Veteran German director Doris Dörrie pays homage to Ozu’s Tokyo Story with this drama about an elderly German couple (Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner) who travel to Berlin to visit a son and daughter after the wife is told her husband has a terminal illness. As in Ozu’s drama, their indifferent children make them feel like nuisances, so they decide to travel to the Baltic Sea; after the wife suddenly dies, the husband’s grief compels him to visit their youngest son in Tokyo, a place she’d always longed to see. This may lack the understated pathos of Ozu’s somber masterpiece, but it’s still a moving meditation on aging and loss, and Wepper and Elsner are unforgettable. In English and subtitled German and Japanese.
Cherry Blossoms
2 hours 7 min