Daigo is shocked when his Tokyo-based orchestra, in which he plays cello, dissolve. He’s quite shocked, apparently unaware of the empty houses he was playing to. (Images 2, 3, 4) He returns home and confesses his joblessness to his wife Mika, who smiles and accommodates with glee. Tells him he’ll find another job. Then, when Daigo confesses that he hasn’t paid off the 75 Million Yen he spent on his cello (that’s nearly $200,000), the chipper Mika is thrown for a moment – just a moment – and then skips away to make dinner.

The couple pawns the cello and moves to Yamagata, to the house of Daigo’s late mother. Why they didn’t simply sell the house to pay for the cello, or simply to stay in the city, is not explained. Mika is overjoyed to live in the unkempt family home, which doubled as a coffeehouse and bar in the past, and prances about town collecting fresh ingredients for dinners.

Daigo is instantly hired as an “encoffiner,” someone who prepares a corpse before burial. He works for the fatherly Ikuei at the NK Agency, and learns what his true calling is. The rest of the plot hinges around the shameful nature of the career, and Daigo’s efforts to keep his job a secret from his friends and wife. But we already know fro m the first scenes that his wife is supportive and unnaturally cheerful, and that Daigo isn’t good at anything else, so it’s easy to guess how the story wraps up.

The film is 130 minutes long, and could easily be trimmed to 90. Most of what could be cut is in the final third, which is soporific. The main narrative question – how will Mika react when she finds out about Daigo’s job – is already solved, and we get a third of the film which is simply soporific resolution.

Diago is a fool. His wife Mika is a fool. They have foolish sentiments and empty souls. You would think that a job like preparing the dead would force Diago to contemplate some deeper issues: what happens when you die, what is the purpose of life, how can I find meaning when all ends in death? But no. We instead get dialogue like this: “It’s funny how fate works. You never know where you’ll end up.”

The character of Ikuei as the mentor figure was, as needed, less of a fool. Still, he didn’t have much insight either. He muses while chewing on seafood, “The living eat the dead. Unless they’re plants.”

Lots of swooping, melodramatic, unnecessary camera moves. The compositions are along the line of BBC melodramas of the 1980s. There are many shots and scenes completely unmotivated by the story, and these tend to be the most visually appealing of the film, but they aren’t aesthetically-pronounced enough to inspire an emotional reaction. (Image 9).

There are several poorly executed montages in the film, including the one that the film’s signature i mage comes from: Diago playing his cello in a green meadow. (Image 8) Why is he there? Who is he playing for? It’s just a random, swooping shot in a montage with no further significance.

A slow motion effect is added to one shot of a rock falling after filming, and feels tacky to me, especially as it is used at what is supposed to be a “heartbreaking” moment. But if the filmmaker knew this was an important moment, whey didn’t he shoot it in slow motion to begin with? Well, because he didn’t have the foresight.

And for a film about a cellist, he plays only one tune throughout – although every time he “plays” we hear other instruments accompanying him on the soundtrack, even though he is always shown alone. Again, I just find this tacky.

None! There’s nothing original or groundbreaking or noteworthy about Departures. There are no special effects. There are a few corpses, but these don’t feel like dead bodies, not in the way corpses felt like corpses in other films or series.