Kazoku:Eiga Sai 2014, Day 7

After seven days of film-watching, my attendance for this year's Eiga Sai was finally wrapped up with:

"Until the Break of Dawn" by Yuichiro Hirakawa (129 mins) 

Last year, it was "Always - Sunset on 3rd Street". This year, it is "Until the Break of Dawn" which would qualify as the "MMK" (Abs-Cbn) of Eiga Sai. The dialogues are rife with sentimentality, the music is orchestrated for emotional swells, the entire film is meant to be a tearjerker. Thankfully, all of these are not done in a cheap fashion. It might be a cliché already to say this, but you might be the most callous person in the world if you don't get affected even a bit by the film. Truth is, I could have lost interest in the film because of its melodramatic orientation if not because of its subject-matter - death. This is the second Eiga Sai film that I saw that openly dealt with the subject (the other one being "Reunion") and it attempts to bring the subject to a positive light, in a manner that would not make the viewers balk given the grim nature of the matter. By positive, I mean to say cathartic and reconciliatory, qualities which are the primary objectives of the Tsunagu (literally, "Connector") in arranging a one-time "meeting" between the living and the deceased (whom the former had requested and only if the latter would agree so with such). In the film, there are basically three scenarios shown to illustrate the matter - those involving a son and his mother, two high-school best friends and a single man and his missing fiancée. Through these situations, fantastical though they may be, the film attempts to posit such questions as:After humans die, what really happens to them?;Is there a world beyond life?;If given the rare chance to say or do something to our departed ones which we were not able to do when they were still alive, how would we respond to it?;Are humans really prone to doing something that they would regret for their entire lives? 

The director may have chosen the sentimental route in delving into such philosophical/moral concerns (unlike in the stark "Reunion"), but one can't fault him for the wealth of insights and emotions that he manages to bring across. This is in fact a feel-good movie which, in true melodramatic fashion, everything gets neatly tied-up towards the end - the reconciliations, the apologies, the gratitudes and the fulfillment of obligations. On my part, I would rather prefer some ambiguity, loose threads and gray area - the randomness which marks real life. Or in regards the whole festival experience itself, I would have preferred to end it with a film that packed more punch. But then, upliftment isn't such an unwelcome idea after all. 

(Yuichiro Hirakawa's "Until the Break of Dawn":The living meeting with the dead.)