1125 The Funeral

[DarkImbecile]

The Funeral



It’s death, Japanese style, in the rollicking and wistful first feature from maverick writer-director Juzo Itami. In the wake of her father’s sudden passing, a successful actor (Itami’s wife and frequent collaborator, Nobuko Miyamoto) and her lascivious husband (Tsutomu Yamazaki) leave Tokyo and return to her family home to oversee a traditional funeral. Over the course of three days of mourning that bring illicit escapades in the woods, a surprisingly materialistic priest (Chishu Ryu), and cinema’s most epic sandwich handoff, the tensions between public propriety and private hypocrisy are laid bare. Deftly weaving dark comedy with poignant family drama, The Funeral is a fearless satire of the clash between old and new in Japanese society in which nothing, not even the finality of death, is off-limits.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• High-definition restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interviews with actors Nobuko Miyamoto and Manpei Ikeuchi
• Creative Marriages: Juzo Itami & Nobuko Miyamoto, a short program produced by the Criterion Channel
• Commercials for Ichiroku Tart by director Juzo Itami
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
  PLUS: An essay by author Pico Iyer and, for the Blu-ray, excerpts from Itami’s 1985 book Diary of “The Funeral” and from a 2007 remembrance of Itami by actor Tsutomu Yamazaki

[colinr0380]

Fantastic news! This is a wonderful film that whilst a bit too wryly comic to be entirely Ozu-like works as a nice through line to Kore-eda's later works (I'm particularly thinking of something like Our Little Sister) as an ensemble piece about a family being forced to have to gather together in order to perform all the necessary rituals that go into saying goodbye to their father. There are some great scenes here such as the opening 'perfect way to die if one has to' death scene, to all the business surrounding the coffin and everyone curiously peeking inside the furnace, to the need to wrangle all the family members together into one place for more than a minute at a time! Or to remember the lines of one's speech! Plus all the kids running around without entirely taking in the gravity of the situation!

I also like the way that Criterion's write up alludes to the film's alternate international English title that it was released under (certainly in the UK) of Death - Japanese Style. This was also the film that aired on UK's Channel 4 television as the representative example of Japanese cinema after they aired Nagisa Oshima's 100 Years of Japanese Cinema BFI documentary back in 1996.

This is not my absolute favourite Juzo Itami film (that would be 1992's Minbo no onna/Anti-Extortion Woman which brilliantly balances comedy and deeply serious topics, and is much more about the major Itami theme - as major as food! - of power structures within organisations and how it affects people working in them, or working out how to make it work for them), but it comes really close!

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

This one is an incredibly pleasant surprise. As Itami's first feature, I'm surprised to see this get released before A Taxing Woman or Minbo as it's less comedic that those films. The humor in those is often broad and cartoony, but this one is more sedate and elliptical in style. This is dryer and often somber while finding a bit of absurdity in the whole process. It's not indicative of Itami's typical style, but it's a lovely film nonetheless.

[Michael Kerpan]

Looking forward to this very much!

[movielocke]

they're listing this as 1.33, was this originally a TV movie?

[colinr0380]

It's 1.85:1 on imdb, but maybe that is just an error.

The Elegant Dandy Fop makes a good point about The Funeral being a little bit unrepresentative of Itami's later works. I think it is a great example of a first film laying out a whole host of different avenues that the filmmaker could potentially have gone down, from Ozu-like serious family drama to social satire and so on, and that makes it all the more enjoyable to watch and note some of the strands of drama-leavening comedy that take place here as being the aspect that Itami would most gravitate towards out of all of them to create a distinctive style.

The comedy gets heightened more later on (I would perhaps say manga-esque), especially in the "Onna" films and Nobuko Miyamoto is unquestionably the centre of the action in most of them, but even there it never entirely undercuts the serious topics being dealt with. Something like Minbo no onna balances this most amusingly with its hapless hotel bellboys, who are already having trouble with the jobs they have, being forced into having to become specialists in the dirty job of dealing with the yakuza by their Hotel Manager but with the secret weapon of Miyamoto's specialist backing them up and teaching them ways of facing down and dealing with the intimidation tactics the yakuza deploy. Which plays out relatively lightly and comically until Miyamoto's character is stabbed and the bellboys have to try and put the knowledge she has given them into practice without her, and rally the rest of the previously cowering hotel staff (including the Manager!) behind them to face down the thugs with the utmost politeness yet total organisational solidarity that has previously been lacking.

(And of course there is the behind the scenes speculation that this relatively comic film countering tough subject matter through levity apparently incensed the yakuza so much due to how it gives handy step by step guides on how to deal with their behaviour that it may have factored into the somewhat suspicious circumstances of Itami's suicide a few years later)

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I rewatched this via a Japanese Blu-ray about two years ago and recall it being 1.33. I know this was an Art Theater Guild release, which often released films in that aspect ratio. I just picked up the new restoration of Kon Ichikawa’s The Inugami Family which is also 1.33. I never gave it much thought, but I’ve encountered this aspect ratio for post-60s Japanese films numerous times. It’s been years since I did any research about it, but I thought the aspect ratio being typically 1.33 for Art Theater Guild productions mostly had to do with their limited budget (Oshima’s The Ceremony being an exception), but The Inugami Family is a Toho production. Anyone have insight into why this was a popular aspect ratio? House is another Japanese film of the era with the same frame.

[L.A.]

Beaver.

[ryannichols7]

sorry I have to clash with colinr (who's thoughts I always enjoy reading) but I didn't enjoy this movie! in fact I'm genuinely surprised Criterion gave this such a solid little edition - on Tanpopo I thought the supplements were better than the movie, but the movie is solid enough there and it's also pretty popular so that made sense. I didn't expect the nice treatment here, as this ultimately feels like a film that should be buried in an 11 film "complete works" boxset (hint hint)

I am honestly surprised this has a solid range of appeal as I feel like it reaches to take aim at a lot of standards of Japanese society that need a good bit of context to even be remotely funny...and I think it isn't funny. some of the hardest movies to watch are comedies where none of the jokes land, and that's how this one was for me. it doesn't have to necessarily be funny, but I didn't find it to be profound or enlightening about death, family values, or anything of the sort either. I haven't been checking the runtime like this in awhile...my issues with Tanpopo were that there were too many deviations from the (hilarious, excellent) main story, whereas here I longed for deviations from the main story. but no, (and sorry Colin, since you liked these scenes) the death scene takes too long, looking for a priest takes too long, making arrangements takes too long, you get my drift.

it's an insult to me that this gets compared to Ozu, but I guess people think any Japanese movie that doesn't have swords or bloodshed is like Ozu. at least Ozu's films are really funny, I laughed hard once at this movie, and it's ironically the scene early in the movie where Ozu gets lampooned! and a really nice surprise was:

SpoilerShow

the sex scene, which was out of nowhere and honestly great. made up for all the gross ones in Tanpopo and was honestly very realistic and accurate feeling

impressive edition from the big C though like I said - an actual booklet! phenomenal stuff too, more booklets like that please..

[colinr0380]

No hard feelings, Ryan. If we all agreed on everything the world would be a much less interesting place! I would agree that maybe the Ozu comparisons in marketing can create certain huge expectations that can end up backfiring, it even feels worrying to have Kore-eda compared that way, at least until recently when he seems to have been able to break through that conceptual comparison barrier which seemed to occur in the US as late as with Shoplifters.