Tag: Region: Taiwan

A State of Uncertainty: Tsai Ming-liang on Days

This interview was originally published at Cinema Scope

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There’s no exact precedent for the long creative collaboration between Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. In 1991, as the story goes, Tsai stepped out of a screening of a David Lynch movie and spotted Lee sitting on a motorbike outside of an arcade. The director was struggling to cast a television program about troubled teens, so he struck up a conversation with Lee and invited him to audition. During the shoot Tsai became frustrated and began to doubt whether Lee could perform the role, and in the process he discovered that the problem was his own expectations. “I was projecting too many of my own ideas onto Lee’s performance, rather than allowing him to draw upon his own natural way of behaving,” Tsai told Declan McGrath in 2019.

Over the course of three decades and more than 30 films, Tsai and Lee have constantly refined and simplified their methods of observation, first stripping away traditional performance styles, and then the three-act structure, and then, finally, the industrial machinery of film production. Following his last narrative feature, Stray Dogs (2013), Tsai hinted at retirement. In fact, he moved increasingly into art spaces, taking commissions for gallery work and exploring the breakthrough he had achieved in 2012 with the first of the Walker films, in which Lee, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk, moves as slowly as possible through urban environments. Tsai has said that he now happily accepts his destiny, which is simply to film Lee Kang-sheng’s face. In retrospect, each step of his career seems to have been toward achieving a more pure expression of that ambition, removing all vestiges of interference between the camera and Lee’s “natural way of behaving.”

Days, which premiered in Competition at the 2020 Berlinale, marks Tsai’s return to feature filmmaking, but even compared with the sparse and elliptical Stray Dogs it is a stripped-down affair. Tsai has made oblique references to the project in recent years, mentioning only that he was filming Lee and another actor and that he no longer considered himself a screenwriter. Instead, he wanted to work without even a concept for the film in mind. As he explains in our interview, that meant, in practice, collecting images of Lee and co-star Anong Houngheuangsy, recording synch sound, and only later shaping the material into something resembling a narrative.

In the first act of Days, Tsai crosscuts between Lee and Anong living their separate, isolated lives. Lee, now in his early 50s, inhabits a number of spaces, including a spartan, modern flat, the crowded streets of Hong Kong, and what appears to be the abandoned building that Lee and Tsai have shared since they decided several years ago to move closer to nature while Lee recovered from an illness. Lee’s first major health crisis, a mysterious neck ailment, became a significant plot point in The River (1997). Two decades later, the sickness has returned, and much of Days is a deeply compassionate study of Lee struggling to manage his pain. We see him wearing a neck brace and stretching, and in one remarkable, extended sequence, he visits a clinic to receive a moxibustion treatment, which involves affixing small cones (moxa) to the top of acupuncture needles and lighting them on fire. The treatment ends with a massage-like scraping of the affected area, which causes large contusions to spread over Lee’s shoulders and back. Tsai cuts from the procedure to a close-up of Lee, who stares into the camera, twitching, his face marked on both sides by deep lines from the massage chair, like folds in his skin. It’s a monumental image and unlike any of Lee we’ve seen before.

Tsai and Anong became friends three years ago after meeting in Bangkok, where Anong has worked illegally since emigrating from Laos as a teenager. It’s impossible to not draw parallels between him and the young Lee Kang-sheng we first meet in Rebels of the Neon God (1992): silent, graceful, a strangely arresting screen presence. Tsai often films Anong alone in his home, a barren, concrete slab of a room, where he prays to a makeshift shrine and prepares his meals. The press kit for Days includes this unusually melancholy description of the actor: “Even after several years, the urban city still feels foreign, cold, and lonely to him. His only joy is meeting his Laotian friends occasionally for beer, or making a meal of hometown cuisine at home.”

An hour into Days, Lee and Anong have a pre-arranged meeting in a hotel room. Lee arrives first and removes the top blanket from the bed, folding it in a practiced gesture and setting it aside. Soon Anong joins him and gives him a massage that ends with masturbation and a passionate kiss, all in real time—two shots lasting just under 20 minutes. It’s a rare moment of relatively uncomplicated connection and pleasure in Tsai’s filmography, which seems miraculous somehow. The exchange is no less poignant for being transactional. When Anong leaves, Lee chases after him and they share one meal before returning to their lonely lives back home.

The image of Lee and Anong eating together, like much of Days, recalls the lost family unit that was so central to Rebels of the Neon God, The River, and What Time Is It There? (2001). Lu Yi-ching and Miao Tien, who played Lee’s mother and father, haunt Days with their absence, particularly in a scene after the massage, when Lee and Anong sit quietly together at the end of the bed. Days is a small, modest film, but this shot is precisely blocked and art-directed, with warm light in the foreground and cool fluorescent in the back—a delightful reminder that Tsai remains a master of traditional film form. Lee surprises Anong with a gift, a small music box that plays the theme from Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), and as they sit, listening to the tune, the nature of their relationship transforms suddenly into something more paternal and tender. A generation has passed before us on screen. The cycle is repeating. “And then you suddenly realize you are old,” Tsai told me, with a grin.

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Cinema Scope: Director Tsai, I met you briefly 15 years ago in Toronto when you presented a screening of a Grace Chang film, The Wild, Wild Rose (Wang Tian-lin, 1960). All I knew at the time about Grace Chang was that you’d included a few of her songs in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005). I remember you saying at that screening that you were nostalgic for those old Hong Kong musicals because they are full of genuine, oversized emotions. Is the music box a kind of trick for sneaking genuine, oversized emotions into Days?

Tsai Ming-liang: Yes! It’s very interesting that you started with this question! On the flight to Berlin I watched Judy (2019). Why did I watch that film? Because I love Judy Garland. After I watched it, all I could think was, “There will never be another Judy Garland!”

Cinema Scope: Do you still watch older, more sentimental films for inspiration?

