Almost Heav­en

Chi­nese teenagers are cur­rent­ly being forced to tramp all man­ner of strange routes into the job mar­ket, and 17-year-old Ying Ling has found her­self in the unen­vi­able posi­tion of being hun­dreds of miles from home and work­ing as a trainee mor­ti­cian. Her job involves clean­ing and prepar­ing corpses while orches­trat­ing sen­ti­men­tal cer­e­monies for griev­ing families.

This could eas­i­ly have been a low key and mean­der­ing pro­file of a strange, cul­tur­al­ly remote insti­tu­tion, but direc­tor Car­ol Salter strikes gold with her char­ac­ters – apa­thet­ic teens who just want a lit­tle more from life but know they’re going to have to accept their lot and press for­ward regard­less. The film mon­i­tors these lives from a black­ly com­ic remove, empha­sis­ing the kitsch aspect of these rather gar­ish funer­al cer­e­monies and the louch­eness of the entire operation.

And yet, there’s no fun-mak­ing or mock­ery from behind the cam­era, but a sense of accep­tance – a gen­tle yearn­ing to under­stand the col­lec­tive emo­tion­al impulse behind these cer­e­monies and what effect they’re hav­ing on the minds of these impres­sion­able teens.

As with any job in the ser­vice indus­try, Ying has to learn the rules, but also a very par­tic­u­lar and struc­tured mode of behav­iour. She learns how to wash a corpse with all the focus placed on tech­nique and none on the shock­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal real­i­ty that she has to be extreme­ly famil­iar with a dead body in a pub­lic set­ting. The film looks at death as an indus­try rather than a pro­found state of being (or not being), but some­how the throngs of mourn­ers don’t see any tack­i­ness or exploitation.

It’s shock­ing that most of the staff are bare­ly out of their teens, and it adds an extra lay­er of com­men­tary to a film which looks at the notion of the very young being draft­ed in to deal with the very old (who are liv­ing much longer). Despite all the macabre humil­i­a­tion Ying has to endure, the film ends on a pos­i­tive note, sug­gest­ing that some of the low­er rungs of the employ­ment lad­der are more slip­pery than the ones high­er up.