Cherry Blossoms

The cinematic equivalent of the admonishment "Call your Mother, she worries".

If you've ever felt guilty as an offspring for not loving or understanding your parents enough as they pass into old age and the beyond, do not watch Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms.

It will rip your heart out.

As a matter of fact, go ahead and watch it you selfish ingrate. You may learn something about humility and unconditional love.

I scold because I'm guilty of the same neglect.

Liberally borrowing from the themes of Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece Tokyo Story, Dörrie constructs a cross-cultural bittersweetness amongst the rocks of familial discord, sudden tragedy and the transient nature of existence. It veers close to maudlin sentimentality but continually steers you back on course with brilliantly timed emotional smackdowns.

An elderly couple - a staid civil servant (Rudi) and his wife (Trudi) - are living out their lives in a small German town. She has dutifully raised their three grown children and desires a more adventurous existence with her husband. This want is compounded when she learns (without her husband's knowledge) that he has less than a year to live.

We learn that despite their dissimilar levels of joie de vivre, they love each other very much. In fact, to a degree where Trudi feels that she does not really experience anything unless it is shared with her husband. And even though Rudi seems to take his wife for granted, he is a caring and affectionate man.

She plans to bring him out of his self-made cocoon with a trip to Japan to visit their transplanted son and see Mount Fuji, a dream she has always had.

He, being the practical dud that he is, suggests they visit their other two children in Berlin.

Thirty minutes into the story comes a game changing reveal on the level of Preminger's Laura. A doozy. Not to be spoiled here.

The remainder of the film is a realistically tough look at the separation that children and parents must inevitably experience as they all age, change roles and deal with life's damaging blows. Dörrie uses travel sequences, technological anxieties, cultural discomforts, art vs. philistinism, class distinctions, generation gaps and the passing seasonal beauty of nature itself to signify the morphing aspects of the characters' lives.

The film marvelously handles the difficult familial issues of loss and regret. The inconsideration and emotional presumptions we unthinkingly levy on our loved ones. It seeks answers to those strange mysteries found in the lives of those closest to us. The people we believe we know inside and out.

But, as Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) said in Miller's Crossing, "Nobody knows anybody. Not that well."

Ain't it the truth.