After six years of going to the cinema and brushing up on "The Mortician", it is a plus. Brush to some bad reviews, mainly to say that "the details are deliberate, sensationalism, performance", the film does have some problems objectively, when I saw it, I also realized it, but now I see the feeling is different.
About the details. This time, I experienced two details that had not been discovered before: one was that the wife asked the male owner to give up his job, and the male owner was verbally insulted by the customer, so he went to ask for resignation. He entered the president's room surrounded by plants, so quiet that it seemed to suck away the filth from his body, and the president said to him, "Creatures eat other creatures to survive, it is best to choose something delicious", and invited him to eat pufferfish. Puffer fish is poisonous, but delicious, symbolizing the profession of mortician, which has a holy side in ceremony, but in secular reality it is dirty/poisonous, and "puffer fish delicacy" refers to the high income of entering the mortician industry, fifty thousand yen a day salary. The "good old man" male protagonist can persist for so long, including saying "how to say no" to his wife, in addition to the sense of professional achievement, this is also the reason behind it. But as a Japanese film, this layer cannot be directly filmed, and can only be told to the audience in metaphor, and the president originally enlightened the male protagonist in this way.
The second is reconciliation with the death of the absent father. A man is called a "father," and the film presents the audience with this — when the son finally remembers his father's face, and the father finally gets the son's recognition, he becomes the father at this moment, even if he is dead at this time. But in fact, what the movie really wants to say is that the environment of the father's 30-year residence and his only one box of relics are the obvious evidence of his father. Out of the consideration of settling down for his wife and son, but also a shame for himself, this person did not hesitate to hide his name, live in a dilapidated environment, and did not choose to go home. The reason why the male protagonist can choose to return to his hometown to live in a single-family house after failing in a big city is based on the premise of his father's self-sacrifice.
About sensationalism. A movie that makes a "neat loop" (chicken, stone, record, etc.), in addition to the details of the front and back alignment, the point is in the right position, whether the metaphor is just right, whether the metaphor is just right, is a very difficult thing, similar to this Japanese movie, but rarely can do the sense of balance so well. Perhaps from the perspective of film art, it is still somewhat mediocre, but the evaluation of film is not only a technical consideration, but also a solid enough emotional and cultural core, and it is appropriately expressed, to some extent, all aspects are extremely just right, but also an extreme.
About the performance. In a 130-minute film, the amount of lines is very small, and the amount of information conveyed is often the actor's body and performance. The film spends a lot of time gazing at the faces, expressions, and movements of the actors. In fact, the actor's performance is not a big problem, or very good. Masahiro Motoki is a male star with thick eyebrows and big eyes, a bit of a big waist, and has been trained, and his expression will be a little unbearable, but this does not affect his sense of sincerity, and you can clearly feel that this person has no social work experience of "not being kind", as well as his outlier personality, can interpret this weak personality with a tall body, indicating that his performance is still accurate. After returning to his hometown, he was almost in a vacuum, except for an old classmate and an old man in the bathhouse, most of whom were his own wives, and there was no one else.