Café Noir

An extended essay on unrequited love. Some might call it two essays on unrequited love as the 3+ hour film is cut distinctly into two halves, complete with a credit roll separating them. The first half is in color and focuses on a guy whose married lover ends their affair. The second half is in mostly black & white and focuses on a woman the guy met in the first half (who tells her story in one 14 minute still-camera take against a concrete background. And nails it!).

The guy glues the two parts together. He’s bummed out in the first half, and then from serving as confidant to the differently-bummed-out woman in the second half he gets to feel better. He delivers good character arc and the juxtaposition in styles of bummed-outedness is told and executed well. But the story doesn’t matter.

Cafe Noir is a linear quilt of set pieces and cinematic indulgences, vignette style. There are more than a half dozen scenes you could call music videos, gorgeous music videos with great music: Bach chorales, Korean indie funky dub, opera, Chinese avant-garde. The whole film is melancholy and these “music videos” barely raise its temperature. Except one. A dance number near the end to the middle eastern grooves of Bill Laswell. Dance number?

This film is the first born from a guy who was a leading and influential film critic for more than two decades; an intellectual type critic steeped in the French New Wave who doesn’t think much of films that simply entertain. There’s a short interview with him at Hancinema http://www.hancinema.net/film-critic-puts-his-reputation-on-the-line-in-directing-debut-27040.html that's worth reading.

The film is based on stories by Goethe and Dostoevsky. Most of the dialog is literary if not poetic. Beyond the inspirations and homages to great works of art, Cafe Noir is also steeped in gobs of Kim Ki-dukian religiosity and the academic musings on love of Hong Sang-soo, with plenty of nods to contemporary K...