I can't say as much as I'd like to about this film, Hou's tribute to Ozu for the centenary of the Japanese master's birth, despite it being my favorite of the director's films since "Flowers of Shanghai", at least, and perhaps since "Good Men, Good Women". I was thoroughly entranced by the slim storyline of a young woman in
some large Japanese city, I'm not sure it's ever stated which
.researching an early 20th-Century composer by visiting places he lived and worked in, finding out she's pregnant and dealing with her parents' stoical reactions to her prospects of single motherhood, and the potential budding romance or at least very deep friendship with a geeky bookstore owner/sound recordist. Like most or maybe all of Hou's films, this is so dependent on the visuals and the mood that it just doesn't translate well into words, at least not for this poor scribe; very little happens in the film, and yet there is a deep sense of melancholy and a powerful feeling for the lost world of the postwar Japanese master though it is at the same time decidedly clear that our heroine Yôko (Yo Hitato, really superb) is more "free" in her choices now than she would have been in 1958 or so.
The many shots of trains, and the sequences involving Yôko's parents are really the only very obvious visual references to the earlier Japanese director's influence, but the whole of the film is permeated by a similar sense of generations in transition, of the scary new world awaiting those more interested in remembering history than creating new stories. DVD rental.
The many shots of trains, and the sequences involving Yôko's parents are really the only very obvious visual references to the earlier Japanese director's influence, but the whole of the film is permeated by a similar sense of generations in transition, of the scary new world awaiting those more interested in remembering history than creating new stories. DVD rental.