Schnee im Wind (2000)

Schnee im Wind: Directed by Shinji Sômai. With Kyôko Koizumi, Tadanobu Asano, Kumiko Asô, Akira Emoto. An alcoholic civil servant wakes up under a cherry tree in Tokyo next to a bar hostess with whom he’s impulsively made a suicide pact. Though he’s now changed his mind, he agrees to travel with her to Hokkaido, her preferred site for ending it all. An elegiac road movie of restrained emotion.

“Waking up in a public park with no trousers on and an unknown woman lying with her head in your lap isnu0026#39;t the best way to start a relationship, even less so when Renji Sawaki (Tadanobu Asano), a junior government minister, discovers that the woman Yuriko (Kyokon Koizumi) is the hostess at a u0026quot;pink clubu0026quot;, and that he has agreed a suicide pact with her. In the sober cold light of day Sawaki thinks better of it, but as his personal life and career are in bad shape, he decides it might be an opportune moment to get away from things and takes up Yurikou0026#39;s offer to travel to the remote island of Hokkaido, where she hopes to be reunited with a daughter she left behind as a baby five years previously.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe reasons for this unlikely alliance arenu0026#39;t immediately clear and Somaiu0026#39;s complicated, challenging structure doesnu0026#39;t help. Two threads, occasionally interweaving, move backwards in time in a disorienting manner, tracing the events that have brought both characters together in despair. The main road-movie thread of Yuriko and Sawaki travelling to Yurikou0026#39;s hometown in Hokkaido is also a difficult journey – with two very different personalities, each with their own problems and unable to find any solace in each otheru0026#39;s company, the journey isnu0026#39;t exactly a forward looking one either. The outlook in Kaza-hana may be constantly bleak, but the emotional pay-off makes it worthwhile, and the performance of the two leads is outstanding.”