DEPARTURES opens with all the hype that goes with winning the Oscar for Best Foreign film, creating even more build-up after beating favourites like France’s THE CLASS and Iran’s WALTZ WITH BASHIR.  DEPARTURES has everything going for it that Academy Award members love in a movie – sentimentality, feel-good emotions, classical material (in this the music) and a plot involving life’s principles.  Unfortunately, it is also a very tedious and overlong film.

The film begins with the work performed by a young failed cellist, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki).  This work, which he excels in, is that of an ‘encoffineer’, one who prepares deceased bodies for entry into the next life.  Though Daigo is very good at it, the job is frowned upon by his wife and all those around him.

The best thing about DEPARTURES is the fluid camerawork that runs as smoothly as the casket into the furnace.  Takita is fond of combining steady shots (like on a tripod) followed by the camera then slowly pulling back or tracking the subject.

Though basically serious in nature, the film has moments of dray humour.  The comedic set ups are at times so dry (example: finding a ‘thing’ in what looks like a female corpse) that no one in the audience laughed at all.  But Takita is fond of over sentiment.  It soon becomes apparent, and often too many times, when the time is to pull out the hanky.  The last segment of the protagonists coming to terms with his dead father is too much to handle on the sentiment scale.  The message of human beings having to accept each other and not just look on the surface is drummed not only too hard but repeated once too often in the film.  Takita could do well to trim his film by at least 30 minutes.

The film ends with the credits flowing with a scene of Daigo performing the complete ‘Nokanshi’.  The scene has been done already many times, though in parts, throughout the movie.  Enough repetition already!  We get the point.