After Life (film)

A small, mid-20th century social-service-style structure is a way station between life and death. Every Monday, a group of recently deceased people check-in: the social workers in the lodge ask them to go back over their life and choose one single memory to take into the afterlife. They are given just a couple of days to identify their happiest memory, after which the workers design, stage and film them. In this way, the souls will be able to re-experience this moment for eternity, forgetting the rest of their life.

Twenty-two souls of different ages and backgrounds arrive and are received by the counsellors, who explain them their situation. Lengthy interviews take place in the lodge, with each person having different perspectives of their lives, some being more reluctant in indicating a significant memory.

The story pays most attention to the two younger counsellors, Takashi and Shiori. Takashi has been assigned to help an old man, Ichiro Watanabe, pick a significant memory in his ordinary life. Reviewing the videotapes of Mr Watanabe's life, Takashi discovers that the old man had married his former fiancée, Kyoko, after Takashi had been killed during World War II while he was 22. Takashi has Watanabe assigned to another counsellor but is still troubled by his memories, causing both him and Shiori to re-examine their lives.

Near the end of the week, Mr Watanabe decides which memory to keep. Takashi reveals to him that all the counsellors staying in the lodge are souls who refused or were unable to choose a memory. On Saturday, the hosted souls watch the films of their recreated memories in a screening room and, as soon as each person sees their own, they vanish.

Takashi, after talking Shiori about his life and watching his fiancée's selected memory from the archive, eventually decides to have his sliver of life filmed and abandon the way station forever.

Kore-eda conceived the film from a childhood experience he had with his grandfather, who suffered from a neurodegenerative disease in a time this kind of syndromes were yet not well known. Remembering his gradual loss of memory, which led him not to recognize the faces of his relatives and eventually his own, he commented that "I comprehended little of what I saw, but I remember thinking that people forgot everything when they died. I now understand how critical memories are to our identity, to a sense of self".[6]

In the development phase of the script, the director interviewed more than five hundred people from disparate social backgrounds, asking them to tell him about their memories and choose the single one they would keep. Kore-eda was "intrigued by how often people chose upsetting experiences". The film alternates real footage of these interviews with acting, some based on improvisation, some on a specific script;[6] the interviews were shot on 16 mm film stock by Yutaka Yamazaki, a recognized documentary cinematographer.[7] With this method, Kore-eda combined documentary with a fictional narrative.

In the film, memories themselves are altered by people when they recall them and are subjectively revised, enhanced and reinterpreted when they are staged and recreated.[8][9] About this ambiguous, fleeting nature of memory, Kore-eda reflects:

I saw that human emotions are the sparks that fly when "truth" and "fiction" collide. In this film, I wanted to explore the consequences of such collision by investigating the uncertain area between "objective record" and "recollection". Although the memories in After Life are presented as real experiences that are later reconstructed as film, you can't really distinguish the stories characters tell as "truth" and the recreations as "fiction". They intertwine with great complexity. Our memories are not fixed or static. They are dynamic, reflecting selves that are constantly changing. So the act of remembering, of looking back at the past, is by no means redundant or negative. Rather, it challenges us to evolve and mature.

For the memory sequences, shot both in colour and black and white on a mixture of 8 mm and 16 mm film, Kore-eda involved the still photographer Masayoshi Sukita (best known at the time for his work on the set of Mystery Train).[10]

After Life received positive reviews. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 29 reviews, with an average rating of 7.21/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "After Life is an offbeat and tender exploration of memory, love, and life after death".[11] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 91 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[12]

On AllMovie, Keith Phipps talks about the film as "a peculiar and uniquely moving examination of life after death", observing how "almost incidentally [it] serves as a meditation on filmmaking".[13] "Its unhurried pace and lack of melodrama, like its subject, may linger in the memory long afterwards", adds Jonathan Crow in the same review.[9]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, describing After Life as "a film that reaches out gently to the audience" and concluding that Kore-eda, with this and his previous film Maborosi, "has earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema".[14]

• After Life at IMDb
• After Life at AllMovie
• After Life at Box Office Mojo
• After Life at Metacritic
• Wandâfuru raifu at Rotten Tomatoes
• "ワンダフルライフ (Wandafuru Raifu)" (in Japanese). Japanese Movie Database. Archived from the original on 20 August 2007. Retrieved 19 July 2007.
• Film-series' speech by James Bowman