On DVD: "Departures" and "The Unloved"

Given the American Academy’s spotty record when it comes to picking the Best Foreign Language Film, eyebrows were understandably raised at last year’s Oscars when unknown Japanese entry Departures triumphed over the likes of Waltz with Bashir and The Class. Did the voters get it right? If I say maybe, that’s only to underline the esteem in which I hold the other nominees: while Takita Yôjirô’s drama can’t claim to be as contemporary or incendiary as its rivals, it stands as every bit as human, if not more so. You reach the end credits with an urgent need to ring your parents, or hug your children.

Yôjirô’s protagonist, cellist Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Matoki), has retreated to his hometown after his orchestra is disbanded due to falling audiences. Answering a situations-vacant looking for someone to “assist with departures”, Daigo thinks he’s getting into the travel business; the opening, however, is for a trainee mortician. The musician brings discipline and nimble fingers to the position, gaining a new-found appreciation of life in return: he’s suddenly unable to look at the chopped chicken his wife sets down for dinner, and - conversely - finds himself transfixed by the sight of salmon swimming upstream.

Not for the first time, a Japanese film is steeped in ritual: in this case, that of nokanshi, the art of cleansing and redressing corpses, as performed “live” before the funeral party. Sometimes this ceremony is cathartic, reducing one stern-faced husband to tears; sometimes it’s tragicomic, as when Daigo discovers the young woman in front of him is, anatomically at least, male. The film stresses its hero’s politeness and formality, but never quite lapses into conservatism: it grasps how susceptible we are to change, even as it sets out how connected we remain to the people around us.

Cynics might say Departures typifies the Academy’s tendency to laud films its constituents could imagine themselves making (or remaking) over anything truly challenging. Yet the considerable emotional pull here resides not in Yôjirô’s grandiose flourishes - one montage shows Daigo fiddling away on a mountaintop, like an extra in a BA commercial - but in its quiet compilation of warm, intimate, recognisable moments: a son setting down his cello in his absent father’s spike marks, say, or a husband trying to creep out to work on a winter’s morning without waking his wife - only for the latter to get up anyway, just to see him off.


Samantha Morton's directorial debut The Unloved - screened on Channel 4 in January 2009, and now taking a DVD bow after a theatrical run at the ICA earlier this year - is a haunting, semi-autobiographical account of life in the care system, and the tragedy of one broken home. Events are viewed from the perspective of 11-year-old Lucy (Molly Windsor), a quiet, introverted girl whom we first see being violently abused by her father (Robert Carlyle). Removed by the authorities after a school social worker discovers her physical scars, Lucy is thrown into the fractious, bewildering chaos of a Nottingham care home. A guide of sorts emerges in the form of Lauren (Lauren Socha), but though this surrogate big sister is convinced she has all the answers, it's Lucy who spots there's something amiss about Lauren's relationship with one of the carers.

We'd perhaps expect an intuitive intelligence such as Morton to be good with actors, and in this, she's chosen her recruits from Nottingham's The Television Workshop wisely indeed: she gets a heartbreaking performance from Windsor, who displays much the same spacey fragility as her director in her younger days; a hilariously tough and real-seeming turn from Socha; and a just plain hilarious one from Christopher Russell as the girls' housemate Connor, an irrepressible ginger tyke forever finding some new form of mischief with which to keep himself occupied.

Less expected - and here's where The Unloved reveals itself as more than mere television - is the attention given to the look, and the emotional textures, of the film. Morton's model appears to be the charged, subjective, sometimes magical realism of her Morvern Callar director Lynne Ramsay: the film's sense-memory knows what it is as a young girl to ride the top deck of a double-decker bus, to lie on hallway carpets staring up at the ceiling, to explore one's hometown at dawn, before anybody else has got up, or had the chance to notice someone's gone missing.

The imagery can seem forced or inorganic - Fish Tank's vision of kids slumped in front of My Super Sweet 16 feels more instantly credible than the sight of Lauren and Lucy snuggling up to watch L'Atalante - but there's a wealth of directorial patience and sensitivity to be discovered here; Morton has a particular way with rooms that don't seem empty so much as devoid of love. Compared to the raw, rough-edged, punchily instinctual Precious, with which it came to share listings space back in January, The Unloved's treatment of its abused heroine is altogether considered and poetic, but it's no less compassionate for that: few films have so successfully evoked the places victims of abuse go with their feet and in their heads.

Departures and The Unloved are available on DVD now.