Cafe Lumiere
With Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano, Masato Hagiwara, Kimiko Yo, and Nenji Kobayashi
“It’s very difficult to cross national borders and shoot a film about a different culture. How many films have you seen that do that successfully? There are very few. The reason is very simple. When we look at films [about our own country] made by foreign companies, they’re not accurate. . . . But it’s an interesting challenge.”
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Cafe Lumiere (2003) was commissioned by the Japanese studio Shochiku, which asked Hou to create an homage to its most famous house director, Yasujiro Ozu, in celebration of the centennial of his birth. It’s a return to form for Hou, after the formalism of Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and the emptiness of Millennium Mambo (2001)–and his best film since The Puppetmaster (1993). It’s also his most minimalist effort to date, slow to reveal its depths and beauties, and it marks a rejuvenation of his art, confirmed by his subsequent film, the far from minimalist Three Times (2005), shot in Taiwan.
Like Ozu, Hou is mainly nonjudgmental about his characters, though he does manage to suggest over the course of his almost plotless narrative that Yoko and Hajime are somewhat indiscriminate collectors whose preoccupation with music and trains shows more compulsiveness than passion. This may be a critique of contemporary life–something also hinted at in the film’s Japanese title, Coffee Jikou, which means “coffee, time, light”–but if so, it’s a judicious one that only adds to the sense of serene clarity.
As Brooks has noted, playing a semifictional character named Albert Brooks, which he also did in Real Life (1979), is similar to what Jack Benny used to do on radio and TV. But there’s a significant difference between the obnoxiously aggressive Brooks in Real Life and the passively reactive one here, and I’m not convinced there’s any comic gain.
Where: Music Box, 3733 N. Southport
