Cafe Lumiere

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's great movie CAFE LUMIERE plays tomorrow April 27 7p.m. at Cinefamily.

Commissioned for the Shochiku studio in honor of the centenary of house filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, it is contemplative, calm, quietly evocative and ironically even more beautiful than the late works of the devotee Ozu. The protagonist is an independent-minded freelance writer in Tokyo and the movie observes the ebb and flow of a few days of her life.

I've seen it 3 times and the low-key reality created by the movie is hard to shake. There's so much to look at, "read" and casually puzzle over that it felt very different each time too.