Café Lumière (Kohi jikou)
Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has been widely acclaimed as the most important and original filmmaker working today. Café Lumière, dedicated to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, is characterised by gentle understatement. A young woman gets pregnant to a man she is not much interested in. She and the man who is the obviously perfect partner for her (the great Japanese star, Tadonobu Asano) spend most of the film discussing their interest in books and trains rather than broaching their feelings for each other. This narrative sets up a mix of devices employed to draw our attention to space in everyday narrative situations such as conversations or urban commuting. Hou deploys a variety of techniques, including the use of foregrounds to block background planes and the staging of action away from the camera, to roughen our access to the story and build our consciousness of the world's spaces as something we live in, rather than just seeing through them as a container for melodrama. The patterns which underlie the most profound decisions in life emerge with all the wondrously simple complexity of the Japanese subway system.
Reviews
“No living director comes close to having the same intense feel for light as Hou; indeed, he and his Asian cohort [Jia Zhangke] can be said to be the leading lights in world cinema today.”
Atsuko Saito, FIPRESCI
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When
7:15 PM Monday, 21 February
Buy Tickets Online
Greater Union - Cinema 1
Ticket Price
Full price $14
Industry $12
SPU Concession $10
As Part Of
General FeaturesAbout Café Lumière
104 minutes35mm
1.85:1
Dolby Digital SRD
In Japanese with English subtitles
Print Source
Wild Bunch
Lucie Kalmar
lkalmar@exception-wb.com
Festivals
Venice 2004Pusan 2004
Toronto 2004
London 2004
New York 2004
Vienna 2004
About the Director
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Born in the Chinese province of Kuangtung in 1948, Hou began studying film at the National Taiwan Arts Academy in 1969. His cinema is often concerned with his experiences of growing up in a rural Taiwan aggravated by the beginnings of Westernisation and urbanisation. His 1989 film A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion Prize at Venice in 1989 and he has won numerous awards for his films since.
Filmography
Café Lumière (2004)Millennium Mambo (2001)
Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
Goodbye South, Goodbye (1997)
Good Men, Good Women (1995)
The Puppetmaster (1993)
A City of Sadness (1989)
Daughter of the Nile (1987)
Dust in the Wind (1986)
A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985)
A Summer at Grandpa's (1984)
The Sandwich Man (1983)
The Boys from Fengkuei (1983)
The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983)
Cheerful Wind (1981)
Cute Girl (1980)
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