Starring Masahiro Motoki and Tsutomu Yamazaki. In Japanese with English subtitles. Rated G. Opens Friday, June 12, at the Park Theatre

This Japanese drama, which won this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language film, centres on concert cellist Daigo (Masahiro Motoki), whose Tokyo orchestra is unexpectedly dissolved.

The flummoxed musician and his insipidly supportive wife (Ryoko Hirosue) then head to the northern Yamagata area, where his late mother left a rustic home. Going after a local job he thinks is in the travel industry, Daigo slowly realizes how dear the departed in question actually are. And under the tutelage of a wise old boss played by Tsutomu Yamazaki—the grizzled cowboy from Juzo Itami’s Tampopo—he learns the delicate art of “encoffinment”, a ritualized procedure that prepares loved ones for their final journeys.

Director Yojiro Takita is no Itami. His background is in soft-core porn and martial-arts movies, although his similarly uneven domestic comedy The Yen Family, from 1988, was also an offshore hit. Here, working from Kundo Koyama’s script, he draws too much mugging from his cast, making Yamazaki’s restraint even more effective but obscuring some fascinating conflicts that arise from grieving families glimpsed along the way.

Rather silly marital struggles are explained by belabouring the cellist’s early abandonment by his father—a plot point as certain to return as cherry blossoms in the spring. Joe Hisaishi’s quasi-classical music is too often used in place of the Bach or Schubert we should be hearing from Daigo’s hands, and it seems to recycle stuff this composer already used in the animated efforts of Hayao Miyazaki.

In this sentimental undertaking, my heart goes out to editor Akimasa Kawashima, who obviously lost every battle with the director. The absurdly repetitive movie has recently been trimmed to just under two hours. Another 20 minutes and it could have been saved from some encoffinment of its own making.