Photo: Yo Hitoto as Yoko in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière
Inspired by the centenary of Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu's birth, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's poetic Café Lumière charts the uneasy maturation of a Japanese reporter named Yoko (Yo Hitoto) as she researches an article on real-life Taiwanese musician Jiang Wenye and copes with an unexpected pregnancy—and looming single-motherhood—that's frowned upon by her traditional parents. The film, set in Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs, marks Hou's first movie situated outside of his native Taiwan, and the new locale proves well-suited to yet another one of the director's languorous ruminations on the relationship between the inescapable past, hesitant present, and daunting future. Plentiful shots of passing commuter trains recall Ozu's Tokyo Story, while the intimate scenes between Yoko and her quietly disapproving father (who's struggling to accept Yoko's desire for a non-nuclear family) are reminiscent of Late Autumn, yet Café Lumière—its title a reference to the Lumière Brothers' seminal short film of a train entering a station—is distinctly Hou's. Nick Schager
Inspired by the centenary of Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu's birth, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's poetic Café Lumière charts the uneasy maturation of a Japanese reporter named Yoko (Yo Hitoto) as she researches an article on real-life Taiwanese musician Jiang Wenye and copes with an unexpected pregnancy—and looming single-motherhood—that's frowned upon by her traditional parents. The film, set in Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs, marks Hou's first movie situated outside of his native Taiwan, and the new locale proves well-suited to yet another one of the director's languorous ruminations on the relationship between the inescapable past, hesitant present, and daunting future. Plentiful shots of passing commuter trains recall Ozu's Tokyo Story, while the intimate scenes between Yoko and her quietly disapproving father (who's struggling to accept Yoko's desire for a non-nuclear family) are reminiscent of Late Autumn, yet Café Lumière—its title a reference to the Lumière Brothers' seminal short film of a train entering a station—is distinctly Hou's. Nick Schager
