Kôhî jikô

I am a complete stranger to the works of Hsiao-hsien Hou and Yasujiro Ozu, but I would like to give my opinion on this anyway.

Probably like me, strangers to the works of those directors will find this slow-paced, a little repetitive (with Yoko constantly getting on/off trains) and somewhat confusing in places.

However, watching it I noticed how simply human it was. Most films have a terrible dilemma, which usually are very much unlike real life. But this is a very simple film, in which in the dilemma is simply that she is three months pregnant but does not wish to marry the father of the unborn child. Very human.

Another way it was a very human hearted film was the relationships between her parents - who watch their growing daughter with concern slowly become more independent - and between her bookshop friend - having little chats in the bookshop, not going into deep conversation but having light-hearted chat.

It didn't have to be complicated, and that's what I liked most about this film. It was something to relate to.

This film is definitely a piece of art. Notice how the only soundtrack within the whole picture (music-wise) is Weyne's pieces (that is, during the film - there is a song during the credits). This brings more emphasis on the humanity of the film and the artistic camera shots used. It's a very poetic and serene film.

Cafe Lumiere probably means more to Hsiao-hsien Hou and Yasujiro Ozu fans than it did to me. But it was a sweet film and I'd definitely recommend it to those who just want something simple and quiet to watch.

No user comments from me for some time. It would be arrogant to suggest that I have fans out there who may be speculating why someone who for so long penned at least one review each week has remained largely silent. I can hardly remember the last time my words evoked a response but if by any chance someone may be wondering about my silence I can answer in one word - disappointment. For me the main reason for writing criticism is to impart enthusiasm for works that have excited and moved me in some way which is why my eulogies far outweigh adverse comments. If I ever venture into the latter territory it is generally to question something that I feel has been excessively praised. What I find disappointing about many of the films I have chanced to see recently is that several have been made by directors I very much admire; the two Chinese titans for instance, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. How could the former for instance have conceived "Together", a facile foray into the "mystique" of musical talent beside which Wes Craven's "Music of the Heart" seems almost something of a masterpiece, or the latter's "House of Flying Daggers", yet another martial arts kids flick and nowhere near as much fun as Ryhei Kitamuru's "Azumi". Even Michael Haneke, the Austrian master of unease was way below his usual form with his Armageddon vision "Time of the Wolf" which somehow lacked the incisiveness that someone like Tarkovsky might have given to so potentially powerful a theme. I could go on and cite others but there would be little point. However the greatest disappointment of them all can hardly go unmentioned as it involves two directors whose work I absolutely reverence. I refer to the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-Hsien's tribute to the Japanese Yasujiro Ozu on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, "Cafe Lumiere". How could such a great opportunity so sadly misfire? Try as I can - I have given it three viewings - I cannot discover the film's secrets. The storyline is basically very simple. A young Japanese woman returns to her home in Tokyo from a visit to Taiwan where she has been engaged on research into the work of a Taiwanese composer. She confronts her parents with the fact that she is pregnant by a Taiwanese boyfriend but is clear in her mind that she has no intention of marriage. In Tokyo her friend and confidante is a young bookseller whose main obsession is the local railway scene. When not sitting in his bookshop he is out and about making recordings of railway sounds. And that's about it. True there is a sort of homage to Ozu's minimalist style: long sequences without camera movement punctuated by carefully composed shots of settings (here, as occasionally in Ozu, trains and stations). What is missing is content. Ozu's films are carefully constructed studies of human relationship. His characters are vibrant and beautifully drawn with tensions between different generations always subtly realised. Perhaps he has only one basic message to impart, that life is disappointing, but the fascination of his work lies in the seemingly endless different ways he has of saying this. In Hou's tribute we have nothing but the disappointment of a curiously empty film.

A Japanese movie with a French title, "Café Lumiere" is a desultory tale of a young pregnant woman and her friendship with a local bookstore proprietor. As the movie is almost militantly anti-narrative in its stance, there really isn't much more one can provide in the way of helpful plot summary than that.

