Cafe Lumiere [DVD]

I've read all the other reviews and I think whether one is positive or negative about this film depends on whether one appreciates and enjoys the kind of films made by Ozu This film is explicitly stated to an homage to Ozu and one should therefore expect a gentle style of observation of a small number of individuals, including a family unit, going about their lives and the environment within which they do so. Because I love the films of Ozu, I found no barriers to my enjoyment of this film, replete with long slow takes and a story which slowly emerges from the dialogue between the characters. Again just as in Ozu's films, there is the observation of differences between the generations in attitudes to life's events such as a pregnancy out of wedlock. And just as in Ozu's films, there's usually something red in most shots! All this doesn't mean that Hou Hsaiao-hsien is slavishly copying Ozu, he brings his own distinctive and modern slant to the proceedings, as with Yoko's friend obsessing about trains, recording their sounds and constructing and manipulating complex images of them on his laptop. A very satisfying film but not if the viewer needs a painting by numbers approach to plot and character development.

This is a review of DVD technical aspects, not the film on it.Amazon product details promise "Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.77:1". But specification on the sleeve reads "16:9 Letterbox" and so it is - a picture in the middle of your screen, taking up about half its size. And even on such a small screen the image quality is quite poor. This needs a TV screen up to 42" and a DVD player with a powerful PQ enhancement. At first I thought it's an artistic stylization, some kind of tribute, that would dissolve after the credit sequence. It didn't...Another issue is subtitles - English, yes, but hardcoded and with a font making them illegible when background goes bright.And sound quality wasn't impressive either, far from it...So, the disc quality itself would get a clear 1-star rating. Still I don't know the technical limitation of a source material and after all let's be grateful such films are available at all. Hence the extra 2 stars.Really, after the initial resentment eased off, I put the disc back into my player and it took me just a few minutes to forget all about the poor transfer quality, such was a beauty of this film. So, don't let yourself be put off by grumblers like me and go for films like that, whatever the quality of their presentation is.

