Saturday, June 8, 2019

Nippon Reviews: Sending Off


Sending Off (2019): Produced and directed by Ian Thomas Ash. Starring: Dr. Kaoru Konta. Running Time: 79 minutes.

Rating: 3.5/4


               Ian Thomas Ash, an American filmmaker living in Japan, tends to use a more minimalist, observative style of documentary filmmaking. This is fitting; as he has been drawn time and again to topics surrounding mortality and death, his methods mix well with the more reflective mindset better suited to such subject matter.

               Sending Off, his latest film, follows the day-to-day work of Dr. Konta and her colleagues, who offer home services to elderly patients who are either too sick or frail to move, or who for one reason or another would simply rather pass away at home with family than in a facility. The routines for her and for the family members of these patients are filled with minute details of life during the final days. There are many seemingly simple or banal things that fill the time for the dying and those taking care of them- dressing, bathing, eating or drinking the few things left they are able to stomach- but the physical state of the people in question tends to make even the simplest routines slow, complicated, and ponderous, and dealing with this requires real dedication.

               Dr. Konta perfectly encapsulates the sort of patient empathy needed to handle this sort of work. She is gentle, careful, and extremely generous with patients, always trying to find things to make them laugh or smile. Her staff emulate this as well, and together they do all they can to make the final days of their patients as comfortable as possible. They talk to them about keeping their hair nice, encourages them to drink things like Coke if they want to, or gives them little assignments or tasks to try and help keep their minds sharp.

               The doctor herself also has her own, unique ways to make her house trips special. She is able to notice the small things all around her, often stopping to take pictures of people's garden's, beautiful landscapes, or fields of flowers. These photos, in a way, are small signs of her passing through the lives of these families.

               The biggest amount of time is spent with a particular family whose matriarch is slowly going. We see how the one son has taken over primary care at the end, and ocasionally get glimpes of his own thoughts about this. We see the family come together when the mother passes, and how the son is a bit put off by social demands that ultimately make the burial process larger and more complex than he'd like. I confess that I personally found a morbid fascination in seeing what happens after a body is cremated, though for some these images may cut a bit too close to be comfortable viewing.

               Sending Off is a concise, gentle, meditative film about the slow passing of long, old lives. It's reflective and thoughtful tone matches, perhaps, what most of us would wish our own sending off to be. I certainly found myself contemplating my own end far more than I usually do after seeing this. However, this consideration of the end need not be something depressing. The night may be dark, but is only filled with the terrors of our own making. If we're so lucky, our departure can be as simple as a blossoming cherry tree, fading into the dark with the setting sun.

-Noah Franc

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