Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Café Lumière / Japan / Taiwan / 2004

NYFF COVERAGE – From the appearance of the 1950’s vintage Shochiku logo before the opening credits, Hou Hsia-hsien’s Café Lumière announces itself as an ode to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. And through its fixation on trains, its geometrical compositions, and its extended scenes of sitting around the dinner table, Hou takes up and individualizes aspects of Ozu’s dependable style to create a portrait of Japanese life a century after the master director’s birth.

For the viewer familiar with Ozu’s work, it will be easy to spot the differences between the Tokyo of today as presented in Hou’s film and that of the 1940’s and 50’s found in the older director’s films. Hou’s heroine, Yoko, is not an office girl awaiting a marriage proposal, but a writer researching the life of a Taiwanese composer, Jiang Wen-Ye, who lived in Japan in the 1930’s. She is an independent woman, able to tell her parents with blithe self-confidence that she is pregnant and will raise her child without the help of her mama’s-boy Taiwanese boyfriend.

But in spite of her modernized social politics, Yoko has much in common with the more self-possessed of Ozu’s heroines. The Noriko characters portrayed by Setsuko Hara in such films as Early Summer and Tokyo Story have the same certainty about their fates that Yoko has, though they exercise it within a more rigorously defined social order. In Café Lumière, the last remnant of this hierarchy is found in Yoko’s family home, in her mother’s domestic labor and her father’s authoritative taciturnity. And it is here that Hou retains the hallmarks of Ozu’s visual style: low-angle compositions and the violation of the 180° line.

Elsewhere, Hou plays with the rigorous conventions of Ozu’s cinema, illuminating aspects of each director’s style. Both Hou and Ozu manipulate off-screen space, but whereas Ozu’s films do so through dialectically precise compositions which seem to control the amount of narrative information in a scene, Hou’s long takes are far more relaxed, even seemingly accidental, absorbing the action and dialogue of a sequence almost as a fly on a wall. Hou’s characters have a freedom of movement within the compositions that Ozu’s characters do not have, and in turn, Hou’s attitude towards Yoko is far more equivocal than the way in which Ozu depicts his Norikos.

For all the obvious differences in the styles of the two directors, Hou has clearly inherited the older director’s equanimity in the face of his characters’ familial tribulations. The long takes, open-ended scenes, and calm observation of the mundane are all characteristic of Hou’s style, but here the viewer senses how closely the film’s quiet rhythm matches that which is found in Ozu’s films and how this suggests a serene outlook on the characters’ problems. Like Ozu, Hou is content to simply watch the problems of interrelation sort themselves out. And like Yoko’s friend, Hajime, who wanders through railway stations collecting train sounds with his MD recorder, the film looks for small connections and fragments of significance in the comings and goings of everyday life.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Shochiku Films Ltd. 35mm print
12 Oct 2004 10:41 PM | Comments (1)

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1. teresa leone, qmul, london / 18 June 2005 / 7:47 PM

   Café Lumière

   This delightful and profund film mirrors, touches and crosses the life of a young, determinate woman. Musical as a song, it vibrates through the images of a busy, metropolitan Japan. Intense as life of every day, it glimpses at Yoko’s passionate work of research, her parents’ affection, the warmth of an unconventional friendship with Hajime, the colorful miniature-flat she lives in. Cafes, places, trains, more than words, reveal Yoko’s calm reaction to an unespected pregnancy.