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien is a critically acclaimed auteur whose work is maddeningly unavailable on DVD. Of his 20 films only three are currently being offered at prices collectors can afford. Can someone (Artificial Eye, are you reading?) please give us his films from the 80s/90s preferably in a couple of cheap box sets? The Boys From Fengkuei (1983), A Summer at Grandpa's (1984), A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985), A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995) all won prizes at major film festivals and it is criminal that we are denied a chance to see them. As it is we have only Three Times (2005), Flight of the Red Balloon (2008) and the film under review here, Café Lumière. Commissioned by Japan's Shochiku studio to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Ozu Yasujirō's birth, the film was the first Hou made outside Taiwan and is an homage to the master of minimalism truly worthy of the name. Of course, it helps hugely that Hou's outlook is very similar to Ozu's anyway, but in Café Lumière he really does take the themes of Ozu's austere post war masterworks to their logical conclusions.Ozu was a director primarily concerned with the world as seen through the eyes of the shomingeki (domestic family drama) and from Late Spring (1949) through to his final An Autumn Afternoon (1962) together with screenwriter Noda Kōgo he charted the social transition that took place in Japan following World War II and the resulting American occupation. He saw family as the center of Japanese society. Once tight and very protective of their own, families became looser after the war. Children (especially girls) received increasing freedom to go their own way without the traditional need for discussion or consensus. Each Ozu film saw the same themes centering on generation conflict being explored again and again. The films became increasingly spare, static, stark and despairing at (what Ozu thought of as) the deterioration of family values and the consequent transformation (break up?) of Japanese society. Late Spring centers on a father-daughter conflict with the daughter initially refusing to be married off, but it ends up a celebration of traditional values as they both accept their roles - she as a new wife and he as the single father who must stand alone. 12 years later An Autumn Afternoon finds Ozu in a much darker more cynical mood telling virtually the same story but including the advent of ugly new materialism and the significant secondary character of a drunken failure who ruins his daughter by holding on to her for too long. The film's bitter shōganai (`it can't be helped') ending is a far cry from the poised moving final shots of Late Spring.In Café Lumière Hou takes this gradual disintegration of family life even further so that the film is in effect a shomingeki without the binding sense of home. Yoko (Hitoto Yo) is a young student/writer living alone in a Tokyo apartment. During a visit to her parents in the country during ōbon (the traditional summer-time period where family members get together to pay respects to the spirits of dead relatives which are said to come alive during this time) she reveals that she is pregnant with the baby of her Taiwanese boyfriend who she has no intention of marrying. She states her intention to have the baby and raise it on her own. Family relations are not tight. Her father (Hagiwara Masato) is silent, only capable of sitting, brooding and boozing. Her `mother' (Yo Kimiko) is not her biological mother. It's later revealed that the real mother left Yoko when she was four, giving herself up to a religious cult which is not specified. This could be a large religious organization like Sōga Gakkai, or perhaps a more sinister cult like Aum Shinrikyo - the organization responsible for the 1995 sarin gas subway attack. Mass public support for such religious groups is held by many in Japan to be symptomatic of a nation lacking moral backbone. Hou stresses the significance of the trauma of Yoko's childhood separation from her mother by featuring her nightmare and the book (Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There) which possibly explains it, linking her abandonment with the imminent arrival of her own child. Her new mother is not a bad sort and recognizes the need for the father to talk to his daughter about her future. But of course, the two say nothing to each other when they are left alone. In a fashion typical of many relationships between father and children in today's Japan, meaningful communication has all but broken down. Yoko takes solace in her work (researching the life of Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-Ye whose real life widowed wife we get to meet and whose music permeates the soundtrack) and in her friends, a tempura cook (Kobayashi Nenji) and a bookshop owner named Hajime (Asano Tadanobu). He has an obsession with trains and recording the sounds of their movement which Yoko in turn gets caught up in.As a long term resident here in Japan I can verify that in the film Hou gives us an accurate picture of modern society where the importance of family often gives way to the importance of friends. Like many young people here Yoko can't talk to her family even if she wants to, preferring her freedom and the support of Hajime who is offered up as a possible future partner. Key to the film are the numerous shots of trains and the computer program Hajime has designed, especially the picture of Yamanote Line trains arranged in a circular design around a foetus in the middle of a black hole. As we know from Ozu, trains denote the restless impermanence - the transience - of all things and in this film the city (the Yamanote Line is the circular line that loops around central Tokyo) becomes the surrogate parent for Yoko and her densha otaku (train nerd) possible partner. Of course we could also read it that the foetus is Yoko's baby and the trains represent her. She could well be transient impermanence personified.I haven't seen enough Hou films to say if the mise-en-scène of Café Lumière is typical of him or not though some critics do say it is. It certainly does bear a resemblance to his next film, Three Times and (more relevant to the brief) the influence of Ozu is all-pervasive. With cameraman Mark Lee Ping Bin, Hou retains Ozu's preference for the long static take with little or no movement of the camera. When the camera does move it is in little pans either left or right. Cutting is the 180˚ kind as evidenced by the way Hajime's bookshop is seen first from the door and then later from the shop back. Yoko's family home is established in the same manner. The trademark Ozu low camera frames the room squarely with kotatsu (heated low table) firmly center of frame. Then the shot is reversed completely from the opposite direction. `Pillow shots' are not heavily evident, but the shots of train tracks are obvious examples which function as transition devices in a way the great man would have approved. Ozuian ellipsis of both time and space is much in evidence. Most obvious is the way Yoko leaves her home. She says she's going to borrow a bike and goes to a train station to look up an old friend who is asleep. The next thing we know she's in a coffee shop back in Tokyo. The ellipse tells us everything we need to know about the ennui she feels at her home-life and the fact she wants to escape it as quickly as possible. Spacial ellipses occur where characters talk to people who are off-screen with Hou (like Ozu) choosing to let us exercise our imaginations rather than simply showing us everything. The whole feel of Café Lumière is one of simple, subtle and delicate restraint. This may or may not be a Hou mainstay (judging from Three Times, I'd say it is), but it certainly does concur with Ozu. As other reviews posted here show, there are many for whom the film is so subtle that it appears to be about nothing at all. Actually, it taps into the confused transience of modern Japan with remarkable acuity. I recommend you watch closely and carefully because this film does work a spell over you in its own very quiet way. Ozu would have approved.This ICA Projects disc is a model of its kind. The images are clean and very sharp (aspect ratio: 16:9) and the sound is well-balanced. The subtitles are also letter-boxed properly which is a good thing - they don't fall off the bottom of the screen like they do in some Artificial Eye discs I have bought! There are no extras which is a shame. Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns provides the subtitles, but it's a pity he couldn't add a commentary as well. He has probably done more than any other western critic to get Hou's name more recognized as his reviews for Time Out testify. Let's hope his efforts lead to more of his films being made available soon.

