ENLIGHTENMENT GUARANTEED Directed by Doris Dorrie With Uwe Ochsenknecht, Gustav Peter Wohler The Screen NR 109 min
Imagine if you will a German Zen comedy.
All right. It's a lot better than it sounds. Veteran director Doris Dorrie, who made her reputation in 1985 with Men., matches up her frequent collaborator Uwe Ochsenknecht with newcomer Gustav Peter Wohler as a pair of bumbling German brothers who travel to Japan for a retreat in a Buddhist monastery. Both actors do a wonderful job.
The story divides into three parts. The first, and funniest, introduces us to the brothers at home in Munich, where Uwe is a salesman in a kitchen showroom, and Gustav is a Feng Shui consultant. Uwe has a wife and four screaming children, and comes home one day to find his wife fed up and gone, taking the kids and the furniture with her. He cries drunkenly on Gustav's shoulder, and begs his brother to take him along on his long-planned trip to the Monzen Monastery outside of Tokyo. When he sobers up the next day and realizes the folly of his request, it's too late - Gustav has bought him a ticket, and there's no getting out of it.
Part two chronicles the misadventures of the brothers in the neon jungle of Tokyo, and while the humor holds up fairly well, it begins to show its age and effort as it dips into territory covered many times in movies like The Out-of-Towners. In material that is more gag-based than reality-based, they get lost, lose their money and credit cards, and wind up sleeping in cartons and working in a German beer hall on the Ginza Strip to hustle the train fare to the monastery.
Part three is at the monastery, and this is where you'll need all your reserves of enlightenment to keep laughing. Life in a monastery is made up of a lot of repetitive routines, and they are repeated and repeated here. While this makes for good enlightenment, it makes for slow comedy. But the opportunity for a look at life inside a Zen monastery is some recompense. Interestingly, Uwe - the loutish salesman with no background or interest in Eastern philosophy - takes to the life better than his brother. There's a sort of Zen Murphy's Law at work in the monastery, and what can go wrong for them does go wrong. But by degrees they both learn to let go and accept the peace and beauty of the here and now, and emerge from Monzen very different from the men who went in.
Dorrie teaches graduate film students in Munich, and she was inspired to make this when her students balked at her challenge to them to make a movie using the new Digital technology. "Okay, if you won't do it," she thought, "I will." The medium fit the meditative message perfectly: she was able to "leave everything behind," and make her movie using a single cameraman and a crew that fit into one car. But the look of the movie reads much richer than such simplicity would lead one to expect. Cameraman Hans Karl Hu has captured some wonderful shots, including a classic overhead shot of pedestrians crossing a busy downtown Tokyo intersection. And Dorrie reminds us of what she's up to technically by having Uwe record their adventures with his own hand-held digital video camera.
As the Abbot of Monzen explains, enlightenment is not the achievement of something, but the absence of something. As the movie moves along, it discards its laughs along with the other worldly baggage, but a lot of quiet smiles remain. And Santa Fe, a veritable hotbed of enlightenment, should provide the ideal audience for this story.
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