Cherry blossoms & demons
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Cherry blossoms & demons |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2019 |
| length | 116 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Doris Dörrie |
| script | Doris Dörrie |
| production |
Viola Jäger , Anita Schneider |
| music | Karsten Fundal |
| camera | Hanno Lentz |
| cut | Frank Mueller |
| occupation | |
| |
Cherry & Demons is a Drama by Doris Dorrie from the year 2019 and the continuation of Cherry Blossoms - Hanami (2008).
action
Ten years after the death of his parents Trudi and Rudi, Karl Angermeier's life is like a disaster area: the formerly successful banker is unemployed and depressed. Due to his addiction, the alcoholic has only regulated contact under state supervision with his wife Anita and daughter Mia. When he reaches for the bottle again after a failed attempt to be close to his daughter on her birthday, Yu suddenly appears at his door, whom he last met after the funeral service for his father in Japan. In her endeavor to lead Karl out of the depths of his soul, Yu visits his abandoned parents' house in rural Schongau with him . Once there, Karl is confronted with real demons and ghosts who have haunted him since his own difficult childhood. Again and again his parents appear to him, who confront their frightened son with reproaches and worries.
During a joint visit to Neuschwanstein Castle , Karl meets his sister-in-law Emma, who is employed there and is plagued by grief herself: Since her husband Klaus has made a career as a member of a right-wing populist party as a regional politician, her liberal son Robert has barricaded himself in his room in the hope of so to persuade his father to quit the party. When Klaus meets his brother at home, there are serious disputes, whereupon Karl storms out of the house. Meanwhile, Karl and Yu, who lovingly cares for him, are steadily approaching each other. When she dances in front of him and strips down to her underwear, however, he rejects her advances and points out his feelings of inferiority. A little later, after another hallucination, Karl suspects that his nephew wants to commit suicide. At the last minute he arrives at his brother's house, where he breaks down Robert's door and prevents him from plotting to commit suicide.
On the way home, Karl remains drunk on the forest floor, where he suffers severe frostbite and is later found. In the hospital, the doctors inform his siblings Karolin and Klaus that he can no longer breathe on his own and can only be kept alive with the help of machines. When the family came to Karl's bedside to switch off the equipment, however, he suddenly showed movement again and for a short time could be released into the caring care of his family, who through Karl's fate found each other again for the first time after years of estrangement. Only at home, however, does Karl find out that his penis had been amputated because of his frostbite. Disoriented, he flees to Japan, where he hopes to find Yu, who disappeared after his accident. In a boarding house he meets her grandmother, who takes care of him and a little later reveals to him that Yu had followed her depressed mother into death years before.
Reviews
Michael Meyns von Filmstarts described Cherry Blossoms & Demons as "a late, unusual sequel". Dörrie's production “does not always come off smoothly, and the interweaving of Bavarian down-to-earthness and Japanese spirituality occasionally bumps up and down. But Dörrie still manages to make even drastic script turns appear casually and compellingly. ”Dörrie's latest trip to Japan continues“ her successful film Cherry Blossoms - Hanami with the next generation of the Angermeier family, and it doesn't always go smoothly, but mostly typically German and typically Japanese motifs combined in a stimulating way ”.
"No Dörrie film has so far strayed so much between the surreal and the realism, intersecting the time levels, turning the inner chaos of the main character outwards in fragmented images," said Christina Bylow in her review for the Berliner Zeitung . “When Doris Dörrie sends Germans to Japan, she leaves them with the incomprehensible look, the confusion. It turns them into learners, regardless of their age, and that seems to be the only antidote to what torments all these characters: fear is the block that sits in so many Dörrie characters ”.
Peter Osteried, editor of the media service teleschau , found that Cherry Blossoms & Demons is a completely different film than its predecessor: “One that tries to combine Far Eastern spirituality with a Western story. This is an interesting, but also challenging approach, because this film, whose story defies a stringent narrative, is not really entertaining in the true sense of the word ”. Dörrie makes this story “more than just a self-discovery trip. Rather, this is a story that has a supernatural touch that remains difficult to grasp ”. You can feel that the director prefers to improvise in order to find authenticity “that cannot be planned”. This can also be felt with Cherry Blossoms & Demons , "who was shot with a digital camera and knows how to use the peculiarities of this format". For example, Dörrie plays with alienating images.
The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) in Wiesbaden gave the comedy a particularly valuable rating and wrote: “Dörrie's feature film is not easy fare. And that is not due to the running time of 111 minutes, but to the complexity of the drama [... ] Dörrie's story is exciting, but rarely linear […] Dörrie skillfully plays with the meaning of liberation and sexuality. Their dramaturgy demands, seems nightmarish and intoxicating, never easy. Cherry blossoms & demons demands a high level of concentration from its recipients. The drama leaves its audience as seekers for long stretches. A key to better understanding may be hidden in every picture, in every motif, but it is only the entirety of what is shown that helps decipher the film […] Cherry Blossoms & Demons is anything but a one-dimensional film, Dörrie's drama has its audience certainly still under control days after sighting ”.
Web links
- Cherry & Demons in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Cherry blossoms & demons at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Certificate of Release for Cherry Blossoms & Demons . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF).
- ↑ Ghosts in the Bavarian Forest . Filmstarts.de . Retrieved March 11, 2019.
- ↑ "Cherry Blossoms & Demons": The story of "Cherry Blossoms - Hanami" continues . Berlin newspaper . Retrieved March 11, 2019.
- ↑ The spirits he called . Mittelbayerische.de. Retrieved March 11, 2019.
- ↑ FBW report . In: German film and media evaluation . FBW-Filmbeval.de. Retrieved March 11, 2019.