1998 ‘ワンダフルライフ’ Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
On a cold Monday morning, a group of counselors clock in at an old-fashioned social services office. Their task is to interview the recently deceased, record their personal details, then, over the course of the week, assist them in choosing a single memory to keep for eternity.
Wandâfuru raifu, Wonderful Life, 원더풀 라이프, Μετά Θάνατον Ζωή, Túlvilág, After LIfe, Wandafuru Raifu, Depois da Vida, После жизни, Yaşamdan Sonra, Phía Sau Cái Chết, 下一站，天国, 下一站，天國！
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I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. In general, I live for now and try not to concern myself with the past; I learn from my mistakes and move on with my life. At least that is what I always tell myself. Once in a while something like After Life comes along which makes me reconsider that which has come before.
There is honestly not a tonne to the film aside from the concept, and at times it even feels like a documentary since there are a lot of camera-facing, individual interviews, but the topic is a fascinating one. You are about to leave this Earth forever; what is that one memory you would take with you? You would lose all else…
If you had to distill your life into a single moment that defines you, that made you happy, that you were proud of, could you do it? If this is the end of your life, and this moment is the only one you could take with you beyond, could you do it?
This is the question that Hirokazu Koreeda poses in After Life. It’s a gentle, sweet, and strangely peaceful tale that is filled with poignant moments and stories, and raises more spiritual questions than it answers.
A true gem.
After Life uses a fantastical concept to accentuate its point, namely value inherent in our best memories. To do so it presents a waypoint between life and the afterlife, where passing spirits choose a single memory in their lives to take with them to the Great Beyond as they will forget everything else. What that exactly entails is vague, but the implication is that this is a critical decision for each to ponder carefully over.
And so lies a juncture in spiritual space, whose sole purpose is to facilitate such reflection. Once the memory is chosen the staff then recreates it on-film for the individual to see. At that point they depart, and we never see them again. Presumably it…
I wonder if they let them rate their memory films on Letterboxd before they go.
The film ended 5 minutes ago and already it means so much to me. With one of the most fascinating premises I’ve ever seen, executed with precision, handled with care, and filled with so much insight regarding film, death, life, memory, acceptance, and more, After Life is one of the few films that finds comfort in everything.
With so many beautiful moments and scenes beckoning for retrospection, I don’t want to lessen their impact by translating them into text, but I’ll say this: what a picture!
I’M NOT AFRAID OF DEATH ANYMORE 9
kore-eda!!!!! it feels very hard to give this a rating. so much of it's impact lies in the ripple it creates within you. the introspection; how it forces you to look at your own life and memories, and think about which one is not only the most important to you, but that you want to cherish for eternity. what moment sums everything up for you?
it also seems to be a love letter to cinema. suggesting that we often see our memories in a different light & the way they become sort of cinematic. how we can see memories outside of our own bodies and become the director of things that already happened to us. how cinema allows people to capture a moment in time and come back to it as a way to remind us of who we were... who we are.
to be part of someone's chosen final memory, their greatest happiness. the ultimate compliment.
My transparent bus pass twinkled in the light.
memories… why do we trust them?
they have a quality unlike any other to transport us, to envelope our minds within another reality and place in time. we can shift between personas, ideas, perceptions all with the quick flicker of a roll of film that lies in our minds, maintaining everything from our pasts within them.
the problem with memories is that we can become whoever we wish to become with them. i know that they can be beautiful, i know that they can offer us peace, but they can also be dangerous. they can make us think of ourselves in derogatory ways, in terms with which have no correlation to reality. …
After Life is my absolute least favorite movie from Hirokazu Koreeda by a long long mile. When it comes to ambitious premise with a relatively stripped-down budget, you either get Alphaville, or Dogville, and After Life is for sure stuck in the limbo state, as every single character is in the movie.
With a premise as intriguing as it's supernatural, After Life is oddly naturalistic in its approaches to present the supposedly quirky ghost world, with a large portion of the runtime being amateur performers taking about their personal stories a la interview style. It's objectively mind-numbing to sit through a bunch of deceased individuals' life stories when most of them are not charismatic enough to carry the narrative forward…
this is my 1,000th review on here so let me explore a thought real quick…
do you ever think about how infused film & art become with our lives? i vaguely remember a time when i believed they were supposed to be kept separate, something you could make small talk about but not something you were meant to carry with you like it was a part of you. but it is a part of me. and i’ve sent people paragraphs on jeff bridges’ posture in a film and ran up stairs parallel to an escalator my friend was on, talking with my hands about a film i just came out of and i’ve been endlessly annoying about films i’ve had to…
At the time I searched desperately, inside myself, for any memory of happiness. Now, fifty years later, I learned I was part of someone else's happiness. What a wonderful discovery.
I’m a recent uni grad. Your typical post-grad thrust into a highly competitive job market with little-to-no turning point on the horizon, funnily enough. Hardly a particularly unique woe, granted. But if there’s one thing that would make times more personally palatable when wading that foggy limbo between academia and adulthood, it’s to go through it amongst good people. And the real crime of my student days coming to a close isn’t that I may have to send in an extra dozen applications, it’s that I’m no longer around those very people I’ve become inseparable from. Even if we turn a blind eye to this whole global pandemic thing, the odds of getting all the gang back together for as…
