Departures, Yôjirô Takita

Departures is an elegant and small film about the most inelegant of big topics, death.  Daigo (played by Masahiro Motoki) is an unemployed cellist who returns with his young wife to live in his deceased mother's fishing-village home.  Desperate for work, he takes a job casketing, that is the ritual preparation of bodies before they are cremated.  Though lucrative, the job is held in low esteem by Daigo, his wife, and neighbors.  

As we learn from the film, casketing is a new profession, the result of families no longer performing the end-of-life rituals themselves.  Over the course of nearly a dozen casketing ceremonies, we watch as Daigo lends artistic beauty and dignity to the ritual, thereby providing comfort for the grieving families.  He learns not to force the families to keep their distance; he works, instead, to collapse that distance and bring them in physical contact with the corpse.  

Slow and somber--perhaps too slow in spots--the film ends with Daigo achieving his own reconciliation with his father (who had abandoned his wife and son thirty years earlier) when he steps outside the prescribed role of onlooking family member and gently cleanses his father's corpse.

Recommended.