The German film ‘Fukushima, Mon Amour’, directed by Doris Dörrie, is a two-hander, a movie for two actors/actresses, with the other actors playing only functional roles. It starts with Marie, a German lady, going with the organization ‘Clowns4’ to cheer up the refugees in the post-tsunami shelter in Fukushima. Still grieved by an aborted wedding, Marie cannot derive satisfaction from entertaining the tsunami survivors.When she is considering whether she should go back to Tokyo, Satom, an old lady among the refugees, asks her to drive her to the heavily radiated forbidden Exclusion Zone. There Satom is determined to stay and rebuild her ruined home. Marie decides to stay with her. The rest of the story tells how the two ladies get along with each other despite the culture gap between them.
The black-and-white images of the traumatic landscape with the presence of countless bags of toxic nuclear waste are sadly reminiscent of the disaster a few years before. However, the movie is not meant to bring the audience to tears. On the contrary, there are parts that display a sense of humour. Satom, who claims to be the region’s last geisha, is keen on influencing Marie with her refined culture. While she considers herself elegant, she calls Marie an elephant because of her height and clumsy gait. The way she sprinkles salt on herself and on Marie to ward off the evil spirits also creates cripples of laughter among the audience. In fact, the two actresses’ realistic performance makes the audience forget that their roles are the only two fictitious characters in the story.
The evil spirits, which seem so real as to be a bit disturbing, are assumedly found in the two ladies’ dreams. Obviously, this is due to their guilty conscience; Satom cannot banish the thought of her own selfishness in desperately seeking survival disregarding her apprentice’s safety while Marie is haunted by memories of her disloyalty to her fiancé just on the eve of their wedding. They remain conscience stricken until each faces up to her own fault. And with a resultant calm state of mind, they finally bid each other good-bye. The message here is that our sadness may have been caused by our own folly rather than a natural disaster and that there is always something we can and should do to overcome the sense of guilt and grief.
Despite its lack of entertainment appeal, the movie is highly credited for its psychological complexity and depth. There is no wonder that it is the winner of an Oscars award.
