Movie Reviews from Hell
Enlightenment Guaranteed
| Director: | Doris Dörrie |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2001 |
| Rating: |
 |
This spiritually comic German film directed by Doris Dörrie tells a tale about the mishaps of two brothers who find themselves lost -- and then resort to finding themselves -- in Japan.
One brother, who has been planning this trip for a year or so, practices Zen Buddhism at home and wishes to stay in a real monastery in Japan to find enlightenment (or at least an authentic taste of what it takes to get there.)
The other brother, who is a real estate agent, came home from work one day to find his wife, kids, furniture and possessions cleaned out and a short note on the kitchen floor ending with "I hope our lawyers can find a way to settle this peacefully."
After a drunken, sobbing visit to his Zen brother's home, events turn out that he is coming with his brother to Japan.
Well, they arrive in Japan, and basically all hell breaks loose.
The parts I wanted to particularily comment about are something that never struck me before (oddly enough) - I've wanted to visit Japan myself for some time. This is a great movie to watch if you plan to visit Japan. You'll see how screwed you can be if you don't pay extremely careful attention to what you're doing (and of course, if you don't know the language or how to read Japanese).
I have been to Paris, France, and I found it very easy to find my way around and get the most basic necessesities. But then again, even though I don't speak a lick of French, the alphabet is still Latin, and you can always sort of pronounce the names to yourself and memorize them in your own way.
In Japan, you're not dealing with a Latin alphabet. There are no recognizable characters. Even little things like departure times at the airport terminals are four digits followed by a series of foreign symbols. This movie does a wonderful job of showing how lost, alienated and desperate you could get in a place like that - even just as a weekend tourist!
The other part I particularily appreciated was the authenticity of the footage. This film was shot in video, no doubt probably digital camcorders. If I'm correct, most of at least the outdoor audio was taken just using the microphone on the camcorder, or a semi-grade mic that attaches to it (e.g. a Sony shotgun mic for their accessory shoe.) The beauty of this is you get a really nice, unfiltered (in the Hollywood sense of "filter") view of Japan. You can hear all of the ambience, the hustle, and feel like you are there. It much looks like a home video of a trip to Japan (albeit with steady camera shots), but the rawness of the footage is what makes it so special.
I'm not going to reveal much else about the movie (really, the last two paragraphs are all I wanted to share), because this is a little gem that you should definitely see for yourself, if not have in your video collection.