Lightheartedly serious - Afterlife (Afterlife (DVD))

Member Name: stmatth

Product:	Afterlife (DVD)
Date:	18/08/00 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Makes you think aobut your own life

Disadvantages: Makes you think aobut your own life

A quiet, large building - perhaps an old school -, early morning, people entering the building, sitting down in a waiting room. Until they are individually called into small rooms where a polite professional asks them to sit down. What is going on? A counselling service? A social benefits agency?
"I assume that you understand your situation by now: You died yesterday. I'm sorry for your loss." The team of counsellors explain the situation to the recently deceased: In the next few days, they have to review their lifes and choose one particular memory that is most valuable to them. This will then be reenacted in a film studio, and this will be the memory that they can take with them into eternity.
What follows is a fascinating discovery through the lifes of some twenty-odd persons from all walks of life, as they discuss their lifes with the counsellors - the young girl whose first idea is the memory of Disneyworld, the middle aged prostitute, the elderly office employee whose life seems completely unremarkable. While the story develops, the focus changes from one person to the next, and at first one hardly notices the surprising twist that adds a special tension to the story....
Again and again, I found myself thinking about my own life, and what memory I would choose for eternity. And I found that it would be a hard choice. This film does not simply end when you leave the cinema, rather this idea seems to come back to me every now and again.
However, it is not a sad film. Quite the opposite, it manages to introduce a subtle comic and lighthearted aspect to the situation. The whole setting - the somewhat bureaucratic, but also very personal, friendly and helpful nature of this counselling service for the deceased - has a certain comical absurdity. And the situation comedy in many scenes repeatedly lead to refreshing laughter in the audience. But these comical moments were not artificial "comic reliefs", but came naturally out o
f the situation.
In total, it is a highly original film, in every sense of the word. And I particularly liked it that it did not need any of the standard devices that most mainstream films seem to rely on: there is no artificially added love story, and no special effects whatsoever. Instead, it is a plain and simple, but convincing and entertaining character study.

Afterlife
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Japan 1998
118 mins
cert PG

Summary: