カオルの葬式 「Kaoru no Soshiki」
Release Date: 2024
Duration: 100 mins.
Director: Noriko Yuasa
Writer: Takato Nishi, Noriko Yuasa (Screenplay),
Starring: Koji Seki, Kano Ichiki, Chise Niitsu, Asuka Kurosawa, Daijiro Harada, Tomomitsu Adachi,
In life, you can never truly know another person. That same notion applies even more in death and once a person is gone, there is definitely no way of getting any further details. While there are funerals, it can be said they reduce a person to less than the sum of their parts to get the goodbyes over with quickly since the living still have lives to get back to.
Playing with this dynamic of the mysteries and memories of individuals is Noriko Yuasa with her sophomore feature Performing KAORU’s Funeral. It won the Japan Cuts Award at the Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024 for its story of friends, family, foes, and Kaoru’s failure of an ex-husband gathering to say their final farewells while their reminisces introduce us to the complexities of the title character.
Kaoru (Kano Ichiki) was a screenwriter in Tokyo before a tragic accident one summer night cut her life short. Her funeral takes place in the rural village in Okayama she hailed from and we see the ceremony from the perspective of the chief mourner, her ex-husband, Jun Yokotani (Koji Seki).
Jun is a man drowning in indignity. A failed actor, he drifts around Tokyo working as a driver for call girls. The extent of his fall is telegraphed visually as soon as he arrives at the funeral home, via public transport and bearing cuts and bruises earned while on the job. He is surrounded by Kaoru’s cynical daughter (Chise Niitsu), still reeling from the death of her mother and trying to understand why people die, and TV people, all of whom were chauffeured in and displaying fine funeral attire and varying degrees of success.
“Nobody really knows the feelings of someone who passes away”, a funeral director opines midway through the event, and it is a general truism but with this film and its colourful array of people from different walks of life, we get a glimpse of Kaoru through the way their petty jealousies, shames, rivalries, and profound loves come out over the course of a few days in the run-up to performing Kaoru’s funeral.
The adeptness that Yuasa deals out this story with her cast and crew is impressive. After blazing the screen with colourful, confident, and evocative shorts like Ordinary Everyday (2017), her latest work is the surest sign yet that she is a master visual storyteller as she collaborates with DoP Victor Català to capture the undeniable charm of her settings. With rich colours evident in both the bucolic Okayama setting and neon night-time/daytime dull urban sprawl Tokyo, we get a real sense of atmosphere to places. With these backdrops, we glimpse the many aspects of Kaoru and this is where Yuasa’s supple editing, done with help from Marc Mitjà Viader, serves to mainline information and emotion with nimbleness.
It starts as we get the different perspectives of Kaoru from mourners. Writer, mother, lover, daughter of Okayama. Her childhood is established through zippy dialogue, shot back and forth between lively characters at the funeral home before real glimpses of the woman are delivered through frequent flashback sequences that illustrate her in various roles in a “show, don’t tell” way. While we understand that, sadly, each character has their fixed ideas of the departed, their separate views stack together to give the omniscient audience a better sense of Kaoru.
The pace with which Kaoru’s story comes at the audience is rapid, a sense felt from both the propulsive drum-based musical score and the short duration of frequently used flashbacks that the present-tense narrative dances between. The action also always feels like it is concisely delivered, as if Yuasa trusts us to understand the context and cuts away the fat by continually cutting right into the dramatic highs of a scene and focussing on strong displays of recognisable emotions (love, hate, jealousy, creative ordeals). This is delivered by a cast working in perfect synchronisation at a highly theatrical register so their characters, no matter how briefly sketched, make an impact with vivid displays of passion.
This passion arrives via framing of scenes and blocking as active and fun as that found in a Hal Hartley film and so this visual movement adds to the film’s sense of kineticism, particularly when combined by the fact that their performances frequently evoke laughter and second-hand embarrassment at the sight of kids gambolling around funeral grounds, drunkenness at gatherings, and middle-aged men fighting while women fuss about and chastise all around and keep family/community legends alive that adds depth to the world alongside talk of TV deals.
The way this is all achieved is with such visual alacrity, colour, and energy that it dazzles in ways that much bigger budgeted movies, that are often ploddingly novelistic, fail to do and so it is exciting to watch but always, at its heart is Kaoru and a sense poignancy is continuously piqued through the sights of the efforts that she put into living life.
Even though we get glimpses of her and the film never stoops to exposition to explicitly tell us who she was, she feels like a real person by the end. I came away with an immense respect for her through enjoying the scenes creativity and her unbridled joie de vivre she displays as she remains committed to her dream – to the extent that she shouts it out on city streets after drunken post-play gatherings in her theatre days or when she jumps up during sex to write down ideas in her “eureka” moment. This humanised her as the creative spark is evident but it was also matched with moments of determination, such as the way she cares for her daughter and tries to make motherhood work in the creative industry and in physically demanding jobs, to acknowledge the hard grind needed to advance in life.
Undergirding this portrait of an ambitious and talented individual is a subtext of the impositions placed on women by society. Various motifs concerning this theme are organically interwoven into her struggle and send-off: sights of maintaining a family as a single mother, the viperish vituperative of women driven to cynicism through enduring the same struggle, the oafish comments of older men looking down on women for not conforming. These motifs of social approbation form a stream of social commentary that is successfully synergised in Kaoru’s personal journey and channelled into coming out amidst the theatrical nature of the funeral.
This is all delivered with such energy and force and style that it means that while Yuasa has taken the tried-and-tested funeral genre of films – just think of Juzo Itami’s The Funeral (1984) and Yojira Tokita’s Departures (2008) – she has made it uniquely her own by imbuing it with a thrilling dynamic energy and given it even more depth beyond saccharine portrayals of finding catharsis in family drama or cynical comedy takedown’s of bourgeoisie ideals typically found in the genre as she successfully explores the idea of how we remember a person and broaching wider social issues.
Thus, crucially, while Performing KAORU’s Funeral is fast and fun, it uses cinematic techniques to deliver a very rich in background of details and incident and characters and its central character. It says a lot about the odds she faced in pursuing of her dream that she lives on in people, physically through DNA, in their memories, and in how characters thinking of her allows them to able to change the course of their lives. This sense of catharsis genuinely feels well earned, particularly as Jun (and the audience) comes to a better understanding of a woman he had probably never truly understood and tragically lost twice in life and hopefully finds inspiration to live better while trying to understand others.
Performing KAORU’s Funeral was screened at the Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024.
You can read my interview with Noriko Yuasa, the director, here.