The Funeral: At a Loss

Foreign friends are routinely surprised, on arriving in Japan, to learn that there are completely separate words (tatemae and honne) for the self you’re expected to be in public and the one that exists behind closed doors. And, of course, at a funeral, when the most private emotions are suddenly thrown open to the world, it’s not hard to end up caught in the middle. For someone with Itami’s irreverent spirit, a wake is the perfect chance to see people struggle to express dignified and proper emotions when they’re not feeling dignified at all. They know what they’re meant to say, but they’re always fluffing their lines. The Funeral delights in the dissonance: an associate dressed in a jaunty summer hat and pointing his Scoopic 16 mm camera at a sleeping Wabisuke promises to do anything to help; relatives offer condolences on bended knee only after bustling in amid concerned inquiries of “You brought the cat?”

Put differently, this is not the world of Yasujiro Ozu, the restrained and often melancholy filmmaker of a generation before; in Ozu, even a wedding may feature the sorrowful exchanges and dark suits of a funeral. When, in Itami’s film, the mysterious Yoshiko (Haruna Takase) looks out to sea, much as in a central scene after an elder’s death in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, and intones, “The day will turn into night,” it comes across in context as something close to nonsense. For those familiar with Ozu’s work, there’s a particular delight in seeing Chishu Ryu, an actor he worked with on almost all of his fifty-four films, suddenly appear in the second half of The Funeral. But while in Ozu he frequently plays a father who is poignantly bewildered by the younger generation, here he’s a worldly priest stepping out of a white Rolls-Royce and receiving extra payment in the form of a gaudy modern table.

The Funeral sparkles with such Western touches, as if the first-time (English-fluent) filmmaker is gleefully announcing his distance from the Ozu style of old, as every one of his loud imported flourishes clashes with traditional Japanese propriety. The mailboxes in this leafy town, the rock and roll blasting out of a car radio, the undertaker dressed in beret and shades (long after dark)—the sandwiches!—all speak for an American-inflected Japan at comical odds with the country’s classical obsequies. So, too, do the bold colors and sometimes melodramatic score: we’ve hardly entered the movie before we’re seeing an avocado in graphic close-up and being introduced to music worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. As the brother of the deceased, Shokichi (Hideji Otaki), recites part of the pitiless Heart Sutra—“Gone, gone, gone to the other shore . . .”—two kids cavort around the room and a cat stretches and claws at the tatami.

The distance between what we say and what we feel has always been a reliable source of humor, from as far back as Molière and Giovanni Boccaccio. That The Funeral’s main couple are professional actors only serves to underscore this gulf. At the beginning of the film, Wabisuke and Chizuko are appearing in a frothy TV commercial, exactly as Itami and Miyamoto once did together. “Look how easy it can be to create a heartwarming work of art,” trills the jingle in the ad, just before news of the death of Chizuko’s father arrives; soon we’re noticing how Chizuko is sporting a new look in every scene, as if life itself is just a series of roles. Again and again, Itami punctures the high seriousness of the setting with zestily broad strokes, informing us early on that the departed was in fact once a brothel owner, and on occasion showing us grieving mourners from the point of view of the corpse.

“Itami’s achievement is to bring two very different moods together, just as a funeral often manages to do.”

For me, though, what looks to be gleeful and antic mockery suddenly acquires another dimension, becomes something more than just guffawing entertainment, near the film’s midpoint, when out of nowhere we get a four-minute black-and-white home movie that sets sonorous Bach against a wealth of all-too-human details. Chizuko in curlers; price tags on the prayer beads; that cat again, sniffing at the flowers—all of this, caught by that colleague of Wabisuke’s with the 16 mm camera, brings us real life as no TV commercial or posed photo could ever do.

Knockabout scenes continue—Wabisuke will lose his trousers, and much of his assumed dignity, and revelers show no eagerness to say goodbye to bottles of free sake—but these moments rub against something more visceral, even primal, which gradually begins to complicate our responses and, rather wonderfully, leaves us, like the characters, ever more uncertain how to respond.

This is what funerals mean, at heart, in every culture and era: We want to be bright and positive even as we sometimes long to cry. We call a memorial a “celebration of life” and then wonder how much we should whitewash the loss. None of us knows what to say to the bereft, and, very often, whatever our intentions, everything we say turns out to be the wrong thing. My own mother died in California a few months ago, and several of us had to balance the sense of release we felt—at last she was out of her pain (and we freed from our anxieties about her)—against the very real sadness that we also felt. Every response seemed wrong because only partial.

Itami’s achievement is to bring two very different moods together, just as a funeral often manages to do. The helter-skelter action of a slapstick comedy seeps into the openhearted plainspokenness of an Ozu movie. It helps, perhaps, to know Japan a little to see all the ways in which he isn’t exaggerating or taking poetic license; the film was a local sensation, claiming five Japanese Academy Awards, and much more beloved here than his work of the next year, Tampopo, which won him a following in the West. But in the end, what he’s giving us is universal as last breath. We all feel like actors at a funeral, at once eager to say the right thing and aware that we can never give voice to the unspeakable. Determined to remain true to something real, yet committed to not bruising the already wide-open sensitivities of the mourning. Often, as in The Funeral, we end up being jaunty and faux-solemn in startlingly quick succession, pricking the very gravitas we long so much to honor.

What I most enjoy is how the film, near its end, gives us nothing to hang on to, as it follows the lurches of real life into one surprise after another. Adults at a cremation follow the prompt of kids, and suddenly they’re actually seeing the body of an old man burn, through a glitch, and getting a jolting reminder of their own mortality. Money literally flies away—as it has been doing metaphorically throughout—and mourners in distinguished formal dress grab at it the way celebrants at a Western wedding might reach for a bouquet. Now and then, the camera catches Chizuko watching everything with a penetrating calm that suggests she sees much more than we may have originally suspected.

Tragedy and comedy end up as inseparable as the old husband and wife we met at the beginning of the film. The minute piety cracks open, we encounter something much more deserving of devotion. And in the very last scene, with Wabisuke, Chizuko, and Kikue returned to their informal clothes as if brought back to life—the mother herself looked, in the film’s opening shot, as motionless as a corpse—we realize that we don’t know how much to celebrate and how much, almost despite ourselves, to mourn.