Tsai: Yes, I can become very obsessed. I have an exhibition space in Taipei, where I showed the Walker films with Lee Kang-sheng. I just had a film festival there and we screened Chaplin’s City Lights (1931).

Cinema Scope: What happens when the music box is opened? What do you hope viewers will experience at that moment?

Tsai: It’s a gift! That’s a gift we all need.

Cinema Scope: Anong, in much of the film, you are doing everyday tasks like cutting vegetables and preparing food, but the music-box scene is slightly more formal. It’s a beautifully lit shot, and I imagine that room felt more like a traditional film set than the other locations. How did Director Tsai prepare you for the scene?

Anong Houngheuangsy: For the hotel scene, Director Tsai told me to just sit still, to focus on my breathing, and to be prepared to improvise. I didn’t know Kang would bring me the gift, so that was very surprising. I didn’t expect it at all. How I reacted was very natural.

Cinema Scope: How is the character different from yourself? How much are you performing?

Anong: I think I was not even acting. I was just being myself. I was cooking and sleeping and reacting exactly as I normally do. I didn’t create a new story for the character.

Cinema Scope: Lee, I think you and I are about the same age, and I’ve been watching these films for almost 25 years. Seeing you sitting on the bed beside Anong made me realize how much I miss Miao Tien. What do you remember about him? And do you feel his presence in your performance?

Lee Kang-sheng: Miao Tien played my father in The River, which was when I first hurt my neck, the first time I got sick. I’ve gotten sick again, which is what you see in Days. Twenty years later, I’ve reached the age of 51, and looking at Anong, I see that I have become the father character. Anong is like my kid. So, yes, I do find some sort of connection with Miao Tien.

Cinema Scope: Director Tsai, I’m now a father, and my own father is nearing the end of his life, so rewatching your films over the past few weeks has been very emotional for me. Much of your work is about foundational familial relationships and about the effort to better understand and sympathize with the people we love. I wonder if you are so fascinated with Lee Kang-sheng because you can project that desire onto him?

Tsai: When I was making the new film, I did not think of The River at all. But it suddenly hit me one day as I was looking at the footage that there is maybe some kind of continuous connection. I’m present in this film. I’m with them because I see these two actors as my children.

I draw inspiration for all of my films from life itself, so of course in life you see a lot of repetition. For example, the piece of music in the music box is from Chaplin’s Limelight, which I also used at the end of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), in a Chinese version. Because I’m drawing on life, the films are always overlapping. It’s repetition. There’s a cycle. And then you suddenly realize you are old!

Cinema Scope: You mentioned that you are present in Days. Are you an actual character in the film?

Tsai: I was in the film, but I cut myself out! I don’t want the film to be a documentary. It’s a narrative feature.

Cinema Scope: But there is a mysterious third character. He’s there at the acupuncture appointment, pointing out where Lee Kang-sheng is being burned, and we hear him, or someone, clear his throat near the end.

Tsai: No! It’s just people walking by. I enjoy the offscreen sounds. Everything you hear is original sound. I didn’t change them. I didn’t enhance them. I wanted to keep the sounds as they are.

Cinema Scope: You’ve said that you collected footage for a number of years and only later realized it could be fashioned into a film. There’s a mysterious shot in Days of the sun reflecting off the windows of a building. During that scene, I imagined you carrying a camera with you, capturing images as you find them. If so, what are you looking for? How do you know when an image has life in it?

Tsai: I don’t actually walk around carrying a camera, but I do follow my actor. I follow Lee Kang-sheng. In recent years we haven’t made many feature films, but we’ve made a number of short films for museums. We did theatre. We toured in Europe. I’ve been working with a young and talented cinematographer, Chang Jhong-yuan, who is very interested in filming Lee Kang-sheng and me. For example, he was there when I cared for Lee Kang-sheng while he was sick. When I looked at his images I realized I wanted to use them, but I didn’t know how exactly.

Lee Kang-sheng wanted to see a doctor, so I said I wanted to film it. He didn’t disagree, so I followed him to the doctor with the cinematographer. I felt that if I didn’t film that day, if I didn’t capture those images, then no one would ever see Lee Kang-sheng’s face and body at that moment. It sounds strange, but when he got sick there was something heartbreaking about it. I wanted to save those images.

I thought the images would be used in a museum piece, but eventually I met Anong and while we were video-chatting I saw him cooking, and the way he cooked really touched me. I wanted to film it, so I flew to Thailand. That is what I am looking for. I’m always looking for something very real.

Cinema Scope: After collecting footage for years, you had to assemble it into a film. I’m curious about that process. For example, there are several different shots of Lee Kang-sheng walking. In one sequence a handheld camera is following him through a busy street. In another, he walks alone at night under street lamps in static, long-duration shots. Do those sequences have different functions in the film? How do you decide what is necessary?

Tsai: Usually when I work on a feature film, I only use one single lens. But this time, when Lee Kang-sheng got so sick, I didn’t realize I was working on a feature. That realization came later. I was simply doing something like a documentary, just recording what was happening to him.

When we shot his visit to the clinic, we couldn’t negotiate with the doctor. We couldn’t ask for more time for a long shot. We had 30 minutes and everything happened in real time. So we shot with only one camera in a kind of panic. When Lee Kang-sheng is burned, we didn’t plan that. It was all done in a state of uncertainty.

Still, I wanted to have beautiful shots. When we walked the streets of Hong Kong, I wanted to avoid people looking at Lee Kang-sheng, so we used a hand-held camera, which of course created a different energy. But because he is so real, because he is so authentic, something powerful always comes out of it.

Cinema Scope: This was a new experiment, working without a script or even a firm concept. Do you consider it a success? Will you work like this again?

Tsai: Yes. I’m very happy with the results. I felt very comfortable in this mode. I didn’t have a big team with me this time, so I felt no pressure. I had a cinematographer and another person doing the sound, and we worked slowly, taking our time.

