Hey, have you ever seen…After Life?

You died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss.

We’re a day early this week, as real life butts in and schedules conflict.  Next week should be back on track, but in any case, onwards!

There was a point where I was employed at a certain large company and had the horrifying combination of very limited internet access and a lot of free time on my hands.  One of the sites I could get to was bestbuy.com because of some business partner agreement, so I would spend time browsing their movies for something to do, and I stumbled across this little number, much to my eventual happiness.

After Life (or Wandafuru raifu – Wonderful Life) is an odd, dreamy, fantastical movie shot in a documentary style and separated roughly in two arcs, both taking place in an old schoolhouse-looking building.  In the first arc, the people who recently died come to this schoolhouse, this sort of way-station between death and the afterlife, where they meet up with the counselors who work there.  These counselors help the recently deceased in working back through their lives and selecting the one happiest memory from their time on Earth which will repeat over and over in the hereafter as that person’s heaven.  The film explores the counselors, their work with the deceased, the sometimes unexpected consequences of their jobs, their relationships with one another, all the rest of that good stuff that makes a movie worth watching.

The story of the counselors remains the main thread of the film and binds the first half to the second, where the counselors work on reconstructing the chosen memories in a very Gondry-esque fashion, where it will will be filmed and screened for the people whose memories they are.

The movie is one I can easily imagine people saying is boring, and it’s subtitled, and languid and ethereal, and I suppose that makes it prone to dislike, but if these are things that don’t bother you, then this film is hauntingly beautiful.  And the characters seem bloody real…because they are.  A number of the ‘actors’ are speaking in scenes with improvised dialogue about their real lives.

After Life has that interest you find in certain region’s cinema (non-US) in introspection, and memory, and what our lives mean to us when all is said and done.  It’s more a study of the human spirit than humans themselves.  That sounds sort of haughty, though, doesn’t it?  It’s not.  Anyone can watch and appreciate this film, I think.  It’s not highbrow or talking over your head, but instead sweet and melancholy and hopeful and ultimately, as simple as a single happy memory.