I owe an apology to Elliott Smith fans. This morning I discovered that Pullquote has received a fair number of hits since his death because search engines returned my snarky post about celebrity deaths coming in threes. Grieving fans from as far away as Sweden, searching for succor, misspelled Smith's first name [all those "l"s and "t"s] the same way I had [bad, ashamed editor] and got my smartassed throwaway for their trouble.
It's kind of amazing that I never got into Smith's music, given that my all-time favorite genre is hyperliterate sad-bastard music. Something about the whispered sussurration of Smith's vocal delivery failed to connect with me. It happens. A sad song can make heartache majestic and loneliness ennobling. Even wallowing in self-pity can be transcendent with the right soundtrack. I played fast and facile last week with Smith's fans' feelings. I'm sorry.
To make amends, I want to recommend Kore-Eda Hirokazu's 1998 film After Life [Wandafuru raifu]. This beautiful little movie asks, What is the one memory you would take with you when you die?
Each week, people arrive at a strange municipal building, perhaps a small turn-of-the-century school, and are assigned to a counselor. With the counselor's help, each person must select a single memory, which will become the heaven that person will inhabit forever. Because, you see, everyone here is dead. After a week in this way station, the deceased gather in a small screening room, where they watch short films the staff has made of each person's memory. Once a person's memory has screened, he or she disappears into it for eternity.
The director's inspiration for the film came from his memories of his grandfather's descent into senility. The young Kore-Eda thought that growing old and dying meant losing your memories. Coming from a background in documentary, he set about asking 500 people to select one memory from their lives. Actors were shot on 16 mm. recounting these memories to the counselors. The memory movies were then filmed in beautiful 35 mm.
After Life is an incredibly comforting meditation on life, memory, and death. It's like the songs that stay with you: I find it difficult to do it justice in words.
The look and feel of the film itself is refreshingly matter-of-fact given its heavy subject matter. Those interviewed are extraordinary only in their normalcy: One teen-age girl initially picks a trip to Disneyland as her memory. She is the thirtieth teen girl to do so that year.
Scenes of the counselors describing their progress with this week's caseload are marked by petit bureaucracy. Antagonisms and rivalries are rehearsed with cozy familiarity and affection. The characters move through spare, shabby rooms dominated by large, old-fashioned radiators, and the tiles in the baths are cracked. Even the special effects for the memory movies are touchingly low-tech. Cotton-batting clouds are reeled past on clear fishing wire.
Yet somehow it all works and leaves you with a catch in your throat. Transcendence comes in the embrace of the ordinary, as the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the memories gathers weight and heft in the retelling. Outside, the mournful, slushy snow glows bluish white, but we are assured that the cherry trees blossom each spring.
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