Of course, we had limited resources, but the cinematographer knew how to create a beautiful digital image. It takes time! But there was no pressure because I didn’t have the film industry behind my back, pressing on me. The result is something handcrafted. I’m obsessed with this way of making films.

April 1, 2020
Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

This interview was originally published at Mubi. I collaborated on this piece with Daniel Kasman.

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div>We can’t get enough of The Assassin, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years, his first so-called martial arts film, a film set deep in the past yet bracingly present and heartbreaking. A longtime hero of ours, we sought every opportunity to speak with Hou. Thus, the strange email interview after The Assassin‘s premiere in Cannes. And thus, too, this equally strange conversation between Hou, critic Darren Hughes, and myself, where it seemed as though each participant talked past the other, our words and ideas becoming distorted in translation. We offer it to you as a small addendum to the wealth of discourse that surrounds this very special filmmaker, in general, and this film, specifically, aware of and saddened by its slim inadequacy.

At the end of our conversation Darren requested a picture. Hou removed his ragged baseball cap, glanced quickly at the window and at the fluorescents over our heads, pushed back the curtain, and then leaned awkwardly into the natural light, giving us the photo above. That split-second gesture was a good deal more revealing of Hou’s technique than the preceding conversation.

NOTEBOOK: Many of your films are set in the past, but you’re also a strong proponent of realism in cinema. Is there a difference for you when you’re staging, say, a scene between a man and a woman in the past, as in The Assassin, or one set in contemporary Taipei?

HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: I shoot the films the same way. I give the actors short stories to read to give them a sense of how people spoke in that era, but I want them to figure it out for themselves. When making films in Asia, there is little time to give the actors a deep understanding of an era. The best I can do is a classic presentation: the way they wear their clothes, the locations.

When you see a stranger, or when you talk with someone for the first time, you’re naturally fascinated by that particular something they have. I want actors to come on set and bring that same thing. I want to capture that essence and describe it on screen. So there’s no rehearsal. The actors know what I expect of them. I allow it to sink in for the actors, but it’s not through discussion. I really want them to feel it so that when it’s time to deliver those lines it is realistic to them.

If it doesn’t work, I stop the scene and we come back to it later. For example, the scenes between Tian Ji’an [Chen Chang] and Huji [Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh] were not quite right [at first], so I allowed them to workshop a bit and come back to shoot those scenes again.

NOTEBOOK: Did the use of an ancient dialect for the film’s dialog transform that process in any way?

HOU: It comes down to the actors’ relationship with the language. Again, in the scenes with Tian Ji’an and Huji, I made them shoot a couple more times. But with someone like Shu Qi, who didn’t have too many lines, it was fairly easy to get into the dialect!

The actors who play the parents are from China, so they have more of a basis in the old language. They didn’t have to workshop at all. It was all very natural for them.

NOTEBOOK: The Assassin opens with a title card about events from 8th century China, and then the second sentence jumps a hundred years to the “present day” of the film. That jump reminds me of your films Good Men, Good Women [1995] and Three Times [2005] in its juxtapositions of different eras. You seem especially interested in the cinema as a historical tool.

HOU: The opening titles were not in the original cut. The French distributors told me they didn’t really understand what was going on and asked me to add an introduction. But even after adding it, I’m convinced many people still don’t understand.

Hollywood is good at telling meticulous historical stories. I’m not that kind of director. I don’t want things to be so clear. Carefully plotting every storyline, as Hollywood does, would distract from the humanity of the characters.

NOTEBOOK: There’s a moment in The Assassin when Shu Qi walks alone through the mainland countryside, and it reminded me suddenly of the young couples in Good Men, Good Women. When I described you as a historian, it’s because your films are interested in causations: what happened in the 8th century affected the 9th century, what happened in 1940 mainland China affected 1995 Taiwan.

HOU: You’re looking for a thread running through my films, for similar shots in different eras. For me, there are no connections like this. Because I’ve worked with certain actors many times, I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of their performances, so perhaps this is the connecting line you see.

The Tang Dynasty is a very modern era. The way people lived their lives was very modern. For example, the assassin questions what it means to murder. Even if there were a time machine, it would be of no use to me because no amount of detail would overcome our modern eyes.

As I mentioned, I often work with the same actors. But when I was writing the script, I thought about incorporating other interesting people I’ve encountered. I considered casting actors from the mainland who might better encapsulate the feel of the Tang Dynasty. But I like to write with specific actors already in mind because I don’t want to arrive on set and think, “How am I going to fit your personality into my script?”

The circle of actors in Asia is fairly small. By casting Shu Qi, I knew I could give her direction and there would at least be a possibility of her changing her performance. Even though Shu Qi is not from deep in mainland China, she plays the role like an assassin, and that’s what I needed.

November 2, 2015
2007 TIFF Day 8

I’ve liked, to varying degrees, each of the films in Gus Van Sant’s “post-Bela Tarr epiphany” trilogy. Following his brief stint in Hollywood in the mid- to late-’90s, Van Sant has taken a refreshingly reckless approach toward film form. Under the spell of the mad Hungarian but also those guys from Taiwan and Tehran (Hou and Kiarostami, in particular), his films are unlike anything else coming out of the States. And God bless him for it. When I watch these movies, I feel like a lucky volunteer in one of Van Sant’s mad experiments. “Yeah, Gus,” I think to myself, “let’s see what happens when, during a five-minute tracking shot, we shift suddenly into slow motion. Let’s meld unironically beautiful music with images of teenage life just to see what kind of frisson we can generate. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walking silently through a desert for minutes at a time? I’m with you. Let’s go.”

