After Life (1998)
Review of After Life / ワンダフルライフ (1998), directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
When I got really excited about my new Criterion subscription, this was the second movie I picked up. I had obtained this subscription just as this movie was added to the Criterion Channel, as it was a part of the October 2021 line-up. I knew the name Hirokazu Kore-eda very well, but I had never actually seen any of his movies until now. I’ve been meaning to watch the movie After the Storm (2016) for years now, but have just never gotten around to it.
After Life is actually his first movie in which he wrote, produced, and edited the entire thing by himself. This was the film that brought the name Hirokazu Kore-eda to the international stage, because as it debuted at TIFF in 1998, it began a massive distribution list and would win the FIREPRESCI award at the 1998 San Sebastián International Film Festival. It almost mimicked his later success with his film Shoplifters, which would go on to win the Palm D’or at Cannes Film Festival.
I’ve said a lot! Let’s begin the actual review.
Content
The setting of the film is quite mundane, something you’d imagine you’d come across as a rest stop on a long highway. The building is unassuming, the people inside of it hard-working and good at their job. If you didn’t know the context of this film, you would not have imagined that this is purgatory. Every single Monday new guests arrive to check-in at the building; they are newly deceased and are ready to be processed into whatever comes next.
We assume it’s heaven or hell, but it’s actually a lot more wholesome than that. They are paired off with a staff member to discuss what good memories they had in life, and are asked to select one. This memory is what they will live in for the rest of their afterlives, further trapped in the sounds, senses, and feelings incurred by this memory. It’s through this process itself we discover the true nature of the workers at this building; they themselves were unable to pick a memory, and are thus stuck in limbo forever.
For one worker, Takashi Mochizuki, this repetitive routine begins to stutter when an old man is paired with him. The old man claims that he has no good memories that he can think of, and when they delve back into his memories, Takashi comes with an awful revelation: this man married the woman that he loved. Takashi died young, in his twenties, during World War II, leaving behind a sweetheart. She moved on to marry this man, via an arranged marriage, the one who cannot seem to have a single good memory. Takashi cannot seem to stomach this and requests to be moved to another soul. His request is denied, revealing some revelations in the process.
This quiet movie, as simple and unassuming as it seems, shows how quickly the human body and memory can be snuffed out and recreated. Hirokazu Kore-eda partially filmed this in a documentary-style manner, one in which he asked people to select a memory tha they would like to live in together. It was here that he discovered that a lot of people tended to dwell within their bad memories, creating this sense of gloom when reflecting upon one’s past. He then blended this filmed footage along with fictionalized, scripted interviews with actors, creating this hybrid nature within the film itself. We learn to bond with these people and characters by dwelling in their happy moments with them, smiling as they doze off with a happy look in their eyes.
And as suddenly as these people appear in purgatory, they disappear. The only recordings and evidence that they were here was the evidence archive of what their best memories were, the interviews they held with the workers. It’s kind of beautiful to me to have this evidence of someone’s living, as most people pass and their memory is forgotten forever. We all fear being forgotten.
We see this in Takashi’s fear of confronting his sweetheart’s husband; it probably pained him to know that she continued on with her life, leaving him behind as a memory. And that’s what makes the final arc of this film so beautiful, as we see how when she died and was asked to pick a memory, she picked one with Takashi when he was alive. It also demonstrates about how we often shit on ourselves for being a bad influence on the world, dwelling in our negative memories, when, in actuality, we were once a force of good in someone else’s life. And we may never know that.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a good movie. If you’re not used to slow, quiet movies, then you might have a harder time getting through this one. There isn’t really much action or plot outside of the dialogue—dialogue here is the most important aspect to the story. It’s like oral storytelling how we preserve these characters and their memories. You’ll come out of this film thinking about what your most important memory may be, leading us to question what we have done with our lives. Even if we have a lot of characters, we can separate them out by memory and worker. I really, really enjoyed this one.
