Cafe Lumiere in the Guardian

[Mark Nornes]

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/ 
0,6737,1508040,00.html


The go-between

He spearheaded the 'new wave' of Taiwanese cinema and wasn't afraid to
portray his country's troubled past. With Caf? Lumi?re out in the UK,
acclaimed director Hou Hsiao-hsien talks to Geoffrey Macnab about  
filming
in Japan, bridging the generation divide and why he won't return to his
native China
Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday June 16, 2005

Guardian Unlimited
It's mid-morning in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes and Hou
Hsiao-hsien is trying to order a cup of coffee. We're seated together  
with
his wife, who is distractedly reading a newspaper, and his translator,  
who
is waving forlornly in the direction of passing waiters. Hou's new film,
Three Times, received its world premiere in Cannes, but he is here to  
talk
about its predecessor, Caf? Lumi?re which, thanks to the vagaries of
international distribution, is only now on UK release.

Hou Hsiao-hsien might best be described as "a film-maker's film-maker".
Other directors revere the Taiwanese auteur, even if his films rarely
reach wide audiences. When Jim Jarmusch won the Cannes Grand Prix for
Broken Flowers, he seemed almost embarrassed at landing such an award
ahead of Hou, whom he called his "teacher". French film-maker Olivier
Assayas admired Hou so much that in 1997, he made a feature length
documentary about him: HHH: Portrait de Hou Hsiao-hsien. Critics are
equally enthusiastic. "Hou may well be one of the greatest story-tellers
the cinema has known, a rival to DW Griffith," Kent Jones wrote  
recently.
Hou was voted "Director of the Decade (1990s)" in a poll of  
international
film critics put together by the Village Voice and Film Comment.
Nonetheless, not even winning a Golden Lion in Venice for his 1989 film
City of Sadness has helped him emerge a long way outside the festival
circuit.

Caf? Lumi?re is a departure for Hou: the first film he has shot in  
Japan.
The project was originally conceived as a three-part portmanteau picture
to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Japanese  
director,
Yasujiro Ozu, in 1903. When the other two directors dropped out, Hou
decided to make the entire film himself. No, Hou explains, he didn't  
grow
up devouring Ozu movies. It was only because critics kept telling him  
how
much his own work resembled that of the Japanese master that he decided  
to
explore it. He first saw Ozu's films in Paris, in the mid-1980s, when he
was in Europe promoting his autobiographical feature, The Time to Live  
and
the Time to Die. "I was fascinated by Ozu, but our work is different,"  
he
says. "The idea of using details from life - that part is the same."

Caf? Lumi?re is a slow-burning, impressionistic study of a young  
Japanese
girl, Yoko (played by pop star Yo Hitoto), who lives in Tokyo. She has
just come back from Taiwan, where she has been researching the life of a
famous composer. Everything about the storytelling style is low-key and
oblique. In one pivotal scene, Yoko mentions in passing to her elderly
parents that she is pregnant and that her Taiwanese boyfriend is the
father. "But I won't marry him," she says defiantly. Her parents are
startled. They know that Yoko doesn't have any money and that they will
soon be forced to live on their pensions, but they keep their emotions  
in
check. As in Ozu's great films such as The End of Summer, Floating Weeds
or Tokyo Story, there is a rift between generations. The parents  
struggle
to understand their children's motivations. The children, in turn, seem
blithely unaware of the codes governing their parents' lives.

Hou shares Ozu's restrained shooting style, holding shots for a small
eternity and often concentrating the action on the edge of the frame.  
The
camera hones in on small, seemingly throwaway domestic details: Yoko  
with
her back to camera, hanging the washing as she talks on her mobile  
phone,
or her parents sitting quietly together having just heard the news that
she is pregnant. Performances are deliberately understated. As Chang  
Chen,
the lead actor in Three Times, says: "the main thing is for the actors  
to
forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a
documentary." The camera is kept still and at a discreet distance from  
the
actors.

Hou says this stylistic approach wasn't influenced by Ozu but was down  
to
common sense. In his earlier work, "the people in the film were not
professional actors. If you got too close with the camera, you would  
then
see all the dreadful things they were doing. So keeping people at a
certain distance disguised all this embarrassment."

