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Café Lumière (2003)
Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano. Directed by Hsiao-Hsien Ho. Japanese with English subtitles.
When the credits rolled at the conclusion of Café Lumière, I wasn’t sure what I’d been watching for an hour and forty-three minutes, but I knew I liked it. Most of the film is absent any music; its soundtrack is the ambient sounds of Tokyo’s trains, train stations, street traffic, and background conversation. Interior scenes are in small spaces where camera angles seem not to be chosen for the way they frame the characters, but for available space the camera operator can squeeze into, and if that means seeing the backs of everyone’s heads and no faces, that’s okay. Exterior shots follow Yoko through streets and across train platforms, but from a distance, allowing passing traffic to obscure our view for half a minute in some places. There are very few jump-cuts within scenes, there is very little camera movement, and there are no point-of-view shots. Film-making the way our prehistoric forebears did it while living in caves.
There’s kind of a plot, and there are themes, but director Hsiao-Hsien Ho does his best to lead you to them gently, without exposition or voiceover. It’s a film that encourages repeat viewings, and your takeaway could be different the first couple of times you watch it. I saw it on a DVD whose special features included interviews with Yo Hitoto, a Japanese pop singer in her first acting role, and Tadanobu Asano, a notable Japanese action movie star who plays that Asian-looking, butt-kicking warrior in the Thor films. They are asked to share their favorite scene from the film, and they both say their favorite scenes never made the final cut. One gets the feeling that if a scene was too memorable, it was left out for fear of taking over the film’s overall impression. What we’re left with are quiet scenes of characters in small spaces where it seems impossible for characters not to connect, and large spaces where there is always something physical separating them.
The main character is Yoko Inoue, a young writer researching a 1930s Taiwanese composer who worked most of his life in Japan and married a Japanese woman. She lives in a tiny apartment some distance from her parents, and spends a lot of her time on trains. Whether trains are merely a mode of transportation or something else isn’t clear, but trains are a dominant motif throughout the film. A young man who may be merely a friend or possibly a romantic interest works in a used bookstore, spending his free time recording ambient train station sounds on his mini-disc player.
The film is probably best left for each viewer to examine for him- or herself, so I’ll leave it there, with the advice to see it more than once, and to look at the supplemental material if you have access to it. And then message me so we can talk about it, because I’d love to know what others think.
While it has certain sensibilities in common with American mumblecore films, Café Lumière lacks the low-fi approach those movies embrace—there is nothing low-fi or DIY about the deliberate way it is put together. It’s a quiet film that takes its time and refuses to hammer its ideas into your skull, and it’s rather a terrific movie.
9/10 (IMDb rating)
90/100 (Criticker rating)
Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano. Directed by Hsiao-Hsien Ho. Japanese with English subtitles.
When the credits rolled at the conclusion of Café Lumière, I wasn’t sure what I’d been watching for an hour and forty-three minutes, but I knew I liked it. Most of the film is absent any music; its soundtrack is the ambient sounds of Tokyo’s trains, train stations, street traffic, and background conversation. Interior scenes are in small spaces where camera angles seem not to be chosen for the way they frame the characters, but for available space the camera operator can squeeze into, and if that means seeing the backs of everyone’s heads and no faces, that’s okay. Exterior shots follow Yoko through streets and across train platforms, but from a distance, allowing passing traffic to obscure our view for half a minute in some places. There are very few jump-cuts within scenes, there is very little camera movement, and there are no point-of-view shots. Film-making the way our prehistoric forebears did it while living in caves.
There’s kind of a plot, and there are themes, but director Hsiao-Hsien Ho does his best to lead you to them gently, without exposition or voiceover. It’s a film that encourages repeat viewings, and your takeaway could be different the first couple of times you watch it. I saw it on a DVD whose special features included interviews with Yo Hitoto, a Japanese pop singer in her first acting role, and Tadanobu Asano, a notable Japanese action movie star who plays that Asian-looking, butt-kicking warrior in the Thor films. They are asked to share their favorite scene from the film, and they both say their favorite scenes never made the final cut. One gets the feeling that if a scene was too memorable, it was left out for fear of taking over the film’s overall impression. What we’re left with are quiet scenes of characters in small spaces where it seems impossible for characters not to connect, and large spaces where there is always something physical separating them.
The main character is Yoko Inoue, a young writer researching a 1930s Taiwanese composer who worked most of his life in Japan and married a Japanese woman. She lives in a tiny apartment some distance from her parents, and spends a lot of her time on trains. Whether trains are merely a mode of transportation or something else isn’t clear, but trains are a dominant motif throughout the film. A young man who may be merely a friend or possibly a romantic interest works in a used bookstore, spending his free time recording ambient train station sounds on his mini-disc player.
The film is probably best left for each viewer to examine for him- or herself, so I’ll leave it there, with the advice to see it more than once, and to look at the supplemental material if you have access to it. And then message me so we can talk about it, because I’d love to know what others think.
While it has certain sensibilities in common with American mumblecore films, Café Lumière lacks the low-fi approach those movies embrace—there is nothing low-fi or DIY about the deliberate way it is put together. It’s a quiet film that takes its time and refuses to hammer its ideas into your skull, and it’s rather a terrific movie.
9/10 (IMDb rating)
90/100 (Criticker rating)