Departures / It would take a field-team of social anthropologists to discern the semiotic links between ancient and modern Japan in the shadows and light of Departures, which is as close to brilliant as movies seem to get these days. Armed with an arsenal of awards, including a 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, this handsome, visually-adroit story manages to synthesize the formulaic with the archetypal.

Full of surprises, making it unfair to synopsize here, this movie is filled with the kinds of scenes you’ve never witnessed before (in the movies, at least). And, practically unheard of in a Summer release, Departures is about something. Its subject is–hold on, now–death, its theme is forgiveness, and it manages to balance comedy and tragedy. Or, at least, it does at first, beginning with a hilarious scene of casketing, as our hero ritually dresses a dead person for casketing and cremation as grieving relatives watch on.

The film’s title refers to all kinds of departures: a failed cellist returning to his home town (where his mother has left him her house); a father who has abandoned his family when his son was 6 years old; a wife who leaves her husband because she is ashamed of his job; and, of course, death. The time is the present but is equally concerned with the presence of the past: A bath house about to be turned into condominiums as soon as the aging owner dies; certain time-honored rituals threatened by the speed of the modern world; worldwide recession dissolving cultural institutions, and on and on, large and small. Every kind of leave-taking is addressed, some obliquely.

Even the world of video-ized industrial training sessions provides a poignant/hilarious commentary of our new world.

The film begins as our young, newly-married hero loses his treasured Tokyo job; the orchestra for which he plays is dissolved by the tearful owner. Although he considers himself a second-rate cellist, the young man, who has played the instrument since his father abandoned the family, finds that that part of his life seems to be ending.

Now, he and his wife return to his deceased mother’s home, and he looks for a new job, stumbling into something he never would have considered: working with corpses in the casketing ceremonies so familiar in old Japan. He keeps the details of his harrowing new job from his wife, justifiably afraid she might not accept it, that she might consider him “unclean,” as turns out to be exactly how she feels.

The old man, aging fast, for whom our protagonist works, uncomfortably as first, becomes a kind of father to him, teaching him the pleasures of food and drink, even becoming a bit sententious about the work they’re doing: tending for the body of a woman dead for two weeks; hastily conferring how the corpse of a young transvestite should be “dressed” before his relatives; dealing with a family argument during a casketing ritual, handling the body of a close friend. And finally, our cellist must deal with the most troubling case of all–and not what you probably might guess.

Laced with music, mostly Beethoven, and rife with images of modernity over the palimpsest of the past, Departures has been beautifully made, sensitively acted and masterfully directed by Yojiro Kakita, who, with this film, has soared into the highest ranks of world directors. It is to the credit of the U.S.’s Regent films, known mostly for low-budget exploitation films and a single masterwork (Gods and Monsters) that they are guiding the American release of this remarkable film (last week at the Maui Film Fest), taking a huge chance on a film whose subject matter might not tempt most audiences. See it.

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