the guardian, June 16, 2005
The go-between
He spearheaded the 'new wave' of Taiwanese cinema and wasn't afraid to portray his country's troubled past. With Café Lumière 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
[image] Cafe Lumiere Tokyo story ... Yo Hitoto in Café Lumière

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, Café Lumière 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.

Café Lumière 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."

Café Lumière 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, Café Lumière 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

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

 

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Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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