It would be fair to say that if you're the type of person who needs 'something to happen'- i.e. a plot hook, to involve you in a film experience then it would be best you avoid 'Cafe Lumiere'. However, if you would enjoy watching life gently unwinding through a series of simple and beautiful observations devoid of brutal articulation or agenda then this will certainly appeal to you. The speechless father is an hilarious treat!

I will always love this poem of a movie! What's not to like? Everything fits, everything exists to serve the purpose of the movie in true minimal japanese style... I highly recommend this gem of a movie to all!

A movie starting with the logo of Shochiku Company. My heart is warming up: the logo Ozu's movies were starting with, his almost sixty movies, all produced at Shochiku.Then it is the image of a light train, again reminding Ozu. From now on though, you feel there is another moviemaker, with a totally different style: director Hou Hsiao-Hsien. It's Café Lumière (Kôhî jikô), made in 2003, a homage to Yasujiro Ozu's centennial (a splendid video by AsianVirusNet could not be inserted here, unfortunately, due to its size).I saw three such movies dedicated to Ozu: each one expressing a very different personality (Kiarostami, Wenders, Hou). An Iranian, a German, a Taiwanese. Hopefully I will find time to write about each one.The movie of Hou Hsiao-Hsien is possibly the most disconcerting among the three. Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu is programmatically experimental: five cinematic poems about contingent facing eternity. You know what it is about from the very beginning. It's like an abstract painting: if you disagree with the non-figurative, then you don't look at. While the movie of Hou apparently has a plot, only it's just a pretext. So you are waiting for something to happen, in vain: Café Lumière is about something else.Yoko is a young free-lance writer or something, living in today's Tokyo. She's trying to find some traces of a Taiwanese musician who lived in Japan between the two world wars. We are told at some point in the story that Yoko is three months pregnant; she is determined to remain a single mother (which worries her parents; Yoko sees them now and then).Okay. There is also a young antiquarian (Hajime) who is a train buff and rides trains to record sounds: trains stopping in stations, doors opening, public announcements, doors closing, trains starting again, passengers' conversations. The guy is clearly in love for Yoko; they remain only best friends.Meanwhile she goes by train here and there, enters cafés and bookstores, talks by phone with the antiquarian.And this is it. Don't ask about the father of the future baby. Don't ask about things to happen. Don't ask about any outcome.In any movie of Ozu something happens, while the movies of Hou are meditative, depict an atmosphere (even when they are dedicated to Ozu :). Actually Hou's passion for Ozu is visible also in other movies. The final part in Millennium Mambo is clearly suggesting Ozu (while remaining Hou hundred percent). Or one of the first sequences in Good Men, Good Women: there is a TV monitor and a movie is running; it's Late Spring, the scene of the bikes (it was my first encounter with Ozu).I'm trying to understand: is there a difference in the scale of values between the movies made by Hou Hsiao-Hsien up to the start of the new millennium and his newer movies? I saw Flowers of Shanghai, then The Puppetmaster, and I was impressed. I saw Good Men, Good Women, then Goodbye, South, Goodbye, then Millennium Mambo: it took a long time to get their point, to range them on my scale.Flowers of Shanghai calls in mind Chekhov (and Mateiu Caragiale - if you haven't heard about him it's bad for you - only you'd need Romanian knowledge to read him, even very good knowledge). Millennium Mambo is a journey in the sordid world of youngsters good of nothing, small thieves (now and then), night club hostesses, petty gangsters; it is an initiatic journey, to discover that our dreams are snowmen who melt at sunrise - we live in the country of snowmen and we don't know it.Well, you cannot say that these movies have a definite plot, either; it's all about exploring universes; the thing is that their universes are large, while Hou's newer movies are intimist. Café Lumière: a young writer who doesn't find topics of discussion with her parents and befriends a young antiquarian with a passion for train sounds. Three Times: three couples of lovers who talk and look at each other in 1911, 1965, 2005. Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge: a kid, a single mother, a young Taiwanese, all three exploring Parisian streets, Chinese puppet theaters in Paris, Parisian attics - while the director is trying with his movie to find the atmosphere of an older Paris, the one of Lamorisse (do you remember his Ballon Rouge?)It was Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge that gave me the clue for Café Lumière. The plot is just a pretext. It's actually about Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself: the Taiwanese director coming to Tokyo and looking for some old Nippon atmosphere of good Ozu's times.And everything starts to make sense. The main character often travels to Taiwan where she teaches Japanese. The musician who lived in Tokyo between the two world wars was a Taiwanese.He was a real person (Jiang Wen-Ye), who composed delicate music resembling jazz, Formosan Dance, Three Dances, Maggio Suite, Bagatelles - they sound fine and as I was listening to them another great musician came to my mind, maybe one of the greatest of the past century: Conlon Nancarrow.Watching Café Lumière and listening, together with Yoko and Hajime, to a piano piece of the Taiwanese who became a Japanese, while feeling how your memory's calling a player-piano piece by Nancarrow: that's the movie, it has no plot at all; it has charm a lot.Yes, everything makes now sense. Yoko befriended the young antiquarian and visits him at the bookstore, they browse together old books, and old maps of Tokyo, trying to locate an old café, DAT, that was frequented by the Taiwanese musician in the thirties: he was spending evenings and nights there, listening jazz, thinking at his compositions.It is the journey of Hou, actually, towards the Tokyo of between the wars and of the fifties; a journey suggested by old books and old maps examined within old second-hand bookstores; suggested by old pieces of music, listened in narrow spaces, so narrow that only a whisper could find room between the two friends; suggested by elegant cafés or old neighborhoods.And of course DAT, the old café, is no more, replaced by an impersonal office building (the site is hardly discovered, by asking old waiters in small pubs, the folks who always keep pieces of history within themselves).The family from Ozu's time is no more, either. Yoko is not Noriko of Setsuko Hara, ready to sacrifice herself for the parents; on the contrary, she is a very independent girl, very remote to her parents' values and worries, taking her pregnancy very matter of factly, committed to remain a single mother rather than giving up freedom, taking a friendship with a boy her age as it is, nothing more.Is it anything that remained, from the old times of Ozu? Not much, or rather nothing. The nostalgia for those years, that's all. They are dreaming at traditional dishes with old spices, at a small drink slowly tasted : there is a scene in the movie, with Yoko and her parents together in a small restaurant - it is in vain. Ozu died and his world is over.However, there is something that remained. It's hardly to define it: that special warmth between two people, Yoko and her friend, lonely together, even when they are looking for each other: a superb scene with her traveling in a train, while he is in another train on a parallel track; the two are like together for a second, then the trains take each one its tunnel; after a while, she's falling asleep in a train car, he enters the place and is looking at her with a warm smile, letting her sleep; minimalism at its best.What about Ozu's trains? Well, Hou creates with them a world of its own, tracks over tracks in all directions, with trains leaving tunnels to enter other tunnels to meet never; but this is the merit of the great image director, Lee Pin-Bing, one of the greatest in the world. He made the image for almost all Hou's movies (and also for Tian's Springtime in a Small Town).Is now Hou inferior to his older movies? Maybe not, but his universe became condensed as aiming to be a black hole. The great subjects of Taiwan's history were in the past. Now it's about studying a detail, a single detail, with delicacy and patience, to pull up a diamond.

