Okay, I gotta tell y’all about a movie I saw the other day.
“Kirschblüten und Dämonen” (english: “Cherry Blossoms and Demons”).
If you don’t want spoilers for this truly wild ride, by all means, go see it yourself, if you have a high tolerance for boredom and bullshit. Because I’m about to spoil the shit out of this movie. It’s stayed with me for about a month now, because I cannot get over just how completely fucking crazy it is.
[spoiler]Now let me start by saying that it’s entirely likely that part of the reason I didn’t get it is because I missed that it was a sequel to an existing movie, “Cherry Blossoms”. But even missing that context, this was easily one of the more bizarre movies I’ve seen since… ever. I don’t even know where to start with this one.
The protagonist is a heavy alcoholic - like, “so bad he can’t stay sober for one day to be allowed to see his daughter”. He’s wallowing in despair when a bizarre, quirky, truly weird japanese girl from Tokyo so deep in the “manic pixie dream girl” mold she could basically be Zooey Deschanel in yellowface shows up out of nowhere at his apartment. She knew his parents before they died and wanted to meet him, and this prompts him to take her back to his parent’s old country home in a small town, where he meets up with his dysfunctional family.
So far, so standard german drama. We get a look into how the family has been torn apart since their parents’ death, with nice little touches like the way our protagonist’s nephew has taken to never leaving his room and has had a swastika tattooed on his forehead in protest over his stepfather being part of the AfD (the current extremist right-wing party in Germany), which our protagonist responds to with stunned approval.
Throughout all of this, we deal with his guest from Toyko. She’s so quirky! And she also pulls him out of his shell! And makes him do things! And… encourages his heavy drinking? And tries to sleep with him out of fucking nowhere? Seriously, the scene where she strips down for him and tries to convince him to sleep with her comes absolutely out of fucking nowhere and feels like bizarre wish fulfillment… except that he can’t, because he has erectile dysfunction? It’s incredibly awkward.
And… is an evil spirit?
Yeah, see, this is where the movie starts getting weird. Well, weirder. During a trip to Schloss Neuschwanstein, our protagonist is accosted by a japanese tourist who warns him that she’s a demonic spirit, and draws a sign on his wrist with sharpie to protect him. It’s also here where we start seeing visions of our protagonist’s abusive parents, as well as a dark, shadowy demonic figure (realized with some thoroughly awful special effects that make it harder to take seriously than even the rest of the film) meant to display the protagonist’s struggles with alcoholism. It dives deep into magical realism, with the visions getting worse, until our protagonist admits he’s not ready to love Japanese Zooey Deschanel, at which point she runs away and disappears.
Then it takes a trip to fucking snooker loopy city.
Our protagonist gets a vision that his nephew is about to kill himself, so he runs for miles in the freezing cold, absolutely piss-drunk, to try to save him. He gets there, there’s nothing wrong, his relatives turn him away, he runs back through the forest, and collapses into a coma. And apparently dies.
The movie makes a big deal about how he’s not going to wake up, and how his apparent death impacts those around him, really making us think that he’s dead and that we’re approaching the end of the movie. This goes on for like 20 minutes of high drama, before, right before they pull the plug on him, he wakes up.
That’s really weird from a screenwriting perspective. The pacing gets completely fucked, even by the standards of an odd bavarian fantasy drama, as we slowly watch him recover, and discover that his dick was frozen off.
Yes, a major plot point in this movie involves our protagonist having his dick removed. After which we find out that all the talk beforehand about him not feeling like a “real man” and his parents’ constant berating of him as a “mommy’s boy” and that he should “man up” was actually important, because… Well, he doesn’t feel like a man, and maybe he should try not being a man.
I’m cis myself, so this may not quite be “for me”, but let me just state that as someone who is unambiguously in favor of trans rights, this whole segment feels sloppy and poorly-handled, and I won’t speak further of it, beyond that a segment at the end, where he cries out that he wants to “finally live” will probably feel very poignant to former alcoholics and trans folks.
Then the film takes him to Japan, where he spends time searching for Japanese Zooey Deschanel. He finds his way to an inn, where the innkeeper seems to know something about her. There’s one more struggle with alcoholism, then he learns from the innkeeper that his manic pixie dream girl was, in fact, dead the whole time. Walked into the ocean and killed herself a year ago to the day, during a big japanese festival seemingly involving going back to the ocean and celebrating the dead.
At which point our protagonist goes to the ocean, is visited by her, and she asks him to join her… And then she tries to drown him. The last 5 minutes of the movie is taken up in no small part by our manic pixie dream girl (now revealed to be a ghost) attempting to violently drown our protagonist.
Jesus, what the fuck am I watching?
He ends up washed up on the beach, where she calls to him from the waves - “Won’t you join me? Don’t you love me?” And he shouts back, “Maybe someday! But for now I want to live! I finally want to start to live!”
And it ends there. Not a bad place to end, but fucking christ, “she was dead the whole time”?! Really?! That’s what we’re going with?![/spoiler]
What a fucking bizarre ride. Like, the pacing is all over the place, the tone wavers like our protagonist during a breathylizer test, and the whole thing is horribly confusing and bizarre… But I can’t help but come away with it feeling like the ending, as cliche’d as “she was dead the whole time” is, almost redeems it. It certainly stuck with me long enough to make me want to write half a goddamn book just explaining what the ever-loving hell I saw, so that’s nice. I can’t really recommend it other than in a “so bad it’s good” sense, and it is, for extended periods, a long and dull slog. It’s also very German. But for an experience of “holy shit, what the fuck did I just watch”, it’s hard to beat it.