Overrated and overhyped

An Exercise In Nonsense

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Textures. The Layering of scenes. Density with purpose. Filling a shot to the brim with material, lines, shapes, forms, movement. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière is a triumphant lense into the cramped spaces of contemporary Japanese life, albeit through the dispassionate, voyeuristic lens of a Taiwanese man. Scenes evoke the visually dense interiors of Yasujirō Ozu films such as Tokyo Story (1957) or his "Seasons" series; who Hsiao-Hsien acknowledged he was paying homage to.Japanese cinema stalwart Tadanobu Asano as Hajime offsets Yo Hitoto as Yoko, a youthful writer, pregnant amidst concerns from her parents about her professional and marital life; or the expectations of adulthood juxtaposed by the groaning of an older generation, an oft used theme in Ozu's work. Meanwhile her quest to learn more of Jiang Wen-Ye, a Taiwanese Composer, for a new book she's researching takes her through the intricate landscape of modern Japan. Asano provides interludes of stunning earnest, as the shop owner-cum-audiophile who records the numerous metro trains with his portable boom mic. His sporadic appearances and interactions with Yoko have a realistic rhythm to them, a sort of awkward warmness that permeates throughout the film, as they search for information on Wen-Ye.Familiarity with Ozu helps contextualise the film for its broader themes, but the focus and poise of Hsiao-Hsien is distinct and his foreign eye catches much of the unsaid, unheralded beauty of the moment. As the final images of trains intersect and Hajime is slowly recording the whirring cacophony of passing engines, we realise that life is to be lived; by recognising the moment and enjoying the visceral, audible, vibrations of the myriad means of existence around us.--Rave Silo

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.

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.