
Japan or Bust!
By Armond White
Doris Dörrie is best known for the 1985 German film Men, a modest feminist comedy that takes on sexual hierarchies.
Its praise made Dörrie the Sofia Coppola of her day, celebrated as a standard-bearing female director. But unlike Coppola, Dörrie actually examined her characters' social and psychological circumstances—perhaps because she had a fundamental connection to feminist ideas or had a genuine filmmaking purpose.
Dörrie's latest movie, Cherry Blossoms, is good enough to remind contemporary film culture what Coppola lacks. Or put another way: Dörrie offers feminist ideas as the substance of her filmmaking and not the privilege of her femaleness.
In Cherry Blossoms, a middle-aged German couple, Rudi and Trudi Angermeier (Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner), find themselves distant from their grown-up children and inarticulate with each other. Rudi and Trudi are from a generation not used to intimate communication.
More honestly contrived than the hostile-hysterical American suburbanites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet portray in Revolutionary Road, Rudi and Trudi believably settle into socially prescribed male and female patterns. They accept their lot, having raised a family and developed companionship almost unconsciously.
Trudi's dream of visiting Japan gets deferred; her youngest, favorite child Karl (Maximilian Brückner), breaks away from the family—poignantly he escapes to Japan.
It's when Rudi goes to visit Karl that Cherry Blossoms recalls Coppola's Tokyo-set Lost in Translation, and Dörrie reveals a depth of imagination and feeling that exposes Coppola's inadequacy.
Alienation was just a fashion posture for Coppola, but Dörrie probes the unexpected ways Rudi, Trudi and their children put off frustration and compensate for their imperfect family heritage. Dörrie's own filmmaking has sufficiently matured so that feminist family analysis is subsumed by a tender understanding of how her characters miscommunicate. She shows fumbling attempts at love: the Wes Anderson theme. It's rich enough to overcome the trendy Western infatuation with Eastern mysticism. Without scoffing at European religious tradition—Trudi's attraction to Oriental art and Rudi's discovery of new possibilities when he follows through on Trudi's fascination—has unexpected charm. Through this ever-expanding, family love story, Dörrie subtly expresses the alienation of her own parents' generation. It's a kindly view of the ideology Dörrie inherited and examined rather than dutifully accepted.
In Japan, Rudi befriends Yu (Aya Irizuki), a young woman who practices Butoh dancing. It feels overly schematic when the girl introduces herself in English, saying "I am Yu." But there's also a kind of emotional splendor in this scheme, just as Rudi and Yu's excursion to Mt. Fuji leads to an undeniable epiphany. Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles told a richer transnational family tale; but Dörrie is clearly working out a political (feminist) preoccupation, and she shows shallow post-feminist trend-hoppers like Coppola how it can be done.
Cherry Blossoms
Written and directed by Doris Dörrie
With Elmar Wepper, Hannelore Elsner, Maximilian Brückner and Aya Irizuki
127 min., NR