Departures

Departures is a Japanese film that just opened downtown and demands your attention but not for the obvious reasons. Departures was one of the nominees at the Oscars earlier this year and won in the category of best foreign film.
Departures traffics in human comedy. A so so cello player finds he can't even afford his new string bass when the ad hoc symphony he plays for disbands. (In the movie dialogue they refer to the bass costing like 3-million yen, which is somewhere around $30,000 American.) His supportive wife agrees to move from the big city back to his home community and he gets a job to help out. Only when he applies as a travel clerk he realizes that the newspaper ad has a typo and thus the departures actually refers to a cottage industry of people who clean dead bodies. Kind of the middle man between the undertaker and the actual burial.
There was a film earlier this year called Sunshine Cleaning that dealt with sisters who start a dead body fluid cleanup service when they find out how profitable it can be. Only in this Japanese film the people who surround the protagonist (Masahiro Motoki as Daigo Kobayashi) - his wife and his friends - are aghast at what he's doing for a living. Bottom line, in our culture this would be a well paying job performing a holistic service. In Japan death holds a taboo meaning and the stigma of Daigo's labor makes for plot points.
Our hero learns the pride inherent to his work, plays cello on a levee surrounded by mountains, watches a gaggle of geese frolicking in the pasture and in general grows as a human being. The direction observes verisimilitude while allowing for comic turns. The compelling ending brings the characters back together in a more serious mode, everyone more mature from their experiences.