Cherry Blossoms

Life is such a disappointment.
Yes.

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story

Cherry Blossoms, scheduled to open here March 6th, was pushed for the last couple of months for reasons I have never learned. No matter. I was in no hurry. Finally it's arrived, a movie I have not seen and yet feel I know, as a distant cousin. Urbane children of an elderly rural couple find little time in their harried lives for parents they no longer relate to: quest for children's personal fulfillment blowing the parents apart. I've seen this movie before.

I've always been fascinated by movie provenance - be they remakes, sequels, prequels, spinoffs or plagiarisms. On March 18th, I blogged an item on Hollywood begats (read it here: http://peterspovblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/redux-begats.html). With The Soloist, I wrote last week on the series of L.A.Times newspaper columns which spawned a book, several documentary items and then the movie. Each dealing, in its own medium with the awesome mystery that is schizophrenia.

We all enjoyed comparing the themes, approaches, and performances of 12, the Russian movie remake of Sidney Lumet's 1957 Twelve Angry Men. Cherry Blossoms has yet another Hansel unt Gretl trail of provenance behind it: in 1937, in the heart of the depression, Leo McCarey directed Make Way for Tomorrow, a little known Hollywood gem many consider the greatest ever made about the plight of the elderly: when an elderly couple lose their home, their five ungrateful children, now grown-up and married, are far too self-absorbed to care for their parents.

Talk about provenance: Make Way for Tomorrow came from a play, which in turn was adapted from a novel. Here's the lead from the NYT movie review of 1937 : Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow has three qualities rarely encountered in the cinema: humanity, honesty, and warmth. These precious attributes, nurtured and developed by the best script Vina Delmar has written, by Mr. McCarey's brilliant direction, and by the superb performances of Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, and the rest, have produced an extraordinarily fine motion picture, one that may be counted upon to bid for a place among the "ten best" of 1937.
Orson Welles reportedly said that it would make a stone cry. Documentairan Errol Morris quipped: the most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly.

I remember vaguely seeing Make Way for Tomorrow on television decades ago and thinking it very old fashioned. Now, I'd give my eye teeth to rescreen it with fresh eyes. I've searched without success for a dvd or vhs. As far as I can see, Make Way for Tomorrow has been dropped down the oubliette of technological memory. Prints exist but we have no access to them, discarded much the way the elderly occasionally are when they're no longer of much use to their kids. Not surprisingly, while it flopped at the box office then, Make Way for Tomorrow lives on in cinemaniac memory. Nevertheless, you can bet Hollywood isn't actively optionning a remake today. When he won the Oscar that year, for a Cary Grant/Irene Dunne divorce comedy The Awful Truth, McCarey quipped: "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture."

But somebody else, Swiss director Doris Dörrie has. She calls it Cherry Blossoms.

Which brings us to Yasujiro Ozu's 1951 Tokyo Story, modeled on McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (which Ozu claimed he never saw.) Ozu sets his wretched offspring story in post-WW II Japanese reconstruction. An old couple living in the port city of Onomichi take their first trip to Tokyo, visit their married (ungrateful) children: a doctor and a beautician—both somewhat put out by their parents' visit. Endless critics and filmmakers speak of Tokyo Story in complete awe and admiration. It's available both at Boîte Noire and the Fort Movieland.

Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms (just over 2 hours long), then takes two classics, an homage to both McCarey and Ozu masterpieces while making her own movie. I have not yet seen Cherry Blossoms, nor feel any urgent need to do so. While this film and social mores are different (American becomes Japanese becomes Swiss), I anticipate yet another touching portrait of awkward love and understanding for ghastly offspring that leaving me both elated and devastated..

Movies get us looking at our world through different optics: when when the same movie gets translated into three separate decades: the 1930s Hollywood movie becomes the 1950s Japan story 21st century becomes the 2009 Switzerland production, we pick up cultural themes and variations that can't help but be evocative.