Filmes
Jornal da Mostra
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31ª Mostra > 14/02/2008
Text: Leon Cakoff, from Berlin, to ‘Jornal da Mostra’
AN INITIATORY TRIP WITH DORIS DÖRRIE
A low budget German film is a promise of great success this year. KIRSCHBLÜTEN – HANAMI/ CHERRY BLOSSOMS – HANAMI was presented in competition at the 58th Berlin Festival and it the well known director Doris Dörrie took part in almost all steps of the production. “That was the only possible way to travel from Bavaria to Japan, counting on digital equipment, light and easy to use, but mainly counting on an excellent cast,” says the filmmaker, who got famous around the world in 1985 with the comedy MEN/MÄNNER.
The main artistic support in the film is the extraordinary interpretation by Hannelore Elsner. Her couple in the film is the also excellent (and unknown in the movies) Elmar Wepper, who Doris Dörrie got out of equally low cost television productions.
The story is very touching, at the same time that it criticizes acidly the German way of being, especially the Bavarian Germans, considered to be the most methodic and traditional. Some can also see references to the German Nazi past, of which Bavaria was the main ‘nursery’, and whose cinema mystified the symbols derived from the mountains. The mountain fetish is here transferred to the Fuji in Japan.
The film starts with a doctor revealing to a woman that her husband has a terminal disease. She won’t tell him anything. Se will try to stimulate him to fulfill his last dreams while there is still time. That is where the German spirit, ruled, methodic, appears. He’d rather wait another year, when he will retire. And “To see a mountain, we have many in Bavaria, why go see the Fuji, even with the pretext of seeing the son who is working there?” he argues.
Little by little we are introduced in this initiatory trip. The first trip he agrees to make is to Berlin, where their other two children and their grandchildren live. The parents, Trudi and Rudi, are treated as a hassle by the children and no one has the time to go out with them. But Trudi manages to see a Butoh performance, which she loves, but Rudi can’t stand it.
It is when the unexpected happens. During the second trip Rudi accepts to make, to a hotel by the Baltic sea, Trudi dies. Nobody should get angry at this article. Doris Dörrie herself reveals it in the film’s synopsis.
What really matters are the emotional elements the viewer will be confronted with from then on. Being alone, without knowing he is going to die, Rudi finally decides to go to Japan. More as the fulfillment of the deceased wife’s desire than to see his son. We then see the transformation of the rude man in an emotional being, who will little by little notice what he has done of wrong and stupid in life. A rare thing in the lives of people who get old raising their own contradictions. That is the reason for the commotion it causes on the spectators.
Doris Dörrie’s stimulus is like saying “do it before it is too late”. And the respect she has for Japanese culture, even when she is critical, corrects the diversions the other film about cultural shocks in Japan, Sofia Coppola’s LOST IN TRANSLATION, had. But the German film is also cruelly realistic. The last words of the children about their parents show how the insensitiveness cycles repeat themselves. Even if the way one mystifies a mountain in our days is different.
More Berlin Festival at http://www.berlinale.de
English version: Laura Rebessi