Film Reviews

Cafe Lumiere

• Rating:
• Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou.
• Starring: Yo Hitoto, Kimiko Yo, Nenji Kobayashi.
• Details: Japan / Taiwan / 103 mins (U).

Home from Taiwan after a short holiday, Yoko (Hitoto) visits her Tokyo friends, dispenses presents, and goes home to her step-parents (Yo and Kobayashi) to help with the annual cleaning of her ancestors' graves. Hsiao-hsien Hou's film trades in the ordinary and the banal, building up layer upon layer of everyday activities and transactions (cooking, taking the train, talking on the phone, mooching around book stores) and in doing so achieves a deceptively lulling rhythm: 20 minutes in, with practically no warning, Yoko drops the bombshell that she is pregnant to her Taiwanese boyfriend and has no intention of marrying him - although even that news barely ripples the ordered, stoical existence of her long-suffering step-parents. With its very long takes, static camera shots and sensual attention to the most minute of details, this is a film in love with film and fascinated with the visual representation of everyday life - as, indeed, the Lumiere brothers must have been entranced by their magic lantern. The camera, and by extension we the viewers, are voyeurs observing Yoko's world; the fetishisation of trains and phones suggest that the emphasis is on modes of communication, even though the characters appear to have very little to say worth recording. The overall feel is that of nosing through a stranger's diary, albeit one in which they dictate what you are allowed to see. It's that fascinating and that dull.

Review by Declan Burke