Lumiere & Company

Starring:Patrice Leconte, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Liv Ullmann
Director: Patrice Leconte, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Liv Ullmann, Vicente Aranda, John Boorman, Costa-Gavras, Peter Greenaway, Hugh Hudson, James Ivory, Gaston Kaboré, Abbas Kiarostami, Cédric Klapisch, Andrei Konchalovsky, Bigas Luna, Ismail Merchant, Sarah Moon, Arthur Penn, Lucian Pintilie
Studio: Fox Lorber
Product Type: DVD

Description

One of today's greatest filmmakers, Hou Hsiao-hsien pays homage to one of the masters, Yasujiro Ozu, commemorating the centenary of Ozu's birth. In a residential Tokyo neighborhood, Yoko, a young freelance writer defies her strongly traditional parents with news that she is pregnant and has no desire to marry the father. She calmly accepts this reality and stoically deals with the worried reactions of her family. In an effort to alleviate her loneliness, she befriends the owner of a second-hand bookstore. He falls in love with her, but keeps his feelings silent. Gradually, Yoko begins to re-evaluate everything in her life in this meditative masterpiece of young urban solitude.

Customer Reviews:

"Café Lumiere" is a peculiar movie, the kind that some love, but others hate..........2007-06-18

"Cafe Lumiere" is the homage that Hou Hsiao-hsien, a Taiwanese director, paid to Yasujiro Ozu, a Japanese director renowned for the way in which he managed to depict the dynamics of family life and the inner life of his characters.

Did he succeed? I think so, due to the fact that he manages to put the spectator in the place of Yoko, a young woman that is pregnant but doesn't feel like marrying her boyfriend, a grown man that remains too attached to his mother. As we watch "Cafe Lumiere", we want to know what she thinks, and how she is going to react to the new development in her life. The spectator is also interested in her friend, a bookstore owner that seems romantically interested in Yoko, and that has an unlikely but strangely poetic hobby.

Are you likely to enjoy this movie? I really don't know, because "Café Lumiere" is a peculiar movie, the kind that some love, but others hate. I can tell you that it is a beautifully made film that pays extraordinary attention to little details, but that has an extremely open ending. Can you like that kind of film? According to your answer, you will know what to do...

- Belen Alcat, June 2007 -

PS: I liked "Café Lumiere" well enough to give it at least 3 stars out of 5.

Great reflection film!.......2007-04-03

If you enjoy indie films, especially ones that just follow the character's life & story, this film is for you. I quite enjoy the 'sleeper' movie that's not all action packed. This is a lighthearted story of an independent, young Japanese girl who makes her own life decisions, even if it's against her family's traditional views. Also stars Asano Tadanobu as a shy love interest.

art film strangely devoid of life.......2006-10-13

**1/2

A Japanese movie with a French title, "Café Lumiere" is a desultory tale of a young pregnant woman and her friendship with a local bookstore proprietor. As the movie is almost militantly anti-narrative in its stance, there really isn't much more one can provide in the way of helpful plot summary.

Director Hsiao-hsien Hou has opted for a Spartan style of filmmaking that harkens back to such early Japanese masters as Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. Each scene consists of a single medium or long shot with no close-ups or edits whatsoever. The result is that we become so detached from the characters on screen that we find ourselves unengaged in their problems and their fates. And this turns out to be a particularly serious problem in this case because the spare screenplay offers us so little of interest to start with. The story consists mainly of Yoko wandering around the city or moping in her apartment as she goes about the tasks of her daily life. She rides on trains, entertains her visiting parents, spends infrequent moments with her storeowner friend - and that's about it: no revelatory conversations, no insights into character, no point or purpose beyond the prosaic surface. Admittedly, some of the compositions are stunning and the style is intriguing and hypnotic at first, but it soon loses its charm as the tedium of the narrative (or non-narrative) takes over.

The acting is consistently understated and naturalistic, but in a movie in which everybody just looks preoccupied and pensive, there really isn't much call for anything else.

Shadow and Light.......2006-08-05

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Duration: 103 Minutes

Directed by one of Taiwan's most acclaimed directors, Goodbye South, Goodbye, Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, but filmed entirely in Japan and in the Japanese language, Café Lumiere is a tribute for the 100th birthday of one of Japan's most famous directors: Ozu Yasujiro. Renowned for his use of shadow and light and unmoving cameras, Ozu's films mainly concentrated on the internal struggles of families inside there traditional, often spacious, homes where not only did the hidden tensions between family members come to the surface, but also the care and affection, albeit subdued, that the family members hold for each other. In this 2003 film, Hou Hsiao-hsien attempts to capture Ozu's celluloid landscape with his own camera, but how successful is he?

