Café lumiere (2003)

Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiere is a movie that goes from touching to beautiful, eerie and slow. It's a good film. Take this scene for example: Yoko, main character of the film, goes home to visit her parents. She greets them, sits down on the floor. Her mother is preparing food and her father is busy with something. She coos for the cat and the cat jumps up on a shelf. The girl lies down and falls asleep. It's a really simple scene, but it contained a thousand emotions. We get to know that the girl is pregnant and her parents react to her saying that she won't marry the fellow because she won't become his business partner. There are no Announcements with dramatic gestures, no big family quarrels, nothing like that. Lots of silences, people eating food, glancing at each other, acting decent. Hsiao-hsien observes family life, but many scenes of the film has a completely different character. The girl is a freelance writer and she is writing a piece on a composer. She asks her friend to help. The friend records sounds in train stations. The girl takes the train somewhere. We are inside the train, looking out, hearing the noises. I don't know quite how the material of Café Lumiére fits together - the trains and the family drama - but that doesn't worry me so much.