Cherry Blossoms
Dir: Doris Dörrie
Rating: 2.5
Strand Releasing
124 Minutes
The ghosts of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu hang over Cherry Blossoms, a meditation on life and death by German director Doris Dörrie. While the film’s emotional poignancy is undeniable, its derivative nature gets in the way of becoming a complete work of its own. Beginning much like Kurosawa’s Ikura, as a bland businessman (Elmar Wepper) receives a terminal diagnosis (except here the man does not know; only his wife is aware of his condition), Cherry Blossoms swiftly morphs into Ozu’s Tokyo Story, where elderly village-bound parents visit their children in the big city (Berlin) and are promptly neglected.
Rudi and Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) live a life of simple routine. They have three grown children, two in Berlin and one in Japan, and while Rudi enjoys the daily grind and bucolic stillness of their village, Trudi secretly longs to be a butoh dancer. You read that correctly. She yearns to visit their son in Japan but getting Rudi to Berlin is difficult enough. Though Trudi constantly hints that his life may be ending soon, she never gets to courage the tell him, nor does she ever tell him. See, much like Tokyo Story, the couple goes on an excursion to the sea and the wife suddenly drops dead. Despondent, Rudi travels to Japan and do what Trudi had always dreamed.
Writing a homage to Ozu may be one thing, but Dörrie does not have the directing chops to capture Ozu, just as Rudi fails to capture the essence of his dead wife by learning butoh. While Ozu perfectly blended still shots void of people into his tapestries, Dörrie’s attempt to do the same comes off as distracting and hackneyed. Clumsy shots of running ducks, circling flies intersect with flat images of Mt. Fuji and a jumbled shot of the Baltic Sea that is supposed to signal imminent death. It just feels really forced.
But this is not to say Cherry Blossoms is not worthwhile. Rudi’s initial contact with Japan is amusing as he wanders through strip clubs and bathhouses. But, things begin to change when he befriends a teenage butoh dancer. At first, Dörrie portrays Tokyo as a desolate stretch of neon, but as Rudi and the dancer become friends, the beauty of the park (with its cherry blossoms, swan boats and picnics) starts to appear. But rather than let the images speak for themselves, we are spoon fed that the cherry blossom is “the very symbol of impermanence.” Such heavy-handedness is impossible to find in an Ozu film, but it’s everywhere in Dörrie’s.
Though the film never becomes completely maudlin, the ending is somewhat predictable. Rudi and the dancer travel to an inn to see Mt. Fuji (“a shy mountain,” the dancer informs us). Rudi cannot forgive himself for stifling Trudi’s dreams and brings her clothes to see the mountain; though he is completely unaware of his own impending death, Rudi wants to have his wife breathe through him one more time. Cherry Blossoms is a film about the impermanence of life and how we must appreciate it before it’s gone. Pity that Dörrie felt the need to ape such a fragile theme.
by David Harris