With its sequences of trains criss-crossing through cityscapes, use of
piano music and shots of Yoko alone in the traffic, or lost in thought,
Caf? Lumi?re is quietly beguiling. Trains are a leitmotif in Hou's (and
Ozu's) work. They hint at characters in transition - and they're also
intensely photogenic. Here, they're almost ubiquitous. Yoko's best  
friend
Hajime (Tadanobu Asano) is a train spotter whose hobby is recording  
train
sounds. In one bizarre sequence, he comes up with a computer design that
shows her unborn baby nestling in a womb constructed of train carriages.

Hou claims to have found shooting in Japan a breeze. "At the beginning,  
I
thought it would be very difficult because of the differences between
Japanese and Taiwanese culture," he says. "The idea came from a Japanese
friend. I wanted to tell a family story, just like Ozu, but to make it
about modern Tokyo. I had a map of Tokyo. I started off by working out
which area I liked most. After thinking up the professions for each
character, I was able to work out which part of the city they would go
to."

The Taiwanese director researches his projects meticulously. For his  
2001
feature, Millennium Mambo, largely set in the hyper-charged twilight  
world
of the Taipei rave scene, he threw himself into youth culture. The
distinguished auteur hung out at the local discos and even experimented
with ecstasy. He doesn't think it is a drug for his generation. "It
relaxes you," he muses. "Young people have many, many pressures. When  
they
take it, they can open their minds, relax and get rid of all these
pressures. But I don't have these pressures."

Exquisitely shot by Mark Ping-bin Lee (the cinematographer behind Wong
Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love), and boasting an intense central
performance from Shu Qi (playing another of Hou's women adrift in the  
big,
bad city), Millennium Mambo nonetheless failed to connect with younger
Taiwanese audiences. "They thought it out of date," the director
acknowledges. Nor did it carry the same appeal for older critics as his
beautifully crafted 1998 feature, Flowers of Shanghai, set in the  
brothels
("flower houses") of late 19th-century China. In Taiwan itself,  
Millennium
garnered only 3,000 admissions. "Art movies and commercial movies are
(considered) opposites ... it's like they hate each other," he says of  
the
divide that still exists in Taiwanese film culture.

Millennium Mambo was part of his ongoing attempt to explore Taiwanese
culture, history and politics. In his work, he has dealt frankly with
moments in Taiwan's recent past the censors would rather he had left  
well
alone. A City of Sadness was set in the late 1940s, a time of huge
upheaval in the country, and made explicit reference to the 1947  
massacre
of unarmed demonstrators by Chaing Kai-Shek's Nationalist troops. The  
fact
that the Tiananmen Square massacre happened at around the time the film
was released lent the sequence an added resonance.

The 1940s was the period when Hou's own family arrived in Taiwan. Hou  
was
born in 1947 in Guangdong province, China. Not long afterwards, his  
father
moved to Taiwan, eventually sending for his family and setting up home  
in
the south of the country. "He (my father) wanted to stay for only a few
years and then go back to mainland China, but after 1949, that was
impossible." Hou has never returned to mainland China, but he  
contributes
money toward the maintenance of a "family temple". (He is the 25th
generation of his family.) Ask him why he doesn't return to China and he
says cryptically: "The time is not good yet."

Hou has been working in the Taiwanese film industry since the early  
1970s
after military service and a brief (and very unlikely) stint as an
electronic calculator salesman. After spending six or seven years as a
script supervisor and assistant director, he began making his own movies
in the early 1980s. Right from the outset, foreign critics noticed his
work. The Boys From Fengkuei won a prize at the 1984 Festival of Three
Continents in Nantes. Since then, he has been a well-nigh permanent
fixture on the international film festival circuit. Along with  
film-makers
like Edward Yang and Tao De-Chen, Hou spearheaded the "new wave" of
Taiwanese cinema which emerged in the 1980s, as the local industry began
to step out of the long shadow cast by Hong Kong cinema.

These days, he regrets, there is no longer the sense of a movement. Hou
and his fellow directors are so busy with their own projects that they  
no
longer have much contact with one another. Nor is the government
especially supportive. Hou has to turn to Japanese and French financiers
to get his movies made. Almost inevitably, he remains a prophet without
honour in his own land. "My films are accepted much more in Japan or in
Europe," he says just a little mournfully as the waiter finally brings  
the
cup of coffee he has been trying to order since the interview began.

? Cafe Lumiere is out now
Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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