CHERRY BLOSSOMS
Written & Directed by Doris Dörrie
Produced by Molly von Fuerstenberg & Harald Kügler
Released by Strand Releasing
German, English & Japanese with English subtitles
Germany/France. 124 min. Not Rated
With Elmar Wepper, Hannelore Elsner & Aya Irizuki 
 

It’s difficult to talk about German director Doris Dörrie’s recent Cherry Blossoms without giving away one of the film’s secrets: the first hour is a lie. Initially, Dorrie focuses on the life of Trudi (Hannelore Elsner), a small-town German housewife so meek that she stands by the window every afternoon with her husband’s slippers in hand, waiting for Rudi (Elmar Wepper) to come home. His doctor confided to her that Rudi’s ailments will soon take his life. Now, like she has for most of her life, she has set aside everything for her husband and their family. Trudi wants her detached curmudgeon of a spouse, unaware of his impending death, to live his final days with satisfaction.

But Dörrie is a clever director/screenwriter, and she knows her audience both expects and, in a way, wants Rudi to meet his end. His death would allow Trudi to become the woman she’s suppressed in her waning years for the sake of her family—to visit her son in Tokyo, see Mt. Fuji, and study the modernist dance form of Butoh like she always wanted. But it is Trudi who dies without warning. With Dörrie’s pacing and the convincing performances of Elsner and Wepper, it takes talent to spot this switch in advance.

Trudi’s death leaves Rudi immobilized with confusion. Did his wife die happy? Was her life of servitude an act of self-denial, or was it a decisive choice for a more complicated sense of contentment? Did he ever really know her, and for that matter, does he know himself without her? Traveling to Japan to visit the country Trudi never visited, the stodgy creature of habit begins wearing his wife’s clothes and befriends Yu (Aya Irizuki), a homeless Butoh dancer who helps Rudi to better understand his grief.

With knowing pacing and moving poignancy, Dörrie’s travelogue leaves Lost in Translation behind in the playpen. A better comparison is 2007’s The Visitor, where a middle-aged widower slowly finds meaning in his life again with the help of a new family. But where The Visitor’s Walter engages with his life again, Rudi comes to terms with death and his life. By the time Rudi leaves for Tokyo, he may not know he’s going to die, but he sure acts like he does. What makes Cherry Blossoms more complicated than similar films is its suggestion that such behavior isn’t necessarily negative.

Dörrie’s characters, so lost in emotion, become ruminations on identity and relationships. Standing amid the Alps in a breathtaking scene early on, Trudi tells Rudi she wants to see Mt. Fuji, to which he responds, “It’s just another mountain, you know.” This is not how he feels by the film’s close, which delivers an iconic shot that Dörrie has promised her audience since the film began. Zachary Jones
January 16, 2009