Hanami - Kirschblüten: A German movie about Japan

Well, not exactly, but it is set in Japan and on a side note it deals with how someone traveling to a completely foreign culture copes with what he experiences abroad.
This movie "Hanami - Kirschblüten" by German director Doris Dörrie tells the story of an old couple living an ordinary life in the middle of nowhere of Bavaria, a very rural and conservative area of Germany. The wife Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) always wanted to visit Japan, since she had a strong interest in the culture and her son is working in Tokyo, and now she is confronted with a diagnosis of her husband's doctors telling her that he only has a few more months to live because he is suffering from cancer. She doesn't know how to cope with this and is not capable of telling him either. The husband Rudi (Elmar Wepper) is a normal civil servant who is afraifd of change and doesn't want to take risks at all, let alone travel to countries which are very far away. So she finally persuades him to visit their other children in Berlin and then take a trip to the Baltic Sea. While staying there Trudi suddenly dies leaving Rudi behind. He is struggling to keep up his daily life but in the end he has to understand that he needs to go to Japan to find out what his wife wanted to see there. Staying at his son's place (Maximillian Brückner) he experiences the vastness of Tokyo's daily (and night) life until he meets a young Butoh dancer, a form of dance his wife loved to do. He and Yu (Irizuki Aya) finally travel to see Mt Fuji, to fulfil the final wish of Rudi's wife.

At first I didn't really know what to expect since all the movies Doris Dörrie previously made weren't really my cup of tea. And at the beginning of the film I think I saw some tries of applying the technique of slow story telling, which one can find in Japanese cinema very often, to a German landscape and story. But as the movie went on I got sucked into the story more and more and all of a sudden this becomes something everyone can relate to. It's not only a movie which concentrates on the loss of a loved person, but at the same time it shows the difficulties parents and children have as time goes on. There is one scene were Rudi says the should just go back to Bavaria, because his children don't understand him and he doesn't understand them anymore. everything's fine, they are grown up and healthy and happy, that's it. His children take on a similar stance towards their parents, a stance which changes slowly with the death of the mother. And then in the second half of the movie there's the cultural difference between rural Germany and the pulsating metropolis of Tokyo.

This is a great movie with a brilliant cast (Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner are just great) with a very moving story which will get you thinking. I really recommend this one.