Kore-Eda

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

>I saw Kore-Eda's Afterlife this past weekend and I was quite taken with it.
>What kind of response did it get in Japan? Aside from Maboroshi, has he done
>anything else? Is his at all associated with Naomi Kawase?

Here's the draft of my Yomiuri review of the film.  As for Kawase, now 
Sento, they have not worked together on a film as far as I know (though I 
once heard a rumor they were involved).

********



	How far back can you remember?  For me, it's hard to tell.  Memories of 
my early childhood are so much a mix of recollections, family photos, and 
parental stories that I can't tell which are the real memories and which 
are mere recreations.  This question is probably even more difficult to 
answer for today's children, video-taped from day one until their whole 
existence becomes summarized on magnetic tape.  When they look back on 
their lives, can they cull out any memories not mediated by the media 
around them?
	There is one character in After Life who actually does look back on his 
life on video.  One of a score of people who died and find themselves in 
a dreary run-down institution , Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito), an old 
gentleman, is asked by the employees working there to, within a week's 
time, pick one special memory from his life.  Once he has, the memory 
will be recreated on film allowing him, after he views it, to go on to 
heaven with just that one thought in mind.
	Watanabe, however, cannot think of any good recollections; his life, it 
seems, has been that dull.  The tapes of his life that he borrows (shot 
by God, perhaps?) are then meant to jog his memory.
	Watanabe's story is only one of many in Hirokazu Koreeda's rich ensemble 
film, but it proves central not only narratively, interweaving as it does 
with the stories of his case worker, Mochizuki (ARATA), and Shiori (Erika 
Oda), the female employee who loves him, but also thematically.  What 
meaning does our life have if we cannot recall a single important memory?
	The place of memory in human existence is in fact one of the central 
themes of Koreeda, a director who began in the world of television 
documentary.  Not only was his first feature, the award winning Maborosi, 
about a woman trying to come to grips with memory of the sudden suicide 
of her husband, much of his TV work revolves around the issue.  Kioku ga 
Ushinawareta Toki (1996) documents a man who, due to a hospital mishap, 
cannot build up any new memories, and Kare no Inai Hachigatsu (1994) 
records the last year and a half of the life of an AIDS victim as a 
series of memories of him, trying to put on video what was important 
about him.
	The problem with memory, however, is that it is not always reliable.  
Several of the dead in After Life, for instance, cannot recall accurately 
what happened and some lie outright.  Fiction, it seems, seeps into the 
records of our existence.
	Koreeda explores this problem through a mixture of fiction and 
documentary in After Life itself.  Much of the movie is shot in 
semi-documentary style, with both head-on "talking head" interviews and 
short hand-held shots using a long lens, and the content itself is 
partially based on reality.  Many of the recounted memories were culled 
from interviews with older Japanese, some of whom actually appear in the 
movie telling their own tales.  Even the actors were given the freedom to 
speak of their past before the camera.
	Which stories are real and which ones are fiction is impossible to tell, 
which is probably something to be expected of a world where, once one 
decides on a memory, it is not archived, as with Watanabe's videotapes of 
the actual incidents, but recreated using all the tricks of the movie 
business, from cotton clouds to paper cherry blossoms.
	That Koreeda's characters see these reproductions and find them real 
speaks volumes about our memories, but one wonders what the documentarist 
Koreeda then thinks about the relation between fiction and documentary.  
At times, After Life seems dangerously close to the pabdum celebration of 
cinema as a repository of our memories found in Cinema Paradiso and Niji 
o Tsukamu Otoko.  Koreeda, an extremely skilled but not always original 
filmmaker, gives us an enjoyable, emotional, but still a bit too 
easy-to-digest meditation on memory.
	After Life is most interesting when seen in the context of Koreeda's 
work.  In Kioku ga Ushinawareta Toki, the victim actually tries to use 
video as a means of supplementing his impaired memory, but it doesn't 
work.  Something else, it seems, is needed for such media to become 
"real."
	Some of the dead in After Life do not choose a memory within a week's 
time, either because they cannot or because they refuse to.  Those who do 
not choose stay on as employees to help the subsequent dead choose their 
memories. 
	In some ways, it reflects a failure in their life, but in  other ways it 
doesn't.  Like Mochizuki, one gains the opportunity to involve oneself in 
the memories of many.  Koreeda's Kare no Inai Hachigatsu is in some ways 
about that, about the director realizing he is no longer an observer, but 
an intimate participant in his subject's life.
	After Life is then not merely a celebration of memory turned cinematic, 
it is a statement that our memories--and lives--are real only to the 
extent that they truly involve others, whether through the medium of