NORIKO YUASA: PERFORMING KAORU'S FUNERAL (2023) JAPAN CUTS 2024

A lot goes on after you're dead

This appears to be Noriko Yuasa's feature film debut after short films and TV series, or at least her first big one. It's a complicated, ambitious film. The focus is as the title suggests a Japanese funeral with elaborate celebration and grieving ceremonies, drunkenness, angry outbursts, fakery, confusion, and a designated "chief mourner" who is an ex-husband, Jun (Koji Seki). You would need a deep understanding of Japanese language, culture, and traditions to follow this, to know whether it's being "dark" or "darkly humorous" or just serious; whether spot-on, or sometimes a misfire. Any intelligent moviegoer who can read subtitles can obviously see in general what's going on. But honestly, you'll be lost most of the time. There are too many shifts of tone, too many square-ratio, golden-tinted flashbacks, some long years ago, some as recent as yesterday, or Covid, to follow confidently.

Maybe we're meant to be lost, as is Jun. He gets a message, "Kagimino, Okayama Prefecture: Tachibana Funeral Parlor will organize everything." It seems from flashbacks well past midway that his marriage to Kaoru was was a sweet, youthful one that took place years ago, and quite brief (its cause seems to be depicted, but I didn't understand what it was). It is only here, well past midway, that Jun starts to realize he's not just the designated "chief mourner," a performer in a pretty empty collective ritual involving a lot of people he doesn't know, but actually has something to mourn himself, someting poignant indeed. Wasn't this actually his first, great love? May not its quick demise be seen as the tragedy of his life?

Kaoru - the recently dead one: there are several others, including a fussy bespectacled schoolgirl and a pretty young woman - was barely forty, it appears, and pretty, and was hit by a truck, and died. She has been exquitely embalmed. We glimpse that, especially the painting and plastering over of her face into a mask of beautiful perfection that is frequently revealed. And then some drunken guy slides the coffin lid back (yes, it slides, like a traditional Japanese door) and pours wine down on her. What is that about? Though Yumasa sticks mostly to convention, she seems unable to resist flashy, extreme moments like this, or like the old man who gets drunk and violent and causes a big disturbance in an initial dinner party; or late in the game, the mud-slinging battle between Jun and the young bespectacled schoolgirl Kaoru. The overall effect is theatrical, not subtle, in a genre to which the most complex, subtle, and deeply moving films in all of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, belongs.

Perhaps the theaatricality is appropriate, since Kaoru was a screenwriter; and it may be an ironic, intentional embarrassment for Jun to be chief mourner, since he is just a would-be actor, who works as a driver for call girls in Tokyo. All this happens down in the small village in Okayama that Kaoru comes from. Here, there may be producers and other theatrical and movie people who have come, but this is not the time and place for them to be useful to Jun. And they're not of much use to us, either, because we don't know who they are or what their stories are either. The writer, Takato Nishi, and the filmmaker should have collaborated on something more sharply focused and clearly directed. They seem to have been swamped by their own ambition in this good-looking but shapeless film.

[i]Performing Kaoru's Funersl カオルの葬式, 101 mins., won the Japan Cuts award at the 2024 Osaka Asian Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series, NYC (Jul. 10-21).

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.