Kôhî jikô (2003) Reviews

• A transitional work but still Illuminating

  howard.schumann2004-10-04

  Acutely observed and exquisitely realized, Hou Hsiao-hsien's 16th film, Café Lumiére, is a loving tribute to the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu on the centenary of his birth. The film, the first by Hou to be shot in a foreign location, pays homage to Ozu by depicting themes repeated in many of his films: relationships between aging parents, the marriage plans of a grown child, the coming and going on trains, and the quiet contemplation of everyday life. The style, however, is still unmistakably Hou, with its long takes, extended silences, and focus on mundane conversations. In one scene inside a tempura shop, the camera simply observes people coming and going for several minutes while we hear the sound of plates clattering, and food being fried. Yo Hitoto is Yoko, a young Japanese writer who is researching the life of a real Taiwanese musician Jiang Wen-ye, who was popular in Japan during the 1930s. Yoko was raised by her uncle in Yubari but lives in Tokyo with her father and stepmother. She becomes friends with Hajime (Asano Tadanobu), the owner of a secondhand bookstore and they meet often in her favorite coffee shop, making small talk and enjoying the passing scene. He is a train buff who spends his days riding the subway, recording the sound of trains, public address announcements, and the conversations of passengers. Though they are best friends and not lovers, he is startled to find out that she is pregnant by a Taiwanese whom she does not want to marry. Yoko's father (Nenji Kobayashi) and stepmother (Kimiko Yo) urge her to marry though her father is uncommunicative in spite of his wife's best efforts to get him to open up. Oko's uncertainty about her parents demands for marriage is reminiscent of Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon, and other Ozu films on this subject. Café Lumiére pace is deliberate, painstakingly detailed, and without much narrative thrust but it may be the film that Ozu would have made if he lived in the modern age. Beautifully shot by Lee Ping-ping, the film allows us to view the world the characters inhabit, providing extraordinary details of Tokyo life including outlying districts such as Jimbocho, known for its many bookstores, and Kishibojin with its look of old Tokyo. Millennium Mambo may be considered minor Hou and Café Lumiére, transitional Hou but whatever category it is placed in, Hou's work, for me, is illuminating and unforgettable.

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• The light aroma lingers

  harry_tk_yung2005-04-25

  Café Lumiere is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's tribute the 100th birthday anniversary of Japanese master Ozu Yasujiro. Many reviewers have mentioned the signature static images and the "tatami-level" shots. Particularly noticeable in Café Lumiere is the focus on trains. The camera brings to the audience a parade of Tokyo's subway stations (underground and surfaced) as well as moving trains (inside and outside). One motif scene comes up regularly – a carefully framed crane shot of a busy intersection of several railway tracks at a river. The static picture, accentuated by the geometric beauty of tracks and bridges criss-crossing, is brought to life by trains passing in all directions, along the river and over it. We don't know where they come from or go to. This perhaps is the image of life that director Hou wants us to take away when we emerge from the cinema. The story, if there's any to speak of, is cross-sectional rather than linear. We see a point in the life of young writer-researcher Yoko where she is at a cross-road, just pregnant but determined to be a single mother (because her Taiwanese boyfriend is too much of his mother's boy). Her traditional father and stepmother are obviously disturbed. On Yoko's part, she is more disinterested than alienated. Her stepmother, mind you, is not the Cinderella stereotype but appears to be a sensible and kindly woman. The communication gap between Yoko and her parents however cannot be more obvious. Their sole conversation topic seems to be the parent's kind concern that she should eat well, and the conversation is forever punctuated by silences. Her revelation of her pregnancy to them could not have been more complacent, as if she was just telling them that she had flu. The most mesmerising thing about Café Lumiere is Yoko's relationship with a good friend Hajime, a bookstore owner who has so much of a passion in his hobby of locomotives that he goes all over Tokyo with a tape recorder just to record the sound of passing trains at different locations. Hajime however is not a weirdo as his unorthodox hobby suggests, but the exact opposite, a most gentle, sensitive and considerate young man, who seems to be providing a shoulder for Yoko to lean on in her troubled times. Their relationship somehow reminds me of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, although the circumstances are miles apart. And yet, there are similarities, in two people genuinely interested in what each other is doing and share blissful, quiet moments together in each other's company. While the fact that they deeply care for each other is obvious in Sunrise/Sunset, it's a lot more subtle in Café Lumiere. Consider one scene, when Yoko is sleeping in her apartment with a light flu. Door bell and knocking go on alternatively for quite a long time and the audience would probably assume that it's the expectant visit of her out-of-town parents. It turns out to be Haijme bringing over some graphics on his computer notebook to show her. Barely able to keep her eyes open after struggling to open the door, Yoko asks politely "Can I go back to sleep?" and Haijme replies "Of course". The next scene shows Yoko waking up, apparently much recovered, and a bowl of noodles placed in front of her. After the nourishment, she proceeds to enthusiastically look at Haijme's computer graphic on trains, engaging him in a lot of questions. Whenever we see the two together, it's in mundane, ordinary daily existence (a lot of that in Café Lumiere), but with the screen running over with a relaxing mood of comforting tenderness. In the very last scene, after a typically uncommunicative visit from her parents, Yoko goes over to the bookstore to find that Haijme is out there somewhere recording the sound of trains again. A little lost, she gets on a train, sits down (she usually stands) and falls into a nap. In comes Haijme, spots her and moves to stand in front of her, without waking her. In the next scene, we see the two of them getting off the train onto the platform. He continues with his recording while she stands a little distance away, with an almost indiscernible smile of contentment. Minimalism at its best.

