Okuribito

I'm watching a movie called “Departures” (Okuribito) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/. It's a Japanese movie which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 2009. I'm only thirty minutes into the movie and already I'm finding it quite funny even though the subject matter is about “a newly unemployed cellist taking a job preparing the dead for funerals” (per IMDB Summary). It's 130 minutes long so I hope it takes the subtle humor all the way to the end.
During the second half of the first hour the preparation of a body is finally shown and it is done with so much sensitivity, care, and dignity in front of the deceased family. Undressing, cleansing, grooming, and dressing the dead is done with such precise movements, it's almost like a dance.
The conflict comes going into the second hour when his wife finds out what his new job is. She and his friend find his kind of work unclean and not a normal job. So she leaves him because of this. All this time his thoughts go back to his father who started him playing the cello but left him and his mother when he was six years old.
In the last quarter of the film, the wife comes back and witnesses for the first time how her husband does his job when the owner of the bathhouse they visited in the past suddenly died. The owner's son happened to be the friend who vilified him for his job and now ironically, he has to prepare the mother's body for her funeral.
The end of the movie involves the cellist/undertaker's father but I shall leave this review at this point because I hope whoever reads this will get the chance to check the movie out for themselves. The film evolves slowly but beautifully. In the end, it had nothing to do with subtle humor like at the start, but turned out to be a very well composed drama which also illustrated how the Japanese people take care of the dead.