If “High Tension” more or less lives up to its title, “Cafe Lumiere” goes all the way. Here is a movie for anyone who has ever stopped to watch sunlight dance on a leaf; swung by the Met to soak up Vermeer; or wept for the lucidity of an Ozu film. We can talk mise-en-scene till we’re blue in the face, but there’s really nothing to it but this: pure, enveloping, restorative light.

The director, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, is famous for his peerlessly beautiful cinema – and infamous for the complexity of his narratives. That reputation was earned in dense masterworks like “The Puppetmaster,” but “Cafe Lumiere” is as simple as the sun, as guileless as a glass of water. Conceived in tribute to Ozu, the plot resembles one of the master’s domestic melodramas, attenuated to a vanishing point.

Were you to blow on “Cafe Lumiere,” it would surely float right off the screen. Little danger of that: Its skill will take your breath away.

Yo Hitoto stars as Yoko, a young Japanese writer researching the life of Taiwanese composer Jiang Wenye. We learn, eventually, that she is pregnant by a Taiwanese lover we never see. Her friend Hajimi (Tadanobu Asano) runs a clean, well lighted place for books. In his spare time, he perambulates Tokyo recording ambient sounds. Like Ozu, he’s especially keen on trains.

Yoko and Hajimi walk, talk, hang out among books, or sit in the local cafe. A romantic impulse seeds their friendship, but it never flowers. Supremely patient, Mr. Hou cultivates a rarified poignancy from these subdued affections: He makes Wong Kar-Wai look like Park Chan-Wook. And that’s just about all there is to the plot. Sound dull? You don’t look at Monet for the strength of his allegory. “Cafe Lumiere” carries its genius lightly; it’s as kind and gentle a movie as they come.

When it graced the New York Film Festival last year, I wrote that a useful review would consist entirely of high-quality, semi-translucent stills. Better than any words, they might indicate something of the limpid photography and the arresting arrangement of volumes in space; the stuff of the film is variously shelved into grids, woven into arabesques, or carried along on smooth-riding tracking shots. But nothing short of a trip to Anthology Film Archives, where “Cafe Lumiere” unspools over 10 days, will suffice to deliver the ineffable serenity of this remarkable film. A master in thrall to the everyday sublime, Mr. Hou joins Ozu as one of the great shapers of the celluloid art.

Until June 19 (32 Second Avenue, at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).