Any ambivalence I’ve felt toward Van Sant has usually been a by-product of his subject matter. Paranoid Park picks up exactly where the trilogy left off: at a moment of sudden violence. This time it’s an accidental death resulting from a run-of-the-mill act of adolescent rebellion. As was the case with Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, I’m not sure why Van Sant is so fixated on violence, and I’m not totally convinced that he has anything particularly meaningful to teach us about it. When she introduced Une vieille maitresse, Catherine Breillat told us she was interested in “the kind of Romance that isn’t pink and flowery but deep red and black and always close to death” (I’m paraphrasing), and I see Van Sant operating in a similar realm. He’s become our Ann Radcliffe, trading out her castle in the Pyrenees for a skate park in Portland but with the same goal in mind: the Sublime. Paranoid Park is my new favorite of Van Sant’s films, but I remain ambivalent about his subject matter. One last thing: seeing Christopher Doyle’s 4:3 compositions projected on a three-story screen at the ScotiaBank Theatre was a real treat and confirmed my thoughts about Reygadas.

Help Me Eros gave me everything I’d expected of it: an amusing and sympathetic, low-key performance from writer/director Lee Kang-sheng; long, mostly-silent, static takes; inspired design; out-of-left-field musical numbers; and some good old-fashioned transgression. Lee plays a Bible-quoting day trader who went bust during Taiwan’s economic downturn and now spends his time smoking home-grown marijuana, talking to a counselor at a suicide helpline, and flirting with the girls at the betel nut stall below his apartment. Lee told us after the screening that much of the film is autobiographical — that in order to keep himself occupied between films, he’d made and lost a great deal of wealth in the market, and that the one time he called a helpline he got a busy signal. “I wondered how many other people in Taiwan were suffering,” he said. With Tsai Ming-liang acting as producer and production designer, it’s impossible to not speculate about his influence on the development of the film. But I suspect their partnership is a generous one, and Help Me Eros makes me think that Lee should, perhaps, be considered more seriously as a co-auteur of Tsai’s recent films. Help Me Eros fits comfortably alongside their other treatments of contemporary alienation and is distinguished, mostly, by its final image, which is more symbol-heavy and explicitly religious than anything we’ve seen from Tsai. The film drags a bit in the final act, but, all in all, it’s a solid and interesting effort.

A quick story: While waiting in line for Naissance des pieuvres, I met a 70-year-old woman from Toronto who was seeing 50 films at the festival. She used to see even more, apparently, but her children made her swear off Midnight Madness. When I asked her what film she’d really liked, she said, “Oh, I loved Mongol. Talk about violence. That guy makes Tarrantino look like a pussy!” I was sipping from a bottle of water at the time and nearly died. Anyway, she and I had a conversation I’ve had many times over the years. When I mentioned how much I’d liked Secret Sunshine and Flight of the Red Balloon, she told me, “I traded those tickets away. I heard they were depressing.” I think what she actually meant was that they were “slow, boring, and/or sad.” They’re not, but that’s beside the point.

I blame Bergman. When he came to prominence in the States in the late-1950s his films contributed greatly to the creation of a certain stereotype in the popular imagination: the Important Art Film — a dour, high-minded, angst-ridden thing that must be consumed like bitter medicine. (I hate to think of all the people over the years who have rented The Seventh Seal because of its reputation and never made a second trip back to the Foreign Film aisle.) The influence of that stereotype can still be felt at today’s festivals, both in the lines, where even devoted film buffs dismiss movies that might fit the mold, and in the films themselves.

This is all a long and unfair preamble to Nanouk Leopold’s finely-acted family drama, Wolfsbergen. It’s about an aged man who has decided that he is tired of life and eager to be reunited with his long-dead wife. He informs his family that he will soon die, and the film follows the ripples of his decision through the lives of his children and grandchildren. They are a dysfunctional lot, to say the least, but had Leopold given each character the same time and careful attention, all could have been interesting enough to carry a film on their own, I think. Instead, some are barely fleshed out at all, and I found myself becoming increasingly curious about the people who were too often left off screen. Wolfsbergen wears the old stereotype well, and even I was a tad depressed by it. The final scene is a good one, though — good enough that I was forced to reevaluate my response to the film as a whole. And one last note about film aspect ratios: I have no idea why this film was shot in Cinemascope. Leopold often divides her wide frame in half and pushes characters to one side. This, I guess, mimics their alienation from one another, but too often she seems unsure about how to fill the image, and so we end up looking at out-of-focus walls and doorways. I wonder if the aspect ratio was chosen to accommodate the last shot, which does put ‘Scope to great use?

The less I say about L’Amour Cache, the better. I programmed it because Isabelle Hupert is one of the few actors I treat as an auteur, but she is wasted here. This film is a disaster. In fact, it might be the first film I’ve ever seen that gets demonstrably worse with each and every cut. Poorly written, poorly directed, and incompetently edited. I never thought I’d see a boom mike in a TIFF film from a First World country.

September 22, 2007
The Skywalk is Gone (2002)

Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

When I wrote an overview of Tsai’s career two years ago, I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to see The Skywalk is Gone. So I cheated. I stole a great line from Chuck Stephens’s review and turned it into my conclusion. Here’s what I wrote then:

If Tsai’s most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film’s title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai’s world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve.

That last line is a bit too precious, and “grace,” in particular, seems too lazy a word to describe the workings of Tsai’s world, but those blue skies do have a peculiarly joyful effect. That there are blue skies at all in Tsai’s Taiwan is, of course, a major development. Skywalk pokes fun at Tsai’s trademark mise-en-scene (water-logged streets and apartments) by replacing it with a draught, and the director gets some nice gags out of the premise: Hsiao-kang trying to wash his hands, Shiang-chyi trying to order a cup of coffee.

Such change, it seems to me, is the central concern of Skywalk. In the film’s opening image, Shiang-chyi stares up at the spot where the overpass once hung; Tsai floods the soundtrack with the drone of jumbotron advertising and passing crowds. The tilt of her head says it all. “Progress” is a mixed bag, improving our lives at times but also destroying old bonds and reshaping our memories in the process. Those of us who have seen What Time Is It There? know this location, but it’s suddenly unrecognizable, and like Shiang-chyi, we are forced to recontextualize the scene. Doing so demands some work of the viewer, and Tsai allows us plenty of time to do it, leaving his camera fixed for several minutes at a time.

