After Life, the second feature film by Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, radiates this same aura. A 36-year-old who began his career making television documentaries, Hirokazu approaches film with a painterly sensibility. After Life opens with interviews of sixteen subjects, each seated behind a table and speaking straight into the camera, documentary style. Hirokazu shifts from testimonial to lyrical by dipping into Vermeer's palette. Light falls through the rough-hewn windows of an otherwise cold institutional building, filling the spare conference rooms with lush golds and greens. This play of light and shadow softens the faces of a series of figures drawn from the wide spectrum of Japanese society: the deliberately cute teenage girl, the wryly philosophical punk, the disappointed divorcee, the cradle-to-grave company man. The otherworldly look of the conference rooms supports the bizarre announcement made to each subject by a team of three off-screen interviewers: "You died yesterday. We are sorry for your loss." In this bureaucratic purgatory, the interviewers belong to a kind of St. Peter's quality circle that calls upon the recently deceased to choose their most cherished memory. This single memory will serve as a screenplay for the sensations they will experience for eternity.
The themes of loss and memory appear continuously in Hirokazu's work. In 1996 the Japanese government network NHK aired his documentary Without Memory, about a young man trapped in an eternal present by a medical blunder that eliminated his capacity to remember events for more than one hour. His critically acclaimed first feature, Maborosi (1995), explored the grief of a widow after her husband's suicide. The premise for After Life grew from Hirokazu's experience as a young boy, watching his grandfather suffer from Alzheimer's at a time when neither the medical establishment nor his own community had any way of understanding the disease. "As a child I comprehended little of what I saw," the director writes, "but I remember thinking that people forgot everything when they died." That insight inspired the film. "My memories of my bewildered grandfather inspired me to base my film on memories of real people and to use many of those people in my cast."
Hirokazu assembled more than 500 people to ask the same question as his celluloid gatekeepers: "What memory would you choose to take with you to Heaven?" Although ultimately only ten of these nonactors show up on screen, this amalgam of memories supplied Hirokazu with material for his script. The endearing mannerisms of so many of the characters make for a delightful side game while watching the film: Which of the 22 paradise-bound pilgrims are the professional actors? Whose memories are real?
The fantastic setting for these "real" memories is not the only element that makes After Life a fiction film. Much like Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, After Life moves from the avant garde to the conventional. The German film opens with a survey of human frailty from an angel's-eye-view but ultimately settles into the story of an angel who yearns to be human. The memories recited in the Japanese film become the basis for two intertwined love stories and the suggestion of a third. Discerning the development of the film's more conventional plot elements requires patience. After the initial rapid-fire introduction of the characters, the narrative intentionally slows the pace. The camera pays as much attention to the texture of a closed door or the workings of a clock as to protagonist Shiori Satonaka (played with understated moodiness by Erika Oda), the eternally eighteen-year-old memory-keeper's assistant, as she nervously prepares to visit the supervisor she has a crush on. As always patience has its rewards. To prove the point that Heaven can be built by collapsing a lifetime into a single moment, the camera lovingly caresses animate and inanimate objects alike, revealing the life force contained in a single sensation.
In this gesture Hirokazu not only transports Vermeer's style from seventeenth-century painting to twenty-first-century film; he updates the allegory. As Vermeer did with his painter, Hirokazu portrays the filmmaker in the film. After soliciting their clients' memories, the way-station bureaucrats spend the latter half of each week -- and the latter half of the movie -- turning those memories into film. The process runs from initial production meetings ("I don't know if visual images can convey temperature"); through casting (says one of the departed: "I'm a little old to be your little sister"); set building ("How will you make the clouds? With cotton?"); to the last act before progress into the beyond -- projection. If the idea that death is the loss of memory motivated After Life, the allegory suggests that filmmaking can inspire resurrection. For Hirokazu the cinema is, indeed, paradise.
