Coffee jikou

[Richard Suchenski]

I saw it in December last year as part of the Ozu centennial in the only
public screening that I'm aware of.

It's a terrific film; not as incisive, profound, or formally sophisticated
as "The Puppetmaster," "Good Men, Good Women," or "Flowers of Shanghai," but
a wonderful film in it's own right, and an intelligent and moving tribute to
Ozu that manages to be extremely compassionate without being sentimental or
trite (does anyone expect anything less from Hou?).  He's taken some of the
temporal experiments of "Goodbye, South, Goodbye" - particularly the poetic
articulation of everyday time - mixed it with some of the airy rhythms of
"Millennium Mambo," and added a few nods to Ozu's formal rigor and humanist
sensibility.  Like Tian Zhuangzhuang's remake of "Springtime in a Small
Town," or Todd Hayne's "Far From Heaven," it manages to be both a testament
to and a commentary on a celebrated 50's aesthetic without feeling
condescending, facile, or patly ironic.  I'm not convinced that it
represents a new direction for Hou's cinema, but it's a significant
improvement on "Millennium Mambo" (where it felt that, formal beauties
aside, Hou was just marking time), and it's a remarkable achievement.

Hou was apparently somewhat dissatisfied with the film in December, and
decided to try re-editing it for Cannes, where, unfortunately, it never
played.  A friend of mine in Hong Kong tells me that Hou wanted to take it
to Cannes and it looks as if it got snubbed as part of a new more
risk-averse Cannes programming policy that also seems to have skipped over
new films by Jia Zhang-ke, Mike Leigh, and Im Kwon-taek.  Given Hou's
prestige at Cannes over the past decade, however, I find it somewhat hard to
believe that the Cannes selection board would take "Shrek 2" and "The
Ladykillers" over a Hou film, but I guess anything's possible...  It looks
fairly certain, however, that it will play at Venice in September, and it
will almost certainly show up at the New York Film Festival in October, and,
last I heard, a Japanese art-house release was planned for September.

I'm very much looking forward to the chance to see it again.

Richard Suchenski

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tatiana Leite" <tatianaleite at estacaovirtual.com>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2004 2:22 PM
Subject: Coffee jikou


>
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> Hello!
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> Has anyone seen Hsiao-hsien Hou last film? Was it in any film festival?
>
> Tatiana
>
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>