Café Lumière, directed by Hsiaou-hsien Hou (2003)
Hsiaou-hsien Hou gently leans you against a railing on a Tokyo bridge and mesmerizes you with the comings and goings of the city trains below.
The Doppler effect of the trains squealing and echoing along the rails is a subtle massage of the senses, with sound giving way to appearances and disappearances as they make their circles. Every train trip tells a story and carries its own sights and sounds. Each rider is a protagonist, moving from place to place, being transported on their own personal journeys at whatever point in that quest they may be. In contrast, the trains are never at any such point, but instead slither through the city where beginnings and endings blur into middles. Standing upon that bridge, looking down at the perpetual cycle of commuters, the temporal nature of our journeys exude from the unceasing cycle of transit.
This film is carefully shot and transcends the super-structural conventions of cinema. Hou dedicates this film to Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu, to mark the centenary of his birth, stated as the solitary opening credit. Ozu’s films, such as Early Summer, Late Spring, and Tokyo Story are all films praised by critics for their honest portrayals of life in routine. But for Ozu, and with Hou in Café Lumière, life is hardly routine in the same light as circulating trains, but continuously reverberating with intense and discreet emotions. For Hou, his filmmaking is deeply naturalistic and improvisational. From films such as A City of Sadness about civil unrest between Taiwan and mainland China to The Puppetmaster, a biography of a puppeteer, Hou is renowned for long taken shots that provide time for raw happenchance as once again realized in Café Lumière. His style of filmmaking sets the frame and allows one to observe the comings and goings in space free of predetermined outcomes. This style of direction is directly inspired by the meticulous and appreciative filmmaking that Ozu founded in recognition and celebration of everyday life. The lives seen through Hou’s lens are a series of time snippets captured in rigid space, framing for audiences to see for the first time what they have always known.
The journey we are drawn to is Yoko’s (played eloquently by Yo Hitoto). She is exceedingly hip and stylish in a way only the Japanese know. She is cool. The coolness is not the result of experimentations of identity, nor is it an updated knowledge of current trends or fads, but it is a sincere cool that just 'is'. She is traveled, cultured, well read, a music enthusiast, filled with curiosity, devoted to family and friends, and pregnant. The latter could provide this narrative with a threshold of experience for a plotted story, but in Café Lumière, we are exposed to a snapshot of Yoko’s journey, and it is beautiful for the moment we have in her life.
Other characters we meet in Yoko’s circle are her parents (precisely played by Kimoko Yo and Nenji Kobayashi) and her best friend, Hajime (a subtly strong performance by Tadanobu Asano). Yoko has just returned from Taiwan and the film begins with her calling in on Hajime at the bookstore where he works. He is a male version of Yoko: hip, cool, and as platonically interested in her as he is with the world. Hajime is working on an art project, recording the sounds of the stations, trains, and commuters in Tokyo. He captures snippets of everyday life taken for granted. Something as ever-present as the sound of trains in a station goes unnoticed by its riders. Hajime captures those redundancies and embraces them as director Hou does with his character’s lives. This film is about the taken for granted: those everyday things that do not simply get us to where we need to go, or influence our moods at any given moment, but those things that to a greater extent influence who we are at any given time or place. With each new trip, our lives are transformed, and all we consider is where we are going and where we have been, but rarely of where we are.
After visiting Hajime, Yoko goes to see her parents in the countryside on the outskirts of Tokyo. Hou’s shots of the rice plains and mountains provide an open contrast to the bustling claustrophobic realities of the city. Yoko’s parents represent the traditions of the past where parents cook and clean, families make merit to their ancestors, and old friends remain as they were. When we meet Yoko’s parents, the mother is cooking in the kitchen and takes great pride in her dishes. Her father is a stoic and elegant man with a chiseled face and soft demeanor. They lovingly welcome Yoko back from her trip, and after she reacquaints herself with the family and the cat, she falls into a jet-lagged sleep. She wakes up in the middle of the night hungry, and her mother gets up to heat the leftovers. As she eats her midnight snack, Yoko reveals to her mother the pregnancy.
