Faster than the Speed of Life

A year ago I tried to watch Hao Hsiao Hsien's Cafe Lumiere, a beautiful film in which so very little seems to happen, but I found I could not sit through it. It wasn't anything about the quality of the film; it was everything to do with me. I was restless, anxious, unable to sit still for anything that didn't have excitement by the bucket-loads and a quickly unfolding plot. Cafe Lumiere has neither. What it does have, what I discovered for myself almost a year later and almost two years after the film came out, is an exquisite sense of the beauty that exists in the minute, in everyday small events. Just as in the films of Ozu, the director Hao's film is a tribute to, Cafe Lumiere unfolds everything at the speed of life - slow, deliberate, calculated, nothing too small to get lost.

That it took me so long to come to this film was annoying. Life at times seems to move so quickly and people seem always to be trying to rush everything. Technology doesn't help at all with the changes, the "advances" being made almost every day. The idea of the wired citizen is cliche, yes, but it is one we are confronted with daily. All this speed, all this rushing - you feel caught up by it, driven forward, like being propelled by a quickly moving crowd, unable to keep out of the way, pushed headlong in a direction you do not wish go. It is all so exhausting. You become so trapped by this pace that you forget to take time for things, you lose the ability to simply gaze at something with no real purpose in mind. To simply take in, to see the most amazing things around us that we ignore every day for the sake of schedules that enslave us.

When I see a film like Cafe Lumiere or Pen-ek Ratanaurang's Last Life in the Universe (both with the very fine Tadanobu Asano) or Francesco Rossi's Christ Stopped at Eboli or any film by Tarkovsky, I am reminded to slow down, to take time, to see the grain of wood in the door in front of me or the way a tree lies on its side in the woods, or how the light from my lamp makes the wood of my desk glow in golden warmth. Life moves quickly enough, I tell myself, without my being complicit in helping it go faster.

Watching Cafe Lumiere was like taking a slow walk, a deliberate slowing down of my pace. One scene in particular stays with me. The main character, Yoko, is visiting a bookshop run by Hajime, her friend who is in love with her. They are listening to a cd of the music of Jiang Wenye. The camera takes them in, Yoko standing, leaning against a table, Hajime sitting by his desk, books and work all around him, his dog at his feet. We hear the sound of traffic, the sound of the dog moving by Hajime's feet, the music playing on the speakers of the sound system. Yoko and Hajime listen, appreciating what they hear, taking it in as we take them in. They are like two, very real people surreptitiously caught on film they look so natural, so true. It is as if you are there in the bookstore with them, feeling the warmth of the sun on your arm as you listen to this music and browse the books on the shelves. Cafe Lumiere is a film about the serenity of small moments. It travels at the speed of life.