The Skywalk is Gone is like a little gift to all of us who have followed Tsai’s career, and I’m thrilled that Wellspring included it on the DVD release of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. (Unfortunately, Wellspring has unloaded on us a couple more horrible transfers.) I especially enjoyed the escalator scene, which alludes directly to The River, and, by doing so, sets up our expectations for an encounter that isn’t resolved until later in the film. Great stuff. More on Goodbye, Dragon Inn in the coming days.

February 19, 2005
More from Toronto

In his on-going reportage from the Toronto film festival, J. Robert Parks has posted a full-length review of Tsai’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn. Especially given the lukewarm response to Twentynine Palms, this has now officially become my most highly-anticipated film of the year. Parks offers ample spoilers from the film, but anyone who watches Tsai for his plots has already missed the point. This bit from the review has left me down-right giddy with anticipation:

And this brings us to Tsai’s central point: that one type of character is just as worthy as another type and, therefore, one type of story is just as worthy as another. In that, Good Bye, Dragon Inn becomes a powerful defense for the kind of movies Tsai makes, films in which marginalized characters struggle with apparently banal difficulties. They’re not superheroes, they’re not martial artists, they’re not saving the world. And yet they are worthy of our attention. In East Asian cinema, which has become dominated by the martial arts and horror genres, this is an incredibly bold assertion.

September 12, 2003
Great Directors: Tsai Ming-liang
This essay was orignally published at Senses of Cinema.

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The River (1997), Tsai Ming-liang’s third feature-length film, opens with a static shot of a vacant, two-way escalator. After twenty seconds or so of silence—the diegetic drone of the escalators is the only sound we hear—a young woman begins her descent down the left side as a young man climbs to the right. They share an unexpected glimpse of recognition in passing, then turn toward each other, their bodies still being pushed in opposite directions. It’s a paradigmatic instance of Tsai’s storytelling: a nearly wordless exchange between two souls who are, paradoxically, isolated among Taipei’s six million inhabitants and drawn together/pulled apart by its contemporary, technological landscape. That the woman, upon reaching the lower level, immediately turns and ascends back to where her old friend awaits, suggests the possibility of grace—even if fleeting—that bleeds through so much of Tsai’s otherwise bleak and alienating vision. In his world of water-soaked apartments, anonymous sexual encounters, mysterious and catastrophic disease, and desperate loneliness, Tsai clutches tightly to a strange and joyful faith in the potential for genuine human communion, a communion that is rare indeed but occasionally worthy of the effort.

Born and raised in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang was introduced to movies by his grandparents, who often took him to screenings of popular films from China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, America, and the Philippines at any of the dozen or so cinemas that populated their small, quiet town. The son of a farmer who also operated a stall in the city center, Tsai speaks fondly of his relatively carefree childhood. “The main benefit I got from having lived there, in Kuching, for that period” he has said, “was the very slow pace of life, giving me time to develop my interests and enjoy myself.” (1) The analogies here to Tsai’s distinctive film style and narrative concerns are too rich to ignore. Even by the standards of his New Taiwanese Cinema contemporaries, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai’s films are, as some would say, deliberately paced. Cutting together long takes, often of static medium and long shots, he unabashedly requires each viewer to slow down and patiently experience another’s life, thereby avoiding the dictatorial imposition of classical continuity editing that would lead inevitably, in the words of Andrei Tarkovsky, to “a facile interpretation of life’s complexities.” (2) Instead, Tsai’s camera lingers near his subjects in an almost documentary fashion, observing their behavior with relative objectivity, just as the director himself came of age freely observing and admiring the slow movements of Malaysian life.

At twenty, after finishing high school and becoming “a bit of a gigolo”, Tsai left Kuching at his father’s prodding and resettled in Taiwan, where he entered Taipei’s Chinese Culture University to study film and drama. (3) There, he was first exposed to European cinema and, specifically, to auteurs such as Truffaut, Fassbinder, Bresson, and Antonioni, the four filmmakers to whom Tsai is most often compared. “I think European films are closer to me because they are about modern life and ordinary, modern men,” Tsai told Nanouk Leopold. “And I have the idea they are more realistic, true to life.” (4) Although cataloguing their particular influences might be a tad reductive, the contributions of each director to Tsai’s style is clear: Truffaut’s sweet humanism; Fassbinder’s loyal troupe of collaborators, along with his gender and sexual preoccupations; Bresson’s precise attention to the bodies of his non-professional actors; Antonioni’s alienating urban landscapes. For Tsai, the films of the Nouvelle Vague and the New German Cinema, in particular, were convincing evidence of film’s potential as a vehicle for personal expression. He emerged from that experience with a new enthusiasm for the film director as a guiding and influential artistic voice.

Tsai graduated from the university in 1982, an interesting moment in Taiwan’s recent history. Three years after America first enacted the Taiwan Relations Act—which formally recognized the People’s Republic of China and severed official diplomatic ties with Taiwan—but five years before the decades of marshal law were finally brought to an end, Taiwan was in a state of flux, moving slowly but progressively toward democratization (which it would finally achieve fully in 1996 with the election of President Lee Teng-hui). For Taiwan’s emerging generation of artists and filmmakers, that social and political flux resulted in greater access to alternate sources of financing and a renaissance of independent filmmaking. Tsai immediately began work in the theater, where he staged four original plays, including A Wardrobe in the Room (1983), a one-person show in which Tsai himself starred. The drama concerns a young man who voluntarily isolates himself from the city that surrounds him, a motif that would later come to dominate Tsai’s films. He also busied himself by writing screenplays for film and television, work that led to his first significant experiences behind the camera.

