There will be no better tagline this year: “Several people died during the making of this film.” It’s true to the spirit of a documentary that attempts to loosen the centuries-old strictures concerning the grave business of saying a final goodbye to loved ones.
Cara and Sarah are two heroically relaxed funeral directors who are far from the death industry’s terse image and whose clients are looking for something more than the usual combination of hymns and tears. We also meet Peter, a sage parish priest clad in shorts and beanie hat, who confesses to keeping his own funeral plans in a file marked with a skull and crossbones. It may not be surprising that director Rehana Rose encountered her freethinking subjects in and around Brighton.
Rose leads us gently, and with obvious empathy, into surprising and enlightening areas. Take, for instance, Cara and Sarah’s enviably airy office, which is more redolent of a tech startup than anywhere traditionally associated with laying out the dead; or the unexpected briefing Cara offers on the subject of embalming. Rose fashions one visual highlight from the diverse caskets her undertakers carry out of camper vans and double-decker buses. You may not want to take your leave in the leopard-print coffin that suggests the final resting place of Birds of a Feather’s Dorian, but there’s no reason why such options shouldn’t be available to you. It is, after all, your funeral.
Rose’s respectfully framed scenes of the living communing with the dead aren’t trampling on taboos so much as turning them over in search of a new line of approach. If there’s a limitation, it’s that these feel like highly localised case studies. Most customers will be heading for the Co-Op when the bell tolls, and a more direct contrast between one set of arrangements and another could have been instructive. Still, as Cara insists: “People look at us as freaks – but the tide is turning.”
There’s considerable human interest here, and adventurous programmers should be alerted: it would make an apt double bill with Almost Heaven, Carol Salter’s excellent 2017 documentary on the time-honoured formality of Chinese funeral rites.
