Slow moving, darkly filmed, and melancholy Afterlife is a deep film that takes an interesting stance to life and death and makes one reflect on one's own life and those small moments that makes each of us who we are.