Your assignment is to choose one memory from your life to take with you to your grave. The memory will then be scrupulously recreated as a film, which you will watch before disappearing into eternity, all other memories of your life wiped away.

Or, your assignment is to kill all your high school classmates before they get you. If you win, you can expect fame and fortune. If you lose, you die a painful death on a remote island.

The unlikely plots of the two most memorable movies I saw last year both subtly struggle with the question of conformity, and both remain lodged in my mind like a last memory looping around a final reel. Both movies come from Japan, and both films impose artificial constructs of reality that defy reason but require absolute acceptance from participating individuals who find themselves struggling to bridge the gap between obedience and individuality.

After Life (1999) is a sleepy, dreamy film mostly set in a single brick dormitory on a foggy forest grounds. Director and writer Hirokazu Kore-eda approaches the generally schmaltzy notion of ascendancy to the ethereal by crafting a sad metaphor in which we remember our life like a movie -- we are given the chance to fashion a single poignant scene that, once reconstituted into the "permanent" memory of light flashing through film, will be enough to put us at peace forever.

Battle Royale (2001) is a hyper film driven by craven moments of lurid violence. Widely described as Survivor meets Lord of the Flies and directed by the veteran Kinji Fukasaku, it is a black comedy fraught with nostalgia for teendom, contempt for the strictures of society, and ultimately, a disgust at how easily human life is reduced to a game. In Battle Royale, a class of ninth graders is marooned on an island and told that they have a finite amount of time to finish each other off. They use a variety of different weapons (machine gun, pot lid, machete) to find a way out of their predicament. What the plot lacks in sense it makes up for in almost tender moments of teen angst slipped in between appropriately gratuitous installments of slaughter.

So, a scene from each movie:

Battle Royale: A sensitive young man spends his last hours searching for his one true love. Resigned to his death, he wants nothing more than to find and comfort the girl he's always pined for.Finally, he enters an abandoned shed. He calls her name. The girl, hidden in a dark cranny, panics, shooting him. In his dying breath, he tells her to run away, because others will have heard the shots and come looking for her. Why are you helping me, she cries. Because, he says, choking on blood and hormones, I've always loved you.The hapless teen girl stares into the invisible camera -- a camera we imaginebroadcasting the scene for the entertainment of the entire nation. But, she wails, but...he never even called me.

After Life:A girl is searching for her final memory. She is being helped by a kind of death counsellor, a woman in her twenties who, herself, cannot choose a memory and is displaced from the comforts of eternity. The girl proudly announces that her best super special all time memory is of a ride at a Disney-like theme park. She is tentative but excited -- she's pleased her counsellor and can now head off to heaven. But the counsellor isn't impressed. Listen, she says, a lot of young girls come here and choose that memory. Is that really the life moment you want to have with you for all time? The girl, suddenly despondent, says she isn't sure.

I've been thinking a lot about conformity lately. What makes us adhere or rebel? Can we be ourselves in an age when individualism is a kind of relentless conformity -- a mass produced t- shirt emblazoned with the freedom logo? After Life is an elegiac fairy tale attempting to celebrate individuality while recognizing the ultimate sameness of human life. Suppose your choice is, itself, a mass produced movie moment? Does that leave you perpetually anonymous, a lonely creature lost in the crowded after life of generic memories?

Battle Royale addresses a similar issue -- teenagers addled by pop culture, saddled by the awareness of their complicity in an entertainment they would otherwise be safe at home watching, die horrible meaningless deaths even as they clutch at the cliches of teen life which are, themselves, de facto, meaningless, possibly implanted.

Both films struggle with the truth of who we are in the age of the movie. Does the endlessly replicated lifelike image illuminate our most poignant truths? Or does the compulsion to make everything into a movie simply obscure who we are, who we might have been?