Between 1989 and 1991, Tsai wrote ten teleplays, eight of which he also directed, either in whole or in part (this according to the appendix of Tsai Ming-liang, published by Editions Dis Voir in 1999, the only existing book-length study of the director). Tsai now views that period as a fundamental apprenticeship during which he found his voice as a director. There, for instance, he first discovered the remarkable tensions created by mixing professional actors with amateurs, and there he also first explored the use of documentary technique in narrative films. Unfortunately, Western audiences have had precious few opportunities to see Tsai’s early work. Only two of the television films were included in a recent touring retrospective (2002). Chris Fujiwara has described the first, All the Corners of the World (1989), as “a study of a family of movie-ticket scalpers [that] provides early drafts of images and situations that will recur in Tsai’s films, including a roller-rink scene, motorbike vandalism, an elevator ride in a love hotel, and a mannequin floating in water.” (5) The other, Boys (1991), is most notable for introducing the talents of Lee Kang-sheng (aka Hsiao-kang), who has gone on to star in each of Tsai’s features.

Along with the various teleplays, Tsai was also at work on the script for his first feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), which he describes as an attempt to “make a feature that was even more documentary, even more real, about everyday life in Taipei.” (6) The story of a disenchanted youth (Lee) who drops out of school after becoming obsessed with a local petty criminal (played by Chen Chao-jung), Rebels introduces what have since become the hallmarks of Tsai’s style: a preoccupation with the fractured nuclear family, which is explored onscreen by Lee, Miao Tien as his father, and Lu Hsiao-ling as his mother, all of whom return in nearly identical roles in The River and What Time Is It There? (2001); an attention to the rootless nihilism of Taipei’s youth; the juxtaposition of contemporary mores and traditional Eastern religion, most often enacted in the mother’s ceremonial adherence to Buddhist ritual; an interest in sex as an immediate but ultimately unsatisfying act of catharsis; and a symbolic obsession with water.

Rebels also exemplifies Tsai’s distinctive approach to narrative, which deliberately exploits and subverts traditional notions of dramatic tension. In one sequence, for instance, Lee trails Chen and his partner-in-crime into an arcade, where the two young thieves force open video games to steal their motherboards. When the boys complete their job and escape from the arcade, Lee is left alone, locked in for the night, waiting to be discovered. Tsai employs standard continuity editing here—cross-cutting from a shot of Lee asleep on the arcade floor to another of a security guard arriving for duty—but he then elides the expected confrontation and deflates the scene’s tension by cutting to a shot of Lee walking safely down a Taipei street. Later, we see Lee alone in his bedroom, posed with a handgun in his outstretched arms. But, again, the expected violence never materializes, or at least not as Tsai had led us to imagine it. Instead, like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, his films turn viewers into self-conscious observers of strange, complex behavior—less stereotypically cinematic, more unpredictably human.

In Vive l’amour (1994), Tsai’s follow-up, Lee and Chen return, this time as street vendors who are drawn together by a vacant, upscale apartment and the young realtor, May Lin (played by Yang Kuei-mei, another of Tsai’s regulars), who fails repeatedly in her attempts to rent it. The film ends with two stunning sequences that illustrate all that makes Tsai’s vision so fascinating. In the penultimate scene, Hsiao-kang crawls into bed with Ah-jung (Chen), who is sleeping soundly. Tsai’s camera lingers on the two men for several minutes, forcing us to watch—trapped in a moment of almost Hitchcockian suspense—as Hsiao-kang leans closer and closer, finally kissing the other on the mouth without waking him. It’s a remarkable performance. Lee’s face is written with conflicted emotion: curiosity, terror, longing, shame, joy. Tsai then cuts to his heroine, who is now walking quickly and alone through a park that is muddied by construction. She wants only to put some distance between herself and Ah-jung’s bed, from which she has recently escaped quietly after another night of anonymous sex. May Lin finally rests at an outdoor amphitheater, where she sits and begins to cry. Typical of the director’s style, Tsai frames her in a medium close-up, then simply allows the camera to run. The shot lasts for five and a half minutes, during which May Lin struggles to find composure. But she is able to do so only temporarily before surrendering, again and again, to the sobs. As Dennis Lim has said of the scene, Tsai fades to black “just as you’ve convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.” (7)

The River is Tsai’s bleakest film and also his most explicitly transgressive. After the escalator scene described above, Hsiao-kang accompanies the young woman to the set of a movie on which she is working, where he volunteers to float lifelessly in the Tanshui river, imitating a corpse. The remainder of the film concerns his and his family’s attempts to cure him of a mysterious neck pain that becomes progressively debilitating in the weeks that follow his swim. As in The Hole (1997), in which Taipei is plagued by a millennial health epidemic, here Tsai explores the emotional and psychological resonances of an inexplicable pain that carries both symbolic and corporal weight. Lee’s neck condition acts, first, as a metonymic manifestation of other ails, chief among them the collapse of the family, which in many of Tsai’s films stands in as a microcosm of contemporary society. The River dissects the traditional nuclear family with brutal frankness, culminating in a complex and difficult, but undeniably brilliant scene that shocks viewers into confronting the consequences of dishonest living, failed communication, and psychic alienation.

