In cinema, the ideas of heaven and the afterlife have long been associated with bureaucracy. Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death made celestial judgement seem as jovially parochial a business as a rainy afternoon at the county court. In It's a Wonderful Life, James Stewart was saved by an angel whose success would determine whether he qualified for wings, as if seraphic status were the equivalent of a Boy Scout badge. Such conceits are a belated reaction to the 19th century's sentimental, hyperbolic picture of a sugar-candy celestial city - a picture that, just last year, Hollywood unexpectedly tried to sneak back into play with the wretched Robin Williams farrago What Dreams May Come.
This, at any rate, is the western tradition. Whether there's any equivalent in the east is hard to say. I can't remember any Asian images of heaven, but I've seen a few of hell - notably the manic Hong Kong swashbuckler A Chinese Ghost Story, where hell is home to a tree-wraith with a hundred-foot tongue. But, as far as I know, the Japanese film After Life is the only example of Asian cinema to follow the tradition of the bureaucratic beyond. Here, however, we get not the usual domesticating gag but a philosophical conceit to be taken seriously, a metaphor for the way our minds work and our lives shape themselves.
Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, who made the exquisitely melancholic Maborosi, After Life is set in heaven, or perhaps purgatory - a drab, functional welcoming station where the newly dead report for duty. At the start, the week's new intake of dead arrive in the lobby of a crumbing official building, like a school or a tax office. Each is assigned to a counsellor, who interviews them about their memories, and each is given three days to identify the single moment that he or she wants to remember for eternity.
After Life feels less like a celestial fantasy than a documentary in which a cross-section of ordinary people confess their intimate memories in long takes, talking-head style. Some of the interviewees are professional actors, others are non-professionals who appear to be talking about themselves; you can't easily tell which are which. It goes without saying that the selected moments range from the sublime to the ridiculous. One man remembers the flash of light that saved him from suicide; an elderly roue bangs on about his talent for finding prostitutes at bargain prices. A young girl waxes ecstatic about Disneyland, and her counsellor discreetly informs her that she is her 30th client to make this choice.
There are the harder cases, too: a punky young smart-arse who refuses to play ball, and a sullen old gent who needs to review his entire life on video before he can find a moment he's happy with. We learn just as much about the counsellors - overworked, well-meaning types who clock in every week to learn that their workload has increased. In their time off, they chat in spartan living quarters or rehearse the establishment's marching band. They're regular working stiffs (as it were - they are dead, too) but conscientious and devoted to their work.
The central idea is so satisfying that Koreeda could have got by with that alone, but he adds a couple of complex strokes that intensify the insight enormously. One is to make two people's lifetime memories, a client's and a counsellor's, cross over unexpectedly. The other is to introduce the self-reflexive business of film. When old Mr Watanabe reviews his life, he's given 72 cassettes, one for each year; he watches them all, apparently without fast-forwarding, but manages to get through the lot in a couple of days. At the end of the week, each chosen memory is recreated on film for the clients to take away into the empyrean. The counsellors function as a sort of public-access film company, working on minimal budgets. If a man remembers an incident on a bus, they have to find a bus. If it's a plane, they'll have to make do with a section of the wing, in the interests of time and economy, and cotton wool for clouds.
Comic as this is, it's also an eloquent profession of faith in cinema as a means of understanding life; and it suggests that memory is itself a kind of artificial cinema, as if we retained key moments by artificially filming them in our imaginations, like "clips" that stand for the whole six-reeler of the overall life. After Life is an indirect contemplation of the problems of portraiture - of how you represent someone's whole being in a single image, and how that image might help people to know themselves. It reminded me of that exuberant sequence in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies, where Timothy Spall's jobbing photographer enhances the lives of a random bunch of customers by breathing some impromptu life into their posed studio portraits.
Koreeda does something equally compassionate in his film, which, in its austere, restrained way, is richly comic and heart-warming. After Life is as humanist as any feel-good Hollywood film, but with a philosophical underpinning that endlessly repays thought. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being one of those films that people choose to take to their desert island - or to Cloud Nine.
"After Life" (no certificate) opens at the ICA, Pall Mall, London SW1 (0171-930 3647) on 1 October
