Format: DVD from Moline Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.
This is the tenth in a series of twelve movies suggested by Chip Lary.
I’m not the sort of person who thinks that everything happens for a reason, or that there is some sort of guiding force behind everything that happens in our lives. No, events just happen, and this means that sometimes we get wonderful little coincidences or confluences that give us insight or that allow us to project meaning on the events that we experience. When Chip and I exchanged movie lists about nine or ten months ago, I had no idea that 2016 would be a year that ended without Chip in it. I also had no idea that he would give me Departures (Okuribito) to watch. It feels appropriate, because Departures is about death and about saying goodbye.
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a cellist living and working in Tokyo with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue). Then, one day the man who funds the orchestra pulls the plug and Daigo is without a job and owing about 18 million yen on his cello. With no prospects and keenly aware that he probably isn’t good enough to land in another orchestra, Daigo and Mika move to his home town where he has a house that he inherited from his mother when she died several years previously.