But Tsai refuses to slip completely into allegory here, denying us the safety of symbolic distance. Lee’s pain, instead, is always present, always excruciatingly real. In that sense, Tsai’s camera is like the Naturalist’s pen—like Flaubert’s and Zola’s—observing (almost clinically) bodies, faces, and superficial behaviors in an attempt to explain something of the human experience. In Vive l’amour Tsai first began “researching” his characters in isolation, a conceit that he develops further in The River before taking it to extreme lengths in The Hole. “That’s why I like filming bodies in these solitary situations so much,” he has said, “because I think that a person’s body only really belongs to them when they are alone.” (8) Thus, Tsai’s films are populated with shots of the mundane rituals of life—isolated characters eating, pissing, watching television, masturbating, smoking, working, mopping up spills, crying. At one point in The River, Lee sits alone on a hallway bench, where he is finally overcome by the burdens of pain. As in the final shot of Vive l’amour, we are left to watch helplessly as he convulses and, in exasperation, rocks his head into the wall behind him. Here and elsewhere, Lee is the ideal subject for Tsai’s experiments. His slow movements and measured expressions make him something of a Tarkovskyan figure, one who is “outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” (9)

Lee’s body is also on remarkable display in The Hole, in which he and Yang Kuei-mei perform a cinematic dance—quite literally in places—that blends slapstick comedy with profound pathos. Part of the seven-film “2000 Seen By…” series, The Hole marked Tsai’s return to features after the 1995 documentary, My New Friends, a portrait of two HIV-positive men. Perhaps reflecting that documentary experience, The Hole is set in the final days of 1999, when an enigmatic virus forces the government of Taiwan to quarantine large sections of Taipei. Lee and Yang remain, however, and their lives become entwined after a utility worker drills a hole through the floor that separates their apartments. In many ways, The Hole marks a significant departure from the films that preceded it. While Tsai’s central thematic concern (urban alienation) and his palette of symbols (water, in particular) remain on prominent display, The Hole offers portents of grace and promise that are only hinted at in his previous work. Tsai deviates most radically here in his use of fantasy-fueled musical dance sequences that meld nostalgia—harkening back to the popular Hong Kong films of his youth—with playful irreverence. Typically, Tsai eschews musical scores so as to not “shatter the reality” of his cinematic worlds. (10) The Hole, however, has only one foot in reality from the outset; the other is firmly planted in Yang’s and Lee’s projected desires (which, by the way, are awfully fun to watch).

The Hole is also a significant departure for Tsai in that the film’s simple plot—two neighbors pine away in isolation, perpetually separated by an artificial barrier—necessarily eliminates any possibility of the two leads having sex. Sex is an appropriately complicated issue in all of Tsai’s other films, which prominently feature impersonal and unfulfilling sexual encounters. Dennis Lim suggests that, in comparison with the films of his more explicitly political Taiwanese contemporaries, Tsai’s are more concerned with “personal fumblings—often stemming from romantic longing and sexual confusion.” That confusion becomes manifest in frequent one night stands, visits to gay saunas, extramarital affairs, the mimicking of pornography (which plays like a training video in the background of several scenes), and, at its most extreme, incest. In Tsai’s fourth film, however, “the hole” itself, standing as it does between Yang and Lee, becomes that obscure object of desire (and surely it doesn’t require a Freudian analyst to remark on the metaphoric implications of that hole). The film’s penultimate sequence might be the most extraordinary of Tsai’s career. In a static long shot, we see Yang crumpled on the floor of her apartment, exhausted and water-logged. From just beyond the top edge of the frame, Lee’s arm extends down toward her. She notices and reaches for it; they make contact, and he pulls her up, presumably into his life. Such a simple, fairy tale-like image, but, especially given the context of his otherwise dystopian vision, that moment of communion breathes unexpected optimism and life into Tsai’s oeuvre.

In What Time Is It There?, Tsai’s most recent feature, that promise remains, though tempered somewhat by the pains of tragedy and loss. The film is, in many ways, the logical culmination of his career thus far. Lee returns here as a Taipei watch vendor who is mourning the sudden death of his father (Miao Tien). In an early scene, Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a beautiful young woman preparing for a trip to Paris, convinces Hsiao-kang to sell his own watch to her. Their brief encounter inspires in him a sense of longing, which he acts upon by systematically resetting clocks to Paris time and by watching, again and again, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). While Hsiao-kang pines away in Taiwan, Shiang-chyi wanders through Parisian cafes and Metro stations, adrift in the rituals of loneliness: listening silently to the late-night sounds of an upstairs neighbor, longing for contact with random strangers. To this strange pairing, Tsai adds Hsiao-kang’s mother (again Lu Hsiao-ling, though now using the name Lu Yi-ching), a woman paralyzed by grief who also seems to find relief only through ritual, both religious and domestic.

In one of the film’s most touching scenes, the mother dresses formally for a private dinner, accompanied only by her husband’s empty chair at the table. Like Hitchcock’s “Miss Lonelyhearts”, she raises a toast to her imagined companion before breaking into tears. It’s another trademark Tsai moment: his camera again remains static throughout the long take, framing his subject in a medium long shot; the actress works alone in silence, her movements measured and deliberate. The tendency of most critics has been to reduce these signature scenes to simple meditations on Modernist dismay, but doing so too easily dismisses the honor and wonder of mourning. Hsiao-kang’s mother is not a desperate individual adrift in an irrational, alienating world (or some such cliché); instead, she is like so many of us, one who has obviously known love and companionship and now, suddenly, must make sense of loss. Tsai’s style, which is often rightfully compared to the silent cinema, frees us to experience the full brunt of attendant emotions: agony, nostalgia, despair, desire, hope. Our efforts are rewarded in full in the closing moments of the film—the most transcendent of Tsai’s career, thanks in part to Benoit Delhomme’s stunning photography and Miao Tien’s remarkable face—when that same strange beauty returns and What Time Is It There? transforms unexpectedly into a romantic ghost story and an ode to eternal love.

If Tsai’s most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film’s title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai’s world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve.

Endnotes
1. Danièle Rivière, “Scouting: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang”, Tsai Ming-liang, Paris, Dis Voir, 1999, p. 79
2. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, New York, Knopf, 1987, p. 20
3. Rivière, p. 81
4. Nanouk Leopold, “Confined Space – Interview with Tsai Ming liang”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 20, May–June 2002, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_interview.html
5. Chris Fujiwara, “Of Space and Solitude”, The Phoenix, 21 February 2002, http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/documents/02164886.htm
6. Rivière, p. 88
7. Dennis Lim, “Tsai Ming-liang Opens the Floodgates”, The Village Voice, 25 June 2001, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0126/lim.php
8. Rivière, p. 103
9. Tarkovsky, p. 17
10. Rivière, p. 111
11. Chuck Stephens, “Eastern Division Highlights”, Film Comment, January–February 2003, p. 68.
May 22, 2003
What Time Is It There? (2001)

Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

Images: This is a beautiful film. Tsai and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme combine warmly saturated interiors with cold, stark, exteriors (particularly in the Paris scenes). The film is composed almost entirely of static, medium shots, each typically lasting more than a minute. Favorite images: Hsiao Kang drying his hands in a movie theater lobby, the mother sharing her misery with a fish, and the beautiful close-up of Chen Shiang-chyi in the final moments. Actually, the entire final sequence is one of the most stunning I’ve ever seen (so stunning, in fact, that I decided to not spoil it with a screen capture).

