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JAPANESE + ENGLISH | 103 MINUTES | MFA: DECEMBER 22-24 + 28-30 In such films as his masterful Tokyo Story, the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu addressed the disintegration of society and the inevitability of loss with a style that was lucid, precise, and structured. In paying tribute to the 2003 centenary of Ozu’s birth, the great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien touches on the same themes, and his style doesn’t resist evanescence but embraces it. Yoko (Japanese pop star Yo Hitoto), a free-wheeling Tokyo woman, is adrift. Her biological mother left her to join a cult, her father says little, her foster mother makes a good stew. She’s pregnant but she won’t marry. Instead, she researches the life of a Taiwanese composer — his music on the soundtrack, like Satie verging on Schoenberg, echoes the rhythms of the film — while her friend the bookseller records the sounds of trains. Ozu famously favored long-held, low-angled compositions; Hou’s characters drift in and out of long shots, barely emerging from a congested city that has lost even the late master’s melancholy.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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