Cherry Blossoms

Typically in bloom for two weeks of the year, cherry blossoms have captivated generations struggling to come to terms with the frailty of human life. But despite their transient existence, these harbingers of mortality are a far cry from bleak or empty representations of death. Instead, the obvious beauty of these flowers, no matter how short-lived or delicate, is a testament to those unbreakable bonds worth striving for—love, familial ties, and friendships.

German director Doris Dörrie’s “Cherry Blossoms” is a similar reminder to appreciate life’s transient but spectacular moments. This touching film, though at times overstated in its sentimentality, incorporates the evocative power of the plant’s symbolic imagery to encapsulate the experiences of a family coping with an unexpected death.

Not long into the film, Trudi Angermeier (Hannelore Elsner) discovers that her husband Rudi (Elmar Wepper) is going to die. Concealing this fact, she convinces him that they need a vacation, but then unexpectedly dies herself on the Baltic Coast.

Initially unable to relinquish his grief, the aging Rudi travels to Japan carrying all his money and a suitcase of his wife’s clothing in an attempt to transport her spirit to the one country she had always longed to visit. Once in Tokyo, which takes the adage “the city that never sleeps” to a whole new level of disorienting proportions, Rudi ventures around his alien environment wearing his wife’s sweater and skirt to finally bond with the woman he never appreciated while she was alive.

In a similar vein of love and loss, “Cherry Blossoms” is also an especially poignant portrayal of a dying man not only coping with the passing of his faithful life companion, but also reflecting on the slow disintegration of the family structure.

Sentiments aside, the direction of the movie, which is set in Germany and Japan, pays tribute to a cross-cultural exchange between East and West embodied in the interaction between Rudi and a teenaged Butoh dancer named Yu (Aya Irizuki). While Rudi travels to Japan as a way of making amends to his dead wife, it is not until he meets Yu that he learns about an aspect of his wife’s life that had previously eluded him. Thus, Butoh’s dancing becomes a means through which Rudi can honor the memory of his wife while abandoning his own personal inhibitions.

This seamless melding of contrasting personalities and viewpoints is also manifest in the film’s varied dialogue of English, German, and Japanese. To communicate with each other, Rudi and Yu must abandon their native tongues and speak English, thereby intimating that language is no communication barrier for this ostensibly odd couple. What is fascinating about this burgeoning friendship between a homeless Japanese girl and an aging German man is that the relationship transcends labels—it is neither sexual nor paternal. Instead, these two are spiritual partners in life, sharing a mutual obligation to help each other find beauty in loss while overcoming grief.

The success of this film rides on the fact that Dörrie guided what could have been an overtly maudlin disaster into an aesthetically stunning and thematically satisfying piece of visual art. But the movie falters when it begins to show signs of the skewed persepctive that so often characterizes the depiction of the fetishized East by a Western gaze. Though there is no denying the symbolic resonance of age-old emblems—the titular cherry blossoms, for instance, or the impressive Mount Fuji—their prevalence trivializes Rudi’s earnest attempt to reconcile his past wrongs with a renewed love for his wife. As generic and exaggerated symbols, their impact wanes by the story’s conclusion.

Succumbing to mortality almost as soon as it reaches the peak of its blooming season, the image of the cherry blossom may be effective in grounding certain larger themes in perspective. Regrettably, in reference to the film’s unique take on a subject already revered for generations, the innovation gets lost in translation.

—Staff writer Eunice Y. Kim can be reached at kim30@fas.harvard.edu.