Delicada, poetica y hermosa pelicula de unos de los cineastas mas importantes de la actualidad. Homenaje total al cine del maestro Ozu . Desgraciadamente esta edicion es inglesa y por tanto carece de subtitulos en español, pero es tan simple y delicada que en verdad se puede precindir de ellos teniendo una base minima de ingles. Tematica totalmente ozuniana, padres e hijos, pero puesta en la actualidad. Una joya dificil de despreciar.

I purchased this dvd mostly to boost my collection of films directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien. The opening shot says the film was made to mark the centenary of Yasujiro Ozu's birth and thus is made in the style of Ozu's most famous films. Better reviewers than me and film essayists have captured the essence of Ozu films in words. Thus the slow pacing of this film did not surprise me. But I rate it as "not quite Ozu" because I think Hou's film lacked one of the major features of Ozu films that I enjoy. Being a studio director Ozu had a popular stable of studio actors to cast in his films. Ozu could cast Chishu Ryu as a strong silent father and Setsuko Hara as a shy thoughtful daughter. The popularity and screen personae of Ozu's actors made the slow pacing of his films still enjoyable and understandable to a general audience. Not so with Hou's casting. Tadanobu Asano is a fine actor, but his screen personae is completely at odds with being the owner of a second hand bookstore. Yo Hitoto, being a singer I am frankly unaware of, lacks the charisma projected by a star like Setsuko Hara. I suspect that Ozu's films were popular because the cast was popular and the general audience quietly tolerant to see what would become of their favorite stars. Casting an "unknown" actress in the main female role seemed to deprive the film of much potential.I did rate the dvd as a three-star because it has good extras. The French-made extra feature of Hou and his film staff is English subtitled and insightful. Aside from what I thought of the film itself, the purchase was a good addition to a Hou Hsia Hsien film collection.

Après un séjour à Taïwan , une jeune femme revient à Tokyo, où elle retrouve son père et sa nouvelle épouse. Elle est enceinte et veut élever seule son futur enfant. Elle fait des recherches sur un musicien taïwanais qui vécut à Tokyo et sa route croise celle d''un libraire solitaire (le génial Tadanobu Asano ! ) dont le passe-temps est d'enregistrer le bruit des trains ...Il m''a semblé difficile d''entrer dans ce film lent, sans véritable histoire, où les gens ne se parlent pas, où une situation difficile ne suscite aucun écho , où les sentiments ne sont pas formulés.Et pourtant, étrangement, des mois plus tard, « Café lumière » reste gravé dans mon souvenir avec une étonnante émotion. Cet hommage à Ozu propose en effet une réflexion sur la difficulté de communiquer dans la nouvelle famille contemporaine où les liens traditionnels d''autrefois ont été remplacés par des choix individuels plus libres et plus aléatoires , et dans une mégapole anonyme comme Tokyo . Le cinéaste taïwanais Hou Hsiao Hsien tournant en étranger à Tokyo a choisi judicieusement le regard d''une jeune femme indépendante revenant de Taïwan pour rendre compte de sa propre distance d''observateur décalé. Il semble suivre ainsi les déambulations de ses personnages dans les rues avec un mélange d''indifférence et de nonchalance, et nous les regardons passer, secrets, comme si nous étions à la terrasse d''un café. Le film instaure peu à peu une sorte de charme poétique indéfinissable. Il finit par devenir un hommage splendide à ces trains urbains colorés qui se croisent sur plusieurs niveaux (cette séquence est extraordinaire) et qui sont la communication moderne, celle justement que le libraire cherche à capter passionnément. Des bonus très instructifs (c''est rare!) sur le tournage, sur HHH et Ozu.

J'ai été déçue le résumé du film ne correspond pas au déroulement de l'action et j'ai eu du mal à être passionnée par les personnages.Je vais le regarder de nouveau, vérifier si j'ai laissé passer des images clefs ou si je me suis trop laissé influencée par le synopsis.Le film m'a paru très décousu, pas inintéressant au point d'éteindre avant la fin tout de même.