Doris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms – Hanami (which won
the Best Film Golden Space Needle Award at SIFF last year and is
opening in theaters this week) is, at first glance, the king (and the
queen and the court jester and the jack of hearts and even the dirty
kid who brings the king another turkey leg) of the stereotypical
festival-type movie—sad, pretty, specifically designed to
crush you. Fresh off the assembly line at the Meaningful Foreign
Film Factory.
Old, happy German couple Rudi and Trudi live the world’s most
adorable German life together. In their tiny-town cottage, in the gold
and green countryside, everything is ironed and folded and routine, but
not in a faded, depressing way—just a comfortable,
we-are-old-Germans-and-this-is-how-we-do kind of way. There is sleepy
sunshine, there is a running duck, there is a bushy brown cat.
Here, Rudi, let me help you put on your sweater! Thank you, Trudi! I
shall now eat a crunchy apple!
You can feel the fucking heartbreak looming.
Okay. So. Trudi finds out that Rudi is ABOUT TO DIE and decides,
with his doctors, not to tell him (I’m not totally sure that’s
how health care works, but, um, ‘kay). Instead, she just tries to
convince him to go do fun stuff. And Rudi’s like: “Oh Trudi, we can do
fun stuff after I retire next year!” And Trudi is all: OH SHIT,
SINGLE TEAR, TRICKLE TRICKLE.
Specifically, Trudi harbors secret desires of going to Japan and
looking at the cherry blossoms (“I can’t imagine seeing anything
without my husband—that would be like not really seeing it”)
and—and here’s where Cherry Blossoms sets itself
apart—studying Butoh, the fucked-up and heart-rattling Japanese avant-garde dance form. Then they go to Berlin, and there’s
this whole devastating part about not being able to relate to your
adult children (“I can remember them so well as children, but now I
don’t know who they are”), and THEN, spoiler alert kind of,
TRUDI FUCKING DIES!!!
Now Rudi is alone. And now the movie really starts. His utter
confusion, his pilgrimage to Tokyo, his exploration of Butoh and its
panda-bear eyeliner under the wing of a homeless Japanese girl (the
movie would be equally affecting if it was just the Butoh
scenes, minus all the manipulative, old-people-dying tear-jerking) will
leave you—if you are me—feeling like someone’s been digging
around in your brain with a dirty grapefruit spoon. Because that’s its
job. Film scientists engineered it that way. Thanks a lot, film
scientists. Can’t wait for SIFF. Jesus Christ. 
Go to Jigoku!
Ella Taylor describes Butoh in the Weekly thusly: “an art form combining hippie culture with German expressionist dance.” Clearly, Lindy is the only one of the two critics who has a knowledge of Butoh outside of the context of this movie.
Ha! I remember seeing that in the Weekly’s review. What?!?! I guess I never thought of Butoh being so obscure that someone who gets paid to write wouldn’t have been passingly familiar with it, at least. Regardless, given its (ostensible) centrality to the story at hand, you’d think more research would have been warranted.
Oh, and . . . Very funny review, Lindy. It piqued my interest in seeing the film, anyway.
According to a class I took on Japanese culture, it’s not uncommon for Japanese doctors to inform a terminal patient’s family members that he is about to die, while telling the patient himself that he’s fine and his symptoms will clear up on their own. The idea is that knowing you have cancer or boneitis is depressing, and being depressed makes you less likely to recover. I don’t know about Germans, though.