Modest, quiet, contemplative, bittersweet tale of the loss of a life partner and the living-on of the departed one (however briefly) in the surviving one. The partners are a cozy old Bavarian couple, a stick-in-the-mud husband chained to routine and resistant to change, and his self-repressed Japanophile wife whose abandoned aspirations as a Butoh dancer are commemorated in a photo flipbook, and who now keeps from her husband the grim news that he is terminally ill, and prods him diplomatically to visit their unappreciative children. (Since one of the children lives in Tokyo, the resemblance to Ozu’s Tokyo Story cannot be coincidental.) Director Doris Dörrie, who just prior to this made the documentary on the Zen chef, How to Cook Your Life, here carries further her interest in things Buddhist: the cherry blossoms of the title are said to be “the most beautiful symbol of impermanence,” but the ephemeral mayfly, if not physically more beautiful, is more poetic. And her attention to the peripheral life around her central characters — the mosaic of life, the connectedness of life, the man on the street, the cat, the insect — widens the view to a truly spiritual perspective. Elmar Wepper, Hannelore Elsner, Aya Irizuki. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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