THE FUNERAL Movie Review

Funeral Rites
Ososhiki

The TV careers of a married couple are interrupted by the sudden death of the wife's father. The couple gets considerably more than they bargained for, however, when the carefully laid plans for what was to be a traditional, three-day Buddhist funeral service begin to unravel into a series of out-of-control misadventures. Juzo Itami's 1985 debut film has fewer big laughs than his subsequent hits, Tampopo and A Taxing Woman, but it's every bit as dryly and bitterly satirical. A scathing portrait of a Japan in which ceremony and appearance are vastly more important than simple human feeling, The Funeral is a bleak vision of the last manic days of Japan, Inc. just prior to the nation's economic reckoning, which is eerily—if only metaphorically—foreshadowed here. In sequences such as the inappropriate arrival of the husband's mistress, a mix-up by the sushi delivery man, and the couple's careful study of what may be the ultimate self-help video, “The ABC's of Funerals,” the sure, sharp eye of Itami is at its most wicked and brutally funny.

NEXT STOP … Tampopo, A Taxing Woman, The Loved One

1984 112m/C JP Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Kin Sugai, Ichiro Zaitsu, Nekohachi Edoya, Shoji Otake; D: Juzo Itami; W: Juzo Itami; C: Yonezo Maeda; M: Joji Yuasa. VHS REP, FCT