• • •

Charles Taylor opens his fine review of What Time is It There? with the question, “How do you praise the films of Tsai Ming-Liang without making people dread the prospect of going to see them?” The temptation when writing about a film such as this is to lose oneself in an intellectual dissection of its most explicit and admittedly somber concerns: alienation, sorrow, mourning, loss. Hardly the stuff of a Saturday matinee. Tsai has certainly invited such thoughtful analysis throughout his career — I even took him up on the offer after watching Vive L’Amour — but doing so with What Time is It There?, which I’ve now watched on each of the last three days, seems almost dishonest. I’m reluctant to reduce this film to just another Antonioni-like lament (though those echoes surely remain) because doing so would require that I neglect the joy and humor of the film and would force me to too casually equate sadness with irreparable decay, loneliness with nihilism. The film, I think, carefully avoids this trap, so I’ll try to do the same.

Tsai’s favorite everyman, Lee Kang-sheng, returns as Hsiao Kang, a Taipei watch vendor mourning the sudden death of his father. In an early scene, Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a beautiful young woman preparing for a trip to Paris, convinces Hsiao Kang to sell his own watch to her. Their brief encounter inspires in him a sense of longing, which he acts upon by systematically resetting clocks to Paris time and by watching, again and again, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. While Hsiao Kang pines away in Taiwan, Shiang-chyi wanders through Parisian cafes and Metro stations, adrift in the rituals of loneliness: listening silently to the late-night sounds of an upstairs neighbor, longing for contact with random strangers. To this strange pairing, Tsai adds Hsiao Kang’s mother (Lu Yi-ching), a woman paralyzed by grief who also seems to find relief only through ritual, both religious and domestic. The images of her preparing her dead husband’s meals are complex and contradictory, beautiful and devastating.

And it is precisely that tension between beauty and sorrow, a hallmark of great drama at least ever since Aristotle defined “catharsis,” that I would offer in response to Taylor’s opening question. Implicit in Tsai’s critique of an increasingly disjointed, impersonal modern world — and, really, hasn’t this position lost some of its novelty over the last century and a half? — there exists ample evidence of the possibility of honest human communion. What Time is It There?, more than any of the other Tsai films I’ve seen, takes delight in that possibility, marking avenues of escape from alienation by way of the film’s style if not necessarily by its content.

The mother is as good a starting point as any. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, she dresses formally for a private dinner, accompanied only by her husband’s empty chair at the table. Like Hitchcock’s “Miss Lonelyhearts,” she raises a toast to her imagined companion before breaking into tears. It’s a trademark Tsai moment: his camera remains static throughout the long take, framing his subject in a medium long shot; the actress works alone in silence, her movements measured and deliberate. The tendency of most critics, myself included, has been to reduce these signature scenes to meditations on Modernist dismay, but doing so too easily dismisses the honor and wonder of mourning. Hsiao Kang’s mother is not a desperate individual adrift in an irrational, alienating world (or some such cliché); instead, she is like the rest of us, one who has obviously known love and companionship and now, suddenly, must make sense of loss. Tsai’s style, which is often rightfully compared to the silent cinema, frees us to experience the full brunt of attendant emotions: agony, nostalgia, despair, desire, hope.

The wonderful paradox at the heart of this film is that, while exposing the dehumanizing conditions of contemporary life, it simultaneously celebrates the breadth and value of all emotional experience. Shiang-chyi, for instance, certainly suffers profound loneliness and longing in Paris, but those perfectly legitimate feelings are accompanied also by a joyful freedom and curiosity. The first time I watched What Times is It There? I was confused by an enigmatic scene in which she climbs a flight of stairs to investigate her noisy neighbors and becomes distracted by a hallway window. By the third viewing, I was anticipating the moment because it so perfectly characterizes her recognizably conflicted nature. She desires contact with others, of course, but she is also surprisingly content to explore the world on her own. Hsiao Kang is likewise a young man like so many of us, marked at times by deep despair — the image of him crying in his sleep rings more true to me than any other in the film — and at others by absurd humor. As I recall, I also didn’t laugh out loud until that third viewing, when the frequent critical comparisons of Tsai and Buster Keaton began to finally make sense. All three characters in What Time is It There? represent Tarkovsky’s ideal — those who are “outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion” — and that passion alone is reason enough to watch.

November 2, 2002
Good Men, Good Women (1995)

Dir. by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Images: Hou cuts constantly between scenes set in contemporary Taiwan, which are in full color, and scenes from the film-within-the-film, which are a tinted black and white. This allows the director to be more traditionally “cinematic” in the filmed footage — beautiful shots of trees, prison hallways, light fixtures. Favorite images: the self-reflexive shots of the actors in costume posing for photos; all of the moments that reveal the emotional intimacy between Liang and Ah Wei; the amazing move from black and white back to color in the penultimate shot.

• • •

The first cut in Good Men, Good Women establishes several dichotomies that, over the next 100 minutes, are beautifully dismantled for explicitly political purposes. The film opens with a long, static, black and white shot of an ancient mainland village. Toward us marches a small group of peasants (we are led to believe), who sing joyfully as they snake closer to the camera before finally exiting to the right of the frame. The sudden cut to a fluorescent apartