Inside and outside dreams said Princess Haiku

Cherry Blossoms is a film of great sensibility

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I recently viewed the film, Cherry Blossom by Doris Dorrie, an independent German filmmaker. The film touched me so profoundly that I saw it three times and found it to be the equivalent of a "Buddhist slap." While it deals with the tragedy of human relationships and our blundering inability to be present with and for the ones we love, it is not depressing. It's final message is that by entering grief and journeying through it we can find spiritual insight to connect with selfless love. We are all condemned to the sorrows of temporal existence but ultimately aesthetic beauty and acceptance of natural cycles of life and death lead us to transcendence. The film is enhanced by gorgeous cinematography, music and Butoh dance.

After seeing the film I looked for reviews and was disappointed that by and large it's spiritual depth was overlooked and that it was panned as a "feminist" movie perhaps because in this misogynistic era a woman produced it. There were no polemics in what I would call the Buddhist perspective of the film.I saw every character in the film as representing a different aspect of myself. It's really quite remarkable and I encourage all of you to see it. I assure you, you will look more carefully at the ones you love after you see it.

This is a snippet of a review that I did like," With her newest Japan film, “Cherry Blossoms” (which has its New York theatrical premiere on Friday), Ms. Dörrie reconfigures the wrenching parent-child tensions of “Tokyo Story,” the 1953 masterpiece of Yasujiro Ozu. Departing from the formal rigors of Ozu’s postwar reconstruction drama, Ms. Dörrie brings her trademark empathy and humor to the plight of an elderly Bavarian couple. Trudi and Rudi (Hannelore Elsner and Elmar Wepper) visit a son and daughter in Berlin who are too distracted by family and work to give their parents their due. The indignities continue in Tokyo, where Rudi is ignored by an expatriate son and, as consolation, nurtures a surrogate relationship with a teenage Butoh dancer.

Doris Dorrie is a very gifted filmmaker and I look forward to seeing other films she has made and will follow her in the future.

Note: film trailer in my video bar on right side of blog

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Xiaolu Guo, serves up a tantalizing dish of dream and pickled seaweed in her new novel,"A Concise Chinese-English dictionary for Lovers."

"A concise Chinese-English dictionary for Lovers," by Xiaolu Guo is an excellent first novel. Guo serves up a tantalizing dish of dreams and pickled seaweed in her portrait of a young Chinese student in London, pursuing love, language and fine cuisine.

Both love and language are equally incomprehensible in Guo's postmodern reality that strips sexuality down to essentials and sentiment to satire. With her little Chinese-English dictionary in tow at all times, Guo's character pursues the same enigmatic and elusive language of love, that leaves all of us bewildered.

Guo's earthy and intellectual prose is reminiscent of the late Marguerite Duras with a splash of Colette. The novel's blend of satire and poetic meditation has a startling ability to ask existential questions without artifice.

Within a few days of arriving in London, the student casually appropriates a worldly, older bisexual lover. The narrative difficulties of this avant-garde relationship are obvious and the erotic fruit discovered, is as random as a ripe pear falling from a tree near the Metro. The young woman enters the discourse of sensuality and sexuality as candidly, literally and without preconception as she enters language.

As the the relationship falters, the student is sent away, on a five week train trip to other European cities for the purpose of experiencing aloneness. This novel is not only about a Chinese student coping with twin difficulties of language and cultural interpretation, but about disconnects that we all experience between feeling, thought, language and love. It has been a while since I have discovered such a gifted young writer.

Four Flower Petals