Café Lumière 2004 123movies

Watch: 珈琲時光 2003 123movies, Full Movie Online – Shochiku Studio of Japan commissioned several directors to create films reflecting on the themes of Ozu Yasujiro on the centenary of the director’s birth. Here we find Inoue Yoko, an apparently single young woman who is pregnant, searching for a small cafe that was often visited by a Taiwanese composer whose life she is researching. She herself is back from Taiwan and receiving help from a book store clerk, but she first has to contend with the her own reality which includes her parents..
Plot: Making her way through life by forming superficial relationships, Yoko keeps everyone at arm’s length, whether it’s her father and stepmother or Hajime, the owner of a small bookstore who could be the father of her unborn child. Yoko seems most at home when she’s riding the train, speeding around the city with only her thoughts to entertain her.
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Ratings:

	6.8/10 Votes: 3,187
	91% | RottenTomatoes
	80/100 | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 41 Popularity: 3.374 | TMDB

Reviews:

art film devoid of life
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 than that.

Director Hsiao-hsien Hou has opted for a Spartan style of film-making that hearkens 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
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.

Other Information:

Original Language ja
Runtime 1 hr 48 min (108 min)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated N/A
Genre Drama
Director Hsiao-Hsien Hou
Writer Hsiao-Hsien Hou, T’ien-wen Chu
Actors Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano, Masato Hagiwara
Country Japan, Taiwan
Awards 4 wins & 5 nominations
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Dolby Digital
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera Arriflex 535B, Zeiss Ultra Prime Lenses
Laboratory N/A
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 35 mm (Kodak)
Cinematographic Process Spherical
Printed Film Format 35 mm (spherical)