Hou does Ozu

Some good news this morning -- an English language website for the latest Hou Hsiao-Hsien film, Café Lumière. Hou, one of Taiwan's best directors (The Puppetmaster, Good Men, Good Women, Flowers of Shanghai) has set his latest production in Japan, and it is a tribute to Yasujiro Ozu for the 100th anniversary of his birth. Ozu's influence can be felt in many of Hou's films, but with Café Lumière he "tried to think how Ozu himself would have shot a film in today's Japan" and the film is meant to echo the spirituality that pervades over all of Ozu's films. The film stars newcomer Yo Hitoto, and Tadanobu Asano, who is rapidly becoming the John C. Reilly of Japan, given the vast amount of films he appears in (Distance, Ichi the Killer, Zatoichi, Last Life in the Universe, etc.) It tells the simple story of a writer (Hitoto) who meets and befriends a second-hand bookshop owner (Asano) who records the sounds of trains in his spare time. Sounds like a perfect Ozu setup. Described as a Tokyo Story for the 21st century, Hou has said that his aim was to "portray the real and evince other things the eye cannot see". Hopefully this will get a wider distribution than his previous films. Filmbrain can't wait.

Comments

[girish]

awesome news!
there was some bafflement at cannes about why "cafe lumiere" didn't play there.
this announcement means that the film will most likely play the fall festivals (toronto, nyff, venice) and thus have a good shot at distribution.
there was some mixed reaction to his last film, "millennium mambo" (2001) which i couldn't understand--i found it to be pretty darn amazing.
maybe it was the leap from 19th century shanghai to late 20th c. techno/rave culture that was offputting to some people?
do you have a favorite among his films?

[FIlmbrain]

I agree with you about Millennium Mambo -- I didn't feel (as many did) that it was superficial.

His best film (IMO, of course) is Flowers of Shanghai, which I can watch over and over (and I have). That's about as perfect as a film can get.

[girish]

ditto on "flowers of shanghai".

there's a pretty wonderful doc (perhaps you've seen it already) on hou by olivier assayas. it's called "hhh: portrait of hou hsiao-hsien", and was done for the "cinema de notre temps" series.
hilarious to see hou's passion for karaoke in it.

"flowers" and "puppetmaster" are my favorites, though every single film i've seen by him is just stupendous. i can't think of a more consistently excellent director working today (IMO, of course).
i'd love to see his earlier stuff again, like "a summer at grandpa's" or "daughter of the nile". i remember them being really terrific too. the one that's always slipped away from me every time is "city of sadness".
i hope to catch up with it someday.
(as i do edward yang's "taipei story", in which hou plays the lead).

[Filmbrain]

There is a DVD box set out of Taiwan that has four of his early films -- and it's region free! It has The Boys from Fengkuei, A Summer at Grandpa's, The Time to Live and a Time to Die, and Dust in the Wind. It's pretty expensive though.

The Assayas portrait is wonderful -- wish I could locate that on DVD.

I missed Taipei Story when it screened in NYC some years back.

[Ricoh]

You can still find "Taipei Story" on EBay.
I get a copy from there. I believe that's the only source now.

A very wonderful film , directed by Edward Yang, featuring HHH as actor.

[stillwater]

I lived in DC in 2000 when the National Gallery of Art did a HHH retrospective. They showed basically all of his work including the Assayas documentary. It was my first introduction to his work and I agree, he is a compelling filmmaker whose films deserve much better distribution than they receive.