Autumn Blossoms Movie Review

Petals and sex are just starting to go together in movies. In American Beauty, Mena Suvari's roses made sure we knew how great everything was underneath them. In Autumn Blossoms, the flower is the crysanthamum, and two aged blossom makes aspire to provide them for Misha -- a 19-year-old hooker/cellist -- to bathe in. The two fight over flowers, try to keep secret fertilzer recipies, and end up being the envy of all crysanthamum planters in their town.

Needless to say, I would rather watch American Beauty, a decent film that deals with flowers and is actually fun to watch, than sit through another showing of Autumn Blossoms, a film that is about flowers and is about as much fun as a root canal. Autumn Blossoms is one of the foreign films that gives foregin films a bad name. It is slow, drawn out, ultra-bohemian, and incredibly highbrow. Instead of accepting the simple fact that a cow on a rural road moves faster than this movie, writer-director Shunsaku Irehata opts for the unoriginal. He inserts subplot after subplot of every moralistic story that he can, from the desperation that leads a middle class 19-year-old to sell herself to the incredible frustration that a lighter-skinned Nipponese child felt in the post W.W.II. years.

As far as the question of whether or not I liked the movie goes, if you don't know by now, you haven't been reading this review.

Then again, I'm not Nipponese. If I were Nipponese, if I considered the crysanthamum a national passtime, and if I had absolutely nothing to do other than watch high-concept low-execution cinema, than I might have enjoyed this film. As it is, it is simply a waste of your time.

Aka Atsumono.