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• Cafe Lumiere, and trains passing in daylight

  adrian-1932006-12-31

  This little film has all the treatment and feel of a low-budget indie production, but it's actually directed by well known Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou, commissioned by Japan for the 100th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu birthday. And it's a perfect homage to Ozu, "more Japanese" than a Japanese film could have been (notes one commentator). Partway through this film I noticed something strange about the relations between actors. I don't think there's a single reaction shot in this film. Certainly no use of the shot-reaction shot technique that's conventionally used by film makers to get across how actors feel about each other. Shot: actor's attention directed to another actor. Reverse shot: other actor's face gives away the relationship between the two. The shot/reverse shot technique seems to work so well, I think, not so much because it's hard to put two actors on the screen at the same time, but because we (audience) relate uniquely to the face and emotion of a single face, and it's that--the film's relationship to its audience through the camera, which places the audience in relation to actors on the screen, that motivates an emotional response in the viewer that's always different with one face on screen than with two or more. Cafe Lumiere contains no shot/reverse shot sequences. In fact the actors don't make eye contact. And this decision, conscious or not, creates a film in which its characters are always in a scene. Even when they are alone together in the smallest of bookstores, we are given a scene and not a relationship. The camera's still disposition to scenes, urban and interior, captures a landscape of objects and places through which the trapped love of our two lead characters journey in pursuit of a way to connect. Their affections for each other play like muted horns amidst a jingle of train station announcements and contemporary piano movements, there but not together. They are like two passengers, at times on parallel trains (and this is the film's crucial scene), traveling in the same direction but separated by the window panes (pains) through which they direct their looks in a longing to collapse the space between the tracks, able to make the journey, but not together. Beneath the film's unfocused care and tenderness is the story of Yoko's adoption, her pregnancy, and her decision to repeat her own past by bringing up the child without a father. And her friend's (non-lover's) silent yearning, "at the edge," as he puts it in one scene, pictured in a rendering of his own (yes the actor actually made that drawing) as a lonely fetus (perhaps crying, he notes) in an eyeball surrounded by trains and tracks, alluding of course to suicide, preoccupied with a passion for recording trains and their sounds in order to capture evidence (he notes, and does he mean, of his death, should he join his trains on the tracks?)... This is a great little film about hesitation and the desire to overcome it, a film that leaves open the possibility of redemption and which attaches it to the younger generation, who in their innocence and freedom might stand a better chance than the bound generation that brought them into the world to begin with.

