You can't beat an old master

Coffee Jiko

Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Director: Hou Hsiao- hsien
Running time: 103 minutes
Language: Japanese
Currently showing

Yasujiro Ozu's trademark style -- the low camera angles, the straight cuts, the actors talking at the camera in medium closeup -- has inspired book-length studies and earned him a lofty place in the directorial pantheon. It also inspired homages such as Jun Ichikawa's "Tokyo Kyodai (Tokyo Siblings)," but Ozu, a hermetic genius whose aesthetics were a closed system, has produced no school of disciples.

For the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2003, the Shochiku studio, where Ozu spent his entire career, planned to release a tribute film with eminent directors from around the world contributing segments. One, the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien, wanted to make a feature, not a short, however, and Shochiku, which had written and distributed several of Hou's films agreed to finance it.

Hou began shooting in Japan in August 2003 and Shochiku held a world premiere of the completed film, "Coffee Jiko (Cafe Lumiere)" in Tokyo on Dec. 12 of that year, on what would have been Ozu's 100th birthday.