Cafe Lumiere

2003 marked the centenary of the great Yasujiro Ozu's birth, and as such, films in tribute were made. One such film was Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou's "Cafe Lumiere". With Ozu so associated with deep Japanese family drama, it may seem difficult to believe that a non-native can take on a film in tribute to him. But with subtle styling and nuances, Hou shows clear touches of Ozu's influence, while still maintaining enough individuality to steer it away from becoming an Ozu paint-by-numbers work of nothingness.

Yoko - played by Taiwanese-Japanese musician Yo Hitoto - is some sort of reporter-type who switches her time between Tokyo and Taiwan. Researching Taiwanese composer Wen-Ye Jiang (for some reason), she seeks out a cafe/bar the composer frequented when based in Tokyo. And that's about that: a film low on plot and slow in pace, it's in the nuances along the way that make this a tribute to the Japanese master.

Family and its changing nature is a theme hinted at throughout, with Yoko pregnant by her boyfriend in Taiwan. However, she has a somewhat blasé attitude towards the pregnancy, and indeed her boyfriend, unconcerned as to whether she sees him again, let alone allowing him to father his child, reflecting a modern decline in the nuclear family, and particular Japanese attitudes to sex and declining birth rate.

Her father seems unimpressed with her attitude, while her step-mother tries to do what she can to please her. Living in the countryside, their visiting her in her small Tokyo apartment is reminiscent of Ozu's "Tokyo Story", with the elders feeling out of place in the modern metropolis; her father maintaining a silence. Her lack of hospitality, with little to offer her parents - having to borrow food and sake from her older neighbours - shows a further distance from the family unit of today's youth, solely concerned by her own endeavours.

This mirrors Ozu's take on the empowerment of women, as seen in the likes of "Late Autumn", with young females shunning the traditional expectations placed upon them. Obviously four decades along the line, Yoko is quite content to tackle the pregnancy alone and go about her daily life as she pleases, continuing her research of Jiang - though still in early days, it would be interesting to see how this would continue, finding herself alone on a train station platform, feeling sick.

Trains are an important theme in "Cafe Lumiere", Hou choosing to use extensive shots of Tokyo's various forms of railed transportation. This again is reminiscent of some of Ozu's later works, with Tokyo's morphing into a modern day megalopolis - a confusing and sprawling mass of rail networks - a modern equivalent of Ozu's shots of neon lights growing on the landscape.

Sexpot Tadanobu Asano plays Hajime, Yoko's book shop worker friend and Tokyo rail network obsessive: recording the various sounds of Tokyo's trains and creating digital artwork based on trains. The sounds he records, such as the infamous Yamanote Line station announcements are part of modern day Tokyo life. As an outsider, it's clear that the transport network was a distinctive point of Tokyo for Hou.

The extensive use of shots of changes slowly moving across bridges and weaving between bridges while a disgustingly beautiful shot the modern world summarise the film's slow pace. Low on story, you can't help but feel that the film's running time could be drastically cut. Hou captures life as it happens: trains trundle along; Yoko walks around Tokyo's various districts, taking breaks to sit in cafes and chat in bookshops. This is a documentation, the cast less acting, but filmed as they go about the tasks they are asked to perform. Watched in sections, "Cafe Lumiere" can work, but altogether, it can perhaps be a little repetitive and needing a bit of a kick-start.

This is not masterful work, but a well-considered homage and "Cafe Lumiere" can stand alone as a good piece of cinema, though perhaps knowing it is an Ozu tribute adds a little more to it in the audience's mind. Though perhaps this restaurant main could have been condensed to a cafe light lunch.