Café Lumière

Yoko lives in Tokyo, is researching the Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-ye, and has to tell her parents she is pregnant. She has no intention of marrying. No large crisis follows. Her parents go quiet, life continues at the same speed, and the film watches that silence. Shochiku commissioned it for the centenary of Ozu's birth, and Hou Hsiao-hsien declined to deliver the expected thing. He takes Ozu's subjects, the family coming apart and the distance between tradition and a new life, and shoots them with his own camera. Trains are the spine of the film, the lines that stitch the city together seen again and again, at length. Its best scene puts two characters into the same frame at a station without either of them seeing the other. The difficulty is that almost nothing happens, feelings go unspoken, and the film arrives nowhere. Who it is for: viewers who follow Ozu and Hou. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for narrative and resolution.