A writer, Inoue Yoko has just returned home to Japan from Taiwan where she continued her research on the Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-ye. Suffering from nightmares on her trip, she calls her friend Hajime, Asano Tadanobu, the proprietor of a used bookstore, and tells him of her nightmare about a baby whose face began to melt like ice. Later she travels to the quiet confines of the bookstore to pick up a couple of books and CDs Hajime acquired for me. Yoko then spends an inordinate amount of time wandering Tokyo before going to see her father and stepmother. Almost completely silent, almost the only sentence uttered by Yoko while at home is that she would like her mother to prepare her some nikujaga, beef stew. However, that night, after her father has gone to bed, Yoko tells her stepmother that she is pregnant and that she does not plan on marrying the baby's Taiwanese father but instead that she intends to raise the child on her own. It is later revealed that she does not want to marry her boyfriend because he is a mama's boy whose mother still controls most of his life.

With this information later revealed to him, Yoko's father becomes even more silent, and Yoko continues her day to day activities researching Jiang Wen-ye and enjoying the company of Hajime who helps her with her research while he continues his own obsessions of recording the sounds of trains.

Although a bit vacuous, Café Lumiere is beautifully filmed. The interior of Hajime's bookstore, Yoko's apartment and family home, and the interiors of the cafes are stunning to behold because of the mixture of shadow and light. Hajime's bookstore has an almost claustrophobic comforting nature with its hundreds of books and dark wood. The characters come off as a bit empty, but this might stem from Hou's desire to create characters who are so absorbed within the interiors of their own beings that they chose to reduce their communications with the outside world. While a decent movie, Café Lumiere is definitely not a must see unless one is either a major fan of Hou Hsiao-hsien or maybe Asano Tadanobu.

Aspiring to Be an Ozu-Like Work But Muddled by Lethargic Pacing and Character Weightlessness.......2006-02-10

I am a relative latecomer to the transcendent work of film auteur Yasujiro Ozu, whose masterfully understated views of Japanese life, especially in the post-WWII era, illuminate universal truths. Having now seen several of his landmark films such as 1949's "Late Spring" and 1953's "Tokyo Story", I am convinced that Ozu had a particularly idiosyncratic gift of conveying the range of feelings arising from intergenerational conflict through elliptical narratives and subtle imagery. It is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's keen aspiration to pay homage to Ozu on his centenary with this generally enervating 2003 film. Along with co-screenwriter T'ien-wen Chu, Hsiao-hsien appears to get the visuals right but does not capture the requisite emotional weight that would have made the glacial pacing tolerable.

The story concerns Yoko, a young Japanese writer researching the life of mid-20th century Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-Ye in Tokyo after coming back from Taiwan where she taught Japanese. After 25 drawn-out minutes of character set-up, she reveals to her father and stepmother that she is pregnant by one of her students in Taiwan. At the same time, Yoko's coffeehouse friend Hajime, who runs a used bookstore, has an obsession for trains and seems likely to be in love with her. Hsiao-hsien connects this slim plotline with a series of shots held for inordinately lengthy takes as the frame composition changes. There are also long stretches of silence as well as an abundance of scenes featuring trains. While these techniques are consistent with Ozu's style, Hsiao-hsien cannot seem to dive into the characters' psyches the way Ozu did with maximal fluidity and minimal theatrics, in particular, Yoko's plight seems rather non-committal in the scheme of the drama presented and her parents' reaction overly passive to hold much interest. In fact, the whole film has an atmosphere of exhaustion about it, which makes the film feel interminable.

The performances are unobtrusive though hardly memorable. J-pop music star Yo Hitoto brings a natural ease to Yoko, while Tadanobu Asano is something of a cipher as Hajime. The rest of the characters barely register, even Nenji Kobayashi and Kimiko Yo as Yoko's parents. Cinematographer Lee Ping-Bing provides expert work though he violates a cardinal rule of Ozu films by not keeping the camera stable during shots. Hitoto speak-sings the fetching pop song used over he ending credits, "Hito-Shian". The DVD includes an hour long, French-made documentary, "Metro Lumiere", which actually does help provide some of the context for Hsiao-hsien's approach to the film. It includes excerpts from Ozu's films, in particular, "Equinox Flower", to show the parallels with this film though surprisingly no mention of either "Tokyo Story" or "Early Summer", the obvious basis for some of the scenes and situation set-ups. There are also edited interview clips of Hitoto, Asano and Hsiao-hsien, as well as the film's trailer.

Average customer rating:

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Manufacturer: TROMA ENTERTAINMENT INC.
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