After Life

1998's AFTER LIFE presents ideas that I had considered in my earlier years, long before I saw this film during its original release.  Many, in fact.  One is that archives are kept of our entire lives.  Every moment recorded, subject to later review.  This can be a horrifying notion, but comes in handy for a recently deceased man who finds himself in a sort of way station purgatory.  He is told that before he can move on he must select one memory in which he will spend eternity.  He struggles, noting how unremarkable his life was.  

Writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda interviewed hundreds of individuals, asking what memory they would choose.  He used some of these interviews in his film (along with some scripted bits), in which a staff of workers do likewise with a group of the newly dead.  Every Monday, a new batch to be interviewed, then filmed within a recreation of the chosen memory.  Some interviewees are loquacious and candid; others are hesitant and withdrawn.  The staff goes to great lengths to recreate every detail of the final decision, down to traffic noise and how cool a breeze had felt.   Memories are unreliable, of course, subject to our own mental decline and tendency to view the past through various filters. Would someone choose an unpleasant recollection? To Kore-eda's surprise, some of his subjects did. 

AFTER LIFE quite effectively combines a documentary style with a meditative narrative that unsurprisingly is more about the staff members - those who've also died at some point but were unwilling or unable to choose.  They talk about irritations of the job the way longtime worker bees in any Earthly job would.  But Takashi (Arata Iura) has a very compelling argument to ask for reassignment from Mr. Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito), the older fellow I referenced at the beginning of this review.  The reason will provide a strong emotional resonance during the latter half of this film.  For all the heady ideas Kore-eda prompts, his movie probably does work best on an emotional level.  Certain moments at all points in this film brought me to tears.

As you watch AFTER LIFE, it will be impossible not to consider your own life, what solitary memory you would select.  How agonizing.   Ponder that you would spend infinity living in it, forgetting everything else.  For some, it might be the very definition of eternal suffering.  For viewers with theological bents, the film's central premise might seem too humanistic and simplistic to reconcile. Almost a "feel-good" wish fulfillment view of the afterlife, one which rejects the Divine.  One of the subjects, a 21 year old who steadfastly refuses to choose, begins his interview by being shocked that this entire idea of Heaven and Hell was just a story.   It would be interesting to interview Kore-eda about this very theme.

I'm glad Hollywood hasn't attempted a remake, as it would surely be a schmaltzy disaster ala WHAT DREAMS MAY COME.   Kore-eda's film patiently examines identity, coincidence, self worth, purpose.  Most of all - memory, and how it defines us.  I want to cheer when the director states:

"Our memories are not fixed or static. They are dynamic, reflecting selves that are constantly changing.  So the act of remembering , of looking back at the past, is by no means redundant or negative.  rather, it challenges us to evolve and mature." 

Use this quote the next time someone laments that reviewing the past is a waste of time.

It would also make a interesting discussion to consider - as the process of creating a film is so integral to this story - how AFTER LIFE considers cinema itself.