Cherry Blossoms

Kirschblüten – Hanami, Germany 2008

A German man on the verge of retirement wants everything to stay the same – what he eats for lunch, quiet routines with his wife, his geographical distance from their grown children – but everything changes with his spouse's unexpected death in this poetic dissection of family dynamics and what it means to feel alive and engaged… In Cherry Blossoms, the blossoms themselves – beautiful pinks and whites that bloom brilliantly for only a short period – become an important symbol of impermanence and appreciating the moment. Paradoxically, the people who have the most distance from Rudi’s family see it most closely. The movie is an ideal blend of character study, deceptively simple plot twists, inspired acting, and travelogue. – Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle

Doris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms is both a tender tale of cultural crossings and a double portrait of grief. At its center is a long-married provincial German couple, each member of which must confront the other’s death, one in prospect, the other in fact… I don’t want to be coy, but I also don’t want to give away the narrative surprises threaded through this gentle, sentimental tale. It will spoil nothing, however, to say that by the end of the film both parents have died, and that each has contemplated the mixture of fulfillment and regret that has defined their relationship. The matter of mourning is handled with more delicacy than the intergenerational dimensions of the story, which are clumsy and overstated, especially when Klaus and Rudi, during the father’s awkward visit to Japan, must make up for years of silence and misunderstanding.

The most affecting insights offered by Cherry Blossoms are also, in a way, the most banal. Travel to a foreign land can give you a fresh perspective on your life. Old habits die hard. A new friend can soothe your pain. In Rudi’s case, friendship arrives in the person of Yu (Aya Irizuki), a waifish young Japanese woman who practices Butoh, the form of dance that Trudi also loves.

It sometimes seems as if Ms Dörrie’s intention was not just to direct a movie partly set in Japan, but to make a Japanese movie. Her attempts to balance emotional circumspection with an openness to feeling, and to infuse her images with a simple, unaffected beauty, evoke a Japanese tradition going back to Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. – AO Scott, New York Times

Ms Dörrie sees images of her country everywhere in Japan, evidence of the ravages experienced by two former Axis powers: “The total destruction of the country. The destruction of the landscape. The architecture of the ’50s, built in no time. Very cheap materials. But also this Americanization: being torn between tradition and an American lifestyle that all looks very familiar on a subcutaneous level.

“I also think there are psychological similarities. Germans and Japanese tend to be very formal. Very repressed and completely irrational, Mishima style, at the same time. And when that breaks loose, it’s wilder than most of the things that are happening in the world. It’s like Wagner in Japan.” – Jan Stuart, New York Times

Watch the trailer here