Watching Hou

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of my favorite directors, along with Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Abbas Kirosatmi, John Ford, and his fellow Taiwanese Edward Yang.

He's very deliberate--and usually quite political--in his films. Things happen slowly, if at all; and key details slip in and out of frame. Quite different from most filmmakers working today. (This is what I wrote about Millennium Mambo).

I finally got around to seeing Cafe Lumiere, which has been on my list ever since it came out in 2003. It has an interesting back story; it was produced specifically in homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, on the centenary of his birth. Which is somehow fitting--other directors might pay tribute to a predecessor with a scene here or a line of dialogue there; very few would dedicate an entire film to the proposition.

I've never seen any Ozu films, specifically Tokyo Story, which Cafe Lumiere is most directly linked to. Having said that, Cafe Lumiere strikes me as a purposefully small-scale look at some big issues.

The story centers around Yoko, a young woman living alone in Tokyo who's recently returned from one of multiple trips to Taiwan. She's leading the typical life of a modern unattached urbanite--a small place of her own, much time going around the city and in cafes, friends of the opposite sex, days spent vaguely following what catches her fancy (in this case the study of a Taiwanese-born composer who'd spent time in Tokyo 60 years ago).

While she's on a visit home (for the annual grave sweeping day that is prevalent across Asia but unknown in the West) she tells her mom she's pregnant by her Taiwanese boyfriend. She doesn't want to marry him, planning to raise the baby on her own. Of course her mom--who turns out not to be her birth mom (in typical Hou fashion he subtly conveys that early on by letting the mother's greeting of her daughter contrast with the father's)--worries about this.

As does her father; but he shows this, as men tend to do, not by saying anything or even seemingly doing anything, but just by being tender toward her. In one scene, while they're eating her favorite dish, which her mom made at home and they brought in on a visit to the city, he pushes toward her some potatoes, saying they're always been your favorite, telling her simply, 'eat.'

It's one of three exquisite, quiet domestic scenes in the film. The first happens when Yoko goes home to her parents' home outside Tokyo--all that really happens is she lays on the floor while her mom makes food, then she goes to sleep in her room while her dad and then her mom eat, and then she gets up hungry after they've gone to bed and while she's looking for food her mom wakes up and makes her some. It's so simply shot, with great lighting and perfect pace, that along with a few lines of dialogue it conveys exactly the different lives two generations have.

The second scene, which I suspect is in direct homage to an Ozu scene, has the three of them lined up eating at a noodle bar with their backs to the camera; Yoko in black, her parents in white, after cleaning their relatives' graves. That's literally all that happens--the camera just watches them eat while seated closely together for a few minutes.

It points up a stylistic hallmark of Hou--he likes to let scenes unfold from non-standard angles. Throughout Cafe Lumiere, he'll shoot a location like most directors would, where you see everyone's faces; and then come back to that location later and shoot it from the reverse angle, often just showing the backs of the characters.

The film opens, actually, with a long scene where Yoko has just returned from Taiwan and is hanging up laundry and talking on the phone to her friend Hajime, who owns a used bookstore she frequents--all you see the first time you're introduced to the film's centeral figure is her back, with sunlight streaming in past her body.

I think it's all to point up how difficult it is to know what's going on, let alone to know each other; it all depends on what you see, what you're able to perceive. Hou deliberately, I think, allows his films to be hard to understand--you can often be left after a scene wondering whether anything happened. Either because you missed what was important, or else what's important is the feeling of the scene rather than anything more conventionally understood as action. Like in life, in Hou's films it's important to soak up things, without letting processing get in the way.

The film's full of little scenes that really don't sound like much and don't advance the plot in any conventional sense, yet stick with you. My favorite for some reason is a scene where Yoko walks in Tokyo along a bridge past a weeping willow tree.

That's it, nothing else happens--but the balance, the colors, the pace, are all so right, and convey an exact feeling of how Japan is this juxtaposition of the man-made and nature, melded into one, actually, more carefully than maybe any other country.

In some ways, Cafe Lumiere is just a cinematic capturing of a particular time in Tokyo's history. Preserving for posterity Ozu's city, just as in the film Yoko spirals in and learns about the Taiwanese pianist first via his music, then books, then visiting his Tokyo haunts, then talking to his widow and looking at her photos.

Even if you've never gone to Japan you can get a feel for what it's like--and if you have gone, you're reminded all over again of the cleanliness, the exactness of verbal and non-verbal communications, the clear line between stranger and non-stranger, the willingness to leave even important things unspoken, the idiosyncratic interest in the West, the central role food plays.

Building on the specificity with which Cafe Lumiere conveys Tokyo is the theme of trains. Hajime, who has quiet feelings for Yoko that he never directly expreses, really likes trains, memorizing all the train stations and creating a work of art centering on them (in which quite literally he's cradled by trains), and going around Tokyo recording the train system's natural sounds. It's only fitting that a film set entirely in and about Tokyo has one of the city's distinctive and almost organice features at its heart, with the sense of purposeful motion and getting somewhere that goes along with it, in contrast to the meandering of Yoko and to a lesser degree Hajime.

Toward the end of the film, you see Yoko's train being overtaken by another train, in which you can see Hajime standing, recording; she doesn't see him until they both get off at the next stop, and as the movie closes she waits while he spends many minutes recording the departure of her train and the arrival of another one.

Hou shoots them with the arriving train in the foreground--which can be read as how modern life, for better or for worse, is all about things like train timetables (time is a key theme for Hou), trying to bridge distance (there's a subtheme in this film of people living away), and an attempt to make art or beauty or meaning out of it all.

