Café Lumière

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.

(video by ruidina)

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.

---------------------------------------------------

A small surprise in the end: I found on the web something you'll enjoy; the Formosan Dance:

(video by Chen-Wei)

(Hou Hsiao-Hsien)