Taiwanese helmer Hou Hsiao-Hsien celebrated the centennial year of Japanese master Yasurjiro Ozu with this modest-to-a-fault homage pic. It touches on many typical Ozu themes & issues (an independent woman, pregnant by a distant Taiwanese boyfriend, tells her father & step-mother she plans on raising the child on her own yet she seems to be drawing closer to a quietly appealing bookshop owner) and makes stabs at Ozu-style film-making (long fixed-position ‘takes,’ staging in multiple plains of action, interstitial visual grace notes, even touches of red in most compositions), but it’s all to little avail. Ozu’s work remains as elusive as it is quietly revolutionary, precise where CAFÉ is vague (not to say bland) and charged with conflicting emotional POVs where CAFÉ holds just one. Accept no substitutions.
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