You can also see it as the two of them looking up from everyday life and discovering they've arrived at the same destination. Yoko's pregnancy is always in the background--she's only about 3 months in so it's not there visually, but you worry for her, wonder what she's going to do to support her baby. You hope she winds up with her kindred artistic soul Hajime rather than the Taiwanese scion of umbrella makers.

Because this film was made by a Taiwanese director about Japanese characters, you can't discount the political angle. There's an overt reference early, when Yoko brings back from Taiwan for Hajime an old-style pocket watch that was issued as part of the 116th anniversary of the founding of the Taiwanese railroad. Left unsaid is that the railroad was built by the Japanese, during the years in which Taiwan was their colony.

Like all colonized nations, the Taiwanese make use of and in some ways appreciate the public works projects their colonial overseers put up, but it's hard to forget the cost of the projects was always borne by the natives, both financially as well as often in blood, and that the projects weren't intended to benefit the people but to make ruling them easier.

I wonder if Hou is in some sly way saying not only did you Japanese bring the railroad and all that it made possible to Taiwan, but also filmmaking--and watch while I show you the heights to which us Taiwanese have brought it.

Hou also touches upon the well-known racism of the Japanese, with the hanging silence after Yoko tells her mom she's pregnant--by her Taiwanese boyfriend. You flash forward and wonder what'll be worse for the kid to come in Japan--an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, no father, or the Chinese blood.

There is, though, a sense with this scene and the plot that for the younger generation these things don't matter as much--Yoko, after all, is not only sleeping with the Taiwanese but also studying one of their musicians. It doesn't matter not because they've thought about it and rejected old-fashioned hang-ups like racism, but because they're drifting, within a self-created world and thus tend not to inherit things like racism (or family life).

As always with Hou, I look to the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum for his take. He starts his review quoting Hou,

“It's very difficult to cross national borders and shoot a film about a different culture. How many films have you seen that do that successfully? There are very few. The reason is very simple. When we look at films [about our own country] made by foreign companies, they're not accurate. . . . But it's an interesting challenge."

Rosenbaum really is our finest living critic; I always read his reviews, and think, of course..... He writes of Cafe Lumiere:

Cafe Lumiere is a look at everyday Japanese life and how it's changed since Ozu's heyday. It uses some of Ozu's visual motifs -- trains, clotheslines -- and it beautifully reflects what English critic Tony Rayns has called the "persuasive" unassertiveness that characterizes much of Ozu's late work. It's an outsider's view of Japan that's really a two-way mirror, because the obsessive preoccupation of its 23-year-old Japanese heroine, Yoko (Yo Hitoto), a freelance writer based in Tokyo, is investigating the life of Taiwanese classical composer Jiang Wenye. Roughly a contemporary of Ozu, Jiang was born in Taiwan and educated in Japan, then spent most of the remainder of his life in mainland China. The only music heard in the film, besides a pop song over the final credits, is a selection of piano pieces he composed in Japan during the 1920s and '30s; they provide a historical and cultural filter through which we perceive the present. Yoko has just returned from Taiwan, where she's been researching Jiang's roots while teaching Japanese. She's pregnant with the child of one of her students, and she tells her elderly parents that she intends to raise the child alone -- a clear sign of the differences between Japanese life today and the life chronicled by Ozu.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years, until 1945, only two years before Hou was born, and Japanese culture undoubtedly had a lingering effect on many aspects of Taiwanese life. Hou, who's long had an interest in Ozu, shares the older director's fascination with trains, and in Cafe Lumiere one of Yoko's friends, Hajime (Tadanobu Asano), who runs a used-book store, is obsessed with recording the sounds of trains.

Like Ozu, Hou is mainly nonjudgmental about his characters, though he does manage to suggest over the course of his almost plotless narrative that Yoko and Hajime are somewhat indiscriminate collectors whose preoccupation with music and trains shows more compulsiveness than passion. This may be a critique of contemporary life -- something also hinted at in the film's Japanese title, Coffee Jikou, which means "coffee, time, light" -- but if so, it's a judicious one that only adds to the sense of serene clarity.

That sense of doubleness is a Hou trademark; literally, with the liberal use of mirrors and windows and reflections, and of course metaphorically, with the twinning of characters and situations.

He's also good at featuring strong amateur performances--a lot of the side roles in his early films especially were played by friends or strangers he met in the shooting of his films. In Cafe Lumiere, Yo Hitoto plays Yoko; a half-Japanese half-Taiwanese singer who's in her first film, she also sings Hitoshian over the closing credits. Hitoto has a typically cute website, and her songs are all over YouTube, including the one below.



In addition to YouTube this also being the age of the DVD extra, there's a French documentary on it about Hou. He's fascinating to listen to--the specificity with which he thinks, the purposefulness, the way his crew works to make every aspect of his imagination real. His brilliance and committment to his artistic integrity are present when he speaks just as it his films, which often isn't the case.

It's somehow fitting that the French have a deep appreciation for Taiwanese and Japanese (and increasingly Chinese) films.

In many ways it's the passing of the torch; or more precisely acknowledgement first of the intermingling between the great French New Wave directors and the classic Japanese directors, culminating in a bitterseet Gallic nod as France now looks East for the vibrancy and inventiveness she once had.

Were the Lumière brothers around today, they'd probably be working in Asia.

Image from Café Lumière in various places online.