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• Ozu is dead.

  danielhsf2005-09-10

  Ozu is dead. If there's one thing that Hou manages to prove in his tribute to Ozu's centennial, it is that Ozu is dead. Never is there going to be another man who can portray human relationships in the same light as Ozu. The same steadfastness they have as they try as hard as they can to hold on to each other; the sadness they feel when having to leave the family; the difficulties of living together in one household; the moments of regret that they have when one of their family has to leave; and their final acceptance that these are all but a part of life. Hou shows us a Japan that has changed so much from the Japan that Ozu so painstakingly tries to hold on to by capturing it on his camera. Each tear, each regret, each joy is now lost in a world that tries too hard to change. Wim Wenders first laments this in Tokyo Ga on how banal Tokyo has become and how much of an imitation culture new Japanese culture is. Cafe Lumiere, while not being as impassioned as Wender's masterpiece, is every bit as pensive about its regret of the passing on of the old Japan that Ozu loves so much. While in Ozu's films, a pregnancy would herald a big event in a family's lifeline, in Cafe Lumiere it is merely a passing thought. While in Ozu's films, the lead character (most often played by goddess-like Hara Setsuko) would usually be self-sacrificial as best she can to ensure the family's togetherness, here Yoko is determined on striking out as a single mother, regardless of her father's silently burning disapproval. Undeniably, Hou doesn't pass much judgment on his characters. In fact the portrayal of Yoko only shows her as a very modern and much independent Japanese female that is fast becoming the norm in Japan. The female who does not want to be tied down and holds little regard of familial values. And definitely, it would be seen as regressive should Japan return to the past for the sake of the days when family was at the core of societal structure. After all, the definition of progress is change right? Yet, one can't help but feel the absence of Ozu in this movie, the absence that makes its tone all the more poignant in spite of its spots of warmth. Ozu seems to be like the ghost of Maggie Cheung in 2046, or the missing woman in L'Avventura; he is not there, and is never referenced in the movie, and yet, the opening shot of the movie and a few scenes of familial warmth gives one such a pang in the heart that is so distinctly Ozu. In fact, that Hou decides to have many shots of trains departing and leaving and criss-crossing each other in modern Tokyo, and letting us hear the all-familiar sounds of trains going across railways that is so definitive of Ozu's films, only shows that he is fully aware of this fact, and, like Wenders, is seeking to find what little there is left of Ozu's spirit. In the overwhelmingly modern backdrop of Tokyo, we see how something of the past, like the cafe that Yoko hunts for, that some people so want to preserve, has been turned into another urban development project. However, in the film, Hou also shows us that although the landscape of Tokyo now denies Ozu, there is still decidedly some of Ozu's warmth in human relationships. Like how Yoko still feels the same kindred spirit as she tucks in to her favorite dish that her mother has prepared; seeking out old sights in her hometown, sights that remind her of times when she was a kid and still not thinking of independence. And just perhaps, in showing all this, Hou is persuading us to accept life as what we can, just as how the people in Ozu's movies eventually have to accept the loss of one of their family members. I went to Tokyo last June and coincidentally, Kamakura was part of the itinerary. I remember how excited I was, since Kamakura was many a setting for Ozu's films, and it was the place where Ozu was buried after his death. As I reached the Kamakura station on the Enoshima metroline, my heart was all awashed with glee to see that the station looked almost exactly the same as it looked in Ozu's films. The same old signboard, and the same railway tracks against looming mountains. And yet as I walked around Kamakura (now a popular tourist spot for its famous Daibutsu or Big Buddha), I couldn't help but notice how foreign it was despite its quaint Japanese-ness. There were so many tourists walking around the town amidst its quiet surbuban houses, and so many signboards blaring English signs. In a bid to find Ozu's grave, every time I saw a cemetery I would go over to look if there was a tablet that has only a 'mu' character on it. But I never found it. Sigh.

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• Another masterpiece from Hou Hsiao-hsien

  PenGuhWin2005-07-23

  Hou Hsiao-hsien's previous film, "Millennium Mambo," was filled with pulsating colors and rhythms - "Cafe Lumiere," on the other hand, offers us classical piano music, bookshops, and trains... lots of trains. To me, the plot, and in some way the characters, seemed very fluid - you never knew where the film was leading you, and (as in many of Hou's films) it's left up to you to form your own opinion about the characters. "Cafe Lumiere" is a very languid, soothing film, filled with marvelous images and memorable vignettes. It is not a good place for a newcomer to Hou's films to start (try "Mambo" for that), and not a good film for the impatient. However, if you approach it in the right frame of mind, you will find yourself somehow transported into another person's life for a couple of hours, and come out with the film rattling around your subconscious for days afterward.

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