On Criterion, I watched The Funeral, a Japanese film from 1984, from the director Juzo Itami (Tampopo), about a family organizing the funeral of the eldest patriarch in the family, Shinkichi Amamiya (Hideji Ataki), who died of a heart attack, and having three days to balance between traditional norms and modern conveniences. It’s a really interesting and good family dramedy, where there’s a long scene of the family debating whether to put his body in a coffin or lay his body in his bed at home for one last night, and explaining the logistics of keeping his body in the coffin and not upsetting his widow Kikue (Kin Sugai) by putting him on his bed and prolonging the mourning period.
There’s a scene where two cars are driving at high speed side by side in the rain, while the occupants are eating sandwiches, then passing one sandwich to the other through the car windows while driving.
There’s a scene where his son in-law Wabisuke Inoue (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is on the phone about coffin sales, and is like “What do you have that is just above average?”, not wanting something too fancy or too cheap. There’s another great scene where he and his wife Chizuko (Nobuko Miyamoto) are watching a how-to video on funeral etiquette, learning what to say to those expressing their condolences and giving pat, polite but robotic answers.
Itami often worked with his wife Nobuko Miyamoto, and he passed in 1997 at age 64, while she’s still living today at age 79.
This is a really nice sequence of the family preparing the funeral, filmed in black and white home movie style, to focus more on the little moments in between rather than the procedural of the funeral.
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