Director Hsiao-hsien Hou has opted for a Spartan style of film-making that hearkens back to such early Japanese masters as Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. Each scene consists of a single medium or long shot with no close-ups or edits whatsoever. The result is that we become so detached from the characters on screen that we find ourselves unengaged in their problems and their fates. And this turns out to be a particularly serious problem in this case because the spare screenplay offers us so little of interest to start with. The story consists mainly of Yoko wandering around the city or moping in her apartment as she goes about the tasks of her daily life. She rides on trains, entertains her visiting parents, spends infrequent moments with her storeowner friend - and that's about it: no revelatory conversations, no insights into character, no point or purpose beyond the prosaic surface. Admittedly, some of the compositions are stunning and the style is intriguing and hypnotic at first, but it soon loses its charm as the tedium of the narrative (or non-narrative) takes over.

The acting is consistently understated and naturalistic, but in a movie in which everybody just looks preoccupied and pensive, there really isn't much call for anything else.

It's official, folks -- Hou Hsiao-Hsien doesn't have a thought in his pretty little head. Are you wondering why he chose Shu Qi as his muse?

Shu ( or is that Qi? ) doesn't appear in this one. Instead we get a snaggletoothed Yo Hitoto, apparently a pop star in Japan -- judging by her song at the end, she's a pop star just like the girl who serves you at Rockin' Curry is "a actriss" -- and a wasted Tadanobu Asano, typically an indicator of quality, who is required to do nothing here but stand around and look like a mumbling Asian hipster and is too old to manage even that.

Hou's philosophy? Life is limbo, a big nothing, feel it and move on. I'd like to do that but Hou gives us nothing to feel in Cafe Lumiere beyond a bland photo essay of Life in Tokyo Circa 2003 and the flabbergasting observation that people are ships that pass in the night, no, make that trains that pass in the day, never connecting, each hurtling to its own destination, usually some variant of a dark tunnel or maybe a bridge if they're lucky. Yikes. Flowers of Shanghai is one of the most rarefied, technically accomplished and mesmerizing films of all time. How could the same director who created the opening shot of that film, which features about twelve actors conversing at machine-gun speed for about ten straight minutes -- an impossible directorial feat -- get trapped making this laconic sub-Jarmusch reality porn for two films in a row now? Millennium Mambo may be dead weight, but at least it has two great shots, shots that hint at Hou's true calling as the film equivalent of Odilon Redon: Those shots are the sex scene with the arrhythmically blinking lights and the opening shot of Shu Qi floating down a blue corridor. His M.O. while making Cafe Lumiere seems to have been to remove the two great shots from Millennium Mambo to make it more consistent. You be the judge if that sounds appealing.

Hou does not need to refine -- you cannot refine the limbo idea further than Flowers of Shanghai. He needs to expand, to bloat outwards, to release the inner expressionist and genre-revitalizer that is being squandered so senselessly on clichéd minimalism. It's time for him to do a live-action remake of Akira or something. This kind of art film where the actors are supposed to be authentic because they are held facelessly in long-shot and speak in monosyllables is now every last bit as safe, ghettoized and stagnant as the Hollywood action blockbuster. ( What is the connection between "reality" and people who can't talk? It seems to me that people "in real life" never stop jabbering. ) Then again, considering that 2005 alone brought big-budget movies as diverse and rich in ideas as Aeon Flux, The Island, and King Kong, it's now safe to say that even Michael Bay has surpassed Hou, and that's really sad.

The good news is that, though Hou is in his 50s, it frankly feels to me as if he hasn't even begun. There are a couple moments in this film that show the promise is still there, such as a moody bit early on in the bookstore when the room dims to a bloody sunset-red while Hitoto talks about babies with the faces of goblins. But whatever fear is holding him back, however comfortable it is to make the same film over and over and be hailed by the gullible and pretentious as the savior of cinema, Hou, your time as the darling of the Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, Berlin and whatever else film festivals is almost up and people are catching onto your ruse double-quick. Two words for you: Atom Egoyan. Two more words, or maybe three: Tsai Ming-Liang. You are now cribbing from both of these tedious frauds who are about to go up their own dark tunnels forever. Risk your shirt on a sci-fi epic, sell out, be reviled -- but leave the social critiques to people that have no eye and no heart. Let your painterly talent express itself to the full. You're not going to ever get out of limbo otherwise.

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.