After Life
A charming, humane, life-affirming movie about death

You have just died.

A polite young caseworker has just informed you of this fact. He is very sorry for your loss, but now there is something he must ask you to do. In the next three days you must decide on the one — the only — memory from your life that you would like to take with you into eternity. The one moment that will, for you, have made the whole process of being born and enduring all of life's troubles worthwhile.

Such is the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda's "After Life," a film that deals with the topic of death in a gentle, compassionate and practical way.

Set in a drab, utilitarian office building — a typical bureaucratic processing center — the caseworkers of "After Life" consult with 22 newly dead people of all ages and experiences. One memory. Choose only one. Everything else will be forgotten. After choosing, the memory will be recreated for you, and after experiencing it again, you will take that feeling, that memory, into eternity.

Filmed with a profoundly eloquent simplicity, "After Life" takes a fairly stock movie idea — rehashing someone's life — and makes it fresh and original through the sparse poetry of its presentation; it takes a simple idea, and has the wisdom to keep that idea simple, trusting the life memories of the dead to be more than enough drama to fuel the story.

A former documentary filmmaker, Kore-eda wisely includes several non-actors in the cast, knowing that the real memories they present are better than anything which could have been scripted.

The memories are often unexpected, and, surprisingly, often rather mundane: a cool breeze on a bus on a summer day when you are young and have an all-day pass; playing as a child in a bamboo grove, testing the boundaries of your young world while securely anchored by the smell of rice cooking from your home nearby; lying on a blanket as a baby, watching the sunlight coming through a window just so and warming your skin.

Beautiful, haiku moments in time, often far from spectacular, but also somehow quietly perfect, forcing the question: "what more could you want in life but this?"

Life, the film shows, is lived not on grand scales but rather in small moments; and if you pay attention, those moments are available to you all the time.

Of course, with so many moments to choose from, some of the clients have difficulty selecting just one.

Watanabe Ichiro is one such case. He is an old man, and yet when he looks back on his life, he can find nothing remarkable, nothing that stands out from his uneventful life. It falls to his caseworker, Mochizuki, to help him select one.

Mochizuki supplies Watanabe with dozens of videotapes, then leaves the old man alone to sift through the video archive of his life, not yet understanding that in the old man's search for "proof of his life," he might also find the anwers to his own dilemma as well.

The patience and politeness the caseworkers show to their clients is remarkable in itself; their compassion is genuine and real. Better than anyone, they know it is not an easy decision they are asking of their clients; they themselves were unable to choose, which is how they came to be caseworkers. In the "After Life" universe, being unable to choose is the very worst thing that can happen to you. That is your punishment: no eternal fire and torment and demons attacking and rending and all the other sadomasochistic folderol. "After Life" proposes a much saner and compassionate scenario in which your punishment is to continue with all of your memories, the good and the bad, the happy and hurtful, and to become a caseworker helping others move on, a period during which, ideally, the caseworker will have time to sort out their own life and what it meant to them.

The workers realize that their persistence is unnatural, and most move on eventually, but while they wait they continue to build new memories, and after awhile under the spell of this film it is possible to find the many haiku moments hidden in the drab, gray shadows of the office building. Every moment, the film contends, has the potential for beauty and wonder within it.

That assertion is often used as a horrible cliche in American films, but the difference is that "After Life" didn't utter the cliche, I did. The film merely lays it all out there and trusts the audience to understand. It is almost appalling to consider a Hollywood version of this film, in which the point of the beauty and wonder would be made by ramping everything up. All the colors would be brighter, the sounds exaggerated; the memories would be overblown and over done... over produced, as most Hollywood films are; instead of Kore-eda's use of real people, the caseworkers and the dead alike would almost certainly be presented as broadly drawn types, and the memories would be accompanied by some sappily sentimental music to tell the audience that yes, indeed, we're having a memorable moment.

"After Life" is so emotionally true and beautiful, it is frustrating realizing how hard a sell it is to American audiences who might look at it side-by-side at the DVD store with some typical bit of Hollywood fare — let's call it "National Treasure" — only to go finally with "National Treasure." I don't understand the reluctance, the unwillingness to at least give something else a try. Here's the difference: "National Treasure" will distract you from your life for a couple of hours, sure, but "After Life" might have the power to make you look at your life in a completely different way. Which one is more truly deserving of your time?

I guess it boils down to how you experience real life. Does life, for you, truly play in the hyper-reality fashion of a typical Hollywood film, all bright colors and flash in a roller coaster rush?

Maybe it does, maybe I have no idea how others experience life, but I'm willing to bet that your experience of life is much more akin to the beautiful life moments expressed by the dead people of "After Life." I'll bet that when you think of a time when you were truly happy, it will be less roller coaster ride and more like one of the key memories from "After Life." An old woman is asked for her favorite moment and she barely hesitates: As her nation goes to war, the woman sits on a park bench with her boyfriend, handsome and brave in his uniform on the eve of his shipping out; she looks down at his hands, the fingers are interlaced, natural and real, the only sound in the world, cicadas whirring in the trees.