The faces on the screen are so alive, the characters seem to be recalling events they really lived through, in world of simplicity and wonder.Īlthough there are a lot of characters in the movie, we have no trouble telling them apart because each is unique and irreplaceable. Kore-eda filmed hundreds of interviews with ordinary people in Japan. Some of these people, and some of their memories, are real (we are not told which). The method of the film contributes to the impact. His films embrace the mystery of life, and encourage us to think about why we are here, and what makes us truly happy.Īt a time when so many movies feed on irony and cynicism, here is a man who hopes we will feel better and wiser when we leave his film. Kore-eda, with this film and the 1997 masterpiece " Maborosi," has earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema. This isn't all metaphysical work a member of an earlier group, we learn, choose Disney World, singling out the Splash Mountain ride. There are pragmatic details to be workedout: Scripts have to be written, sets constructed, special effects improvised. The staff is hard-working they have a lot of memories to process in a week, and a lot of production work to do on the individual films. No special effects, no celestial choirs, no angelic flim-flam.
And spending forever within our best memory would be, I suppose, as close as we should dare to come to heaven. Surely spending eternity within a bad memory would be-well, literally, hell. The staff members urge him to think more deeply. That is the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda's "After Life," a film that reaches out gently to the audience and challenges us: What is the single moment in our own lives we treasure the most? One of the new arrivals says that he has only bad memories.