MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Funeral’: Celebrating Life, Not Death

Don’t be put off by the title of “The Funeral” (at the Century City 14), for it is the wise, compassionate and slyly amusing debut film of Juzo Itami, writer-director of the phenomenally popular “Tampopo.” Like “Tampopo,” “The Funeral” stars Itami’s actress-wife Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki and has a truly universal appeal; you don’t have to be an aficionado of the Japanese cinema to enjoy it thoroughly. You don’t even have to like sushi.

Jean Renoir would have loved this film, for Itami shares with him an impassioned yet clear-eyed embrace of the human comedy and the gift for expressing all its strengths and foibles in the most inspired, revealing and subtle ways. Despite its title, “The Funeral” brims over with vitality. A triumph of the telling detail, “The Funeral,” for all its sharpness, is much more than satire.

An elderly man, Shinkichi Amamiya (Koen Okumura), arrives home from Tokyo to his condominium in the country, presents his wife Kikue (Kin Sugai) with an unusually generous array of groceries for dinner, enjoys her meal and tells her that his doctor pronounced him in fine health. He announces that he wants to live to be 120 and have a teen-aged mistress--”Anything you say,” his wife replies absently--and he keels over in a heart attack that will prove to be fatal.

Itami has said that the inspiration for his film was the death of his own father-in-law. In the unfolding of the traditionally elaborate Buddhist funeral, with its seemingly endless pomp and ceremony spanning several days, he perceived the perfect opportunity to create a highly contemporary social comedy. Yet the enacting of this ritual doesn’t merely reveal it to be largely meaningless in today’s world. It also shows the ways in which such events, for all their artifice, actually can bring families closer together. Itami is by no means trying to be Japan’s Jessica Mitford, for all the excesses he skewers.

“The Funeral” spans the three days that the ceremony and its preparations require, which provides Itami with a completely natural and sturdy three-act structure. Taking charge is the deceased’s daughter Chizuko (Nobuko Miyamoto) and her husband Wabisuke (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who are well-known actors. The humor that soon develops is possible because Chizuko’s father is not the object of overwhelming grief--he had lived a normal life span, and he wasn’t such a nice guy in the first place. In the aftermath of World War II he had survived by operating a brothel, whose running he left largely to his wife while he “tasted the merchandise.”

Consequently, you find yourself starting to smile when the bereaved, which soon will include a small army of friends, relatives and neighbors, struggle to carry in the rain Shinkichi’s white-damask-covered coffin up the outside staircase to his small, rustic apartment. Despite the presence of a funeral director, there is much confusion and uncertainty over customs--e.g., which direction is the deceased’s head supposed to point? And which way is north, anyway?

One of Itami’s key comments is that all these traditions are more than half-forgotten by the ordinary Japanese; indeed, eventually, Chizuko and Wabisuke will have recourse to an instructional video, “The ABCs of the Funeral.” You can’t get much more Japanese than that. Yet “The Funeral” is one of the few Japanese films that doesn’t lament the passing of empty traditions, which only serve to inhibit the expression of genuine feelings.

While Itami respects the resilient widow’s grief, he successfully risks the outrageous and even the crass. He creates a classic ribald sequence with the unexpected arrival of Wabisuke’s plump mistress (Haruna Takase), who passes herself off as the funeral director’s assistant and who promptly gets drunk and amorous. There’s an earthy scene in the woods with Wabisuke and his lover which is intercut with the unknowing Chizuko standing on a swaying, highly phallic log swing.

Yamazaki, who looks very Gregory Peck in this film, and Miyamoto are as amusing and natural as they are in “Tampopo,” and Sugai is wonderful as a strong, sensible woman whose unscheduled and moving speech of gratitude represents the most authentic emotion expressed in the entire film. The ubiquitous veteran Shuji Otaki has one of his biggest roles in recent years as the deceased’s brother, a conglomerate tycoon who of course tries to run things. That other great veteran, Chishu Ryu, is the priest who arrives in a white Rolls and cons Wabisuke out of some clearly expensive French tiles as part of his reward for his services.

“The Funeral” is as audacious in style as in its views. Itami and his cameraman Yonezo Maeda bring to the film a constant sense of freshness and spontaneity--in some instances they even shoot from the corpse’s point of view, lying in the coffin. There’s also a lovely home movie, shot in black and white by Shinpei Asai, that captures a true sense of family warmth so suppressed in the rigid, protracted enactment of the rituals. “The Funeral” (Times-rated: Mature) is finally a film in splendid celebration of life, not death.