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Café Lumière (2004)

Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien

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From Time Out London

Reviewing Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first UK release (‘A Summer at Grandpa’s’) two decades ago, I compared his gentle observational style to that of the Japanese master Ozu. Since then, the Taiwanese director has established himself as a great filmmaker in his own right, but there remains something appropriate about his having been commissioned to make a movie to commemorate the centenary of Ozu’s birth. The result is both predictably low-key in narrative terms and a subtle engagement by Hou with some of Ozu’s motifs and preoccupations even as he remains true to his own style and concerns. Yoko (singer Yo Hitoto), a writer just returned to Tokyo from Taiwan, is researching a Taiwanese composer of the ’30s, and repeatedly visits a second-hand bookstore run by a friend conducting his own sound project about Tokyo’s railway system. They hang out a little together, Yoko goes about her daily life, and her parents visit from the country… Plotwise, that’s about it. Rather as Ozu did with, say, the family in ‘Tokyo Story’, Hou uses the independent Yoko as an index whereby to gauge the texture of life in today’s Tokyo; at the same time, thanks to a leisurely, dedramatised narrative that allows her, the other characters and us ample room to breathe, Yoko’s no mere cypher. Those unaccustomed to Hou’s later work may find this telling slice-of-life movie too slow or delicate, but patience reaps rewards. Hou’s distinctive framing is fascinating especially for what he elects to reveal or conceal, while his quiet rhythms, like Ozu’s, are, once adjusted to, quite mesmerising.

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Time Out London Issue 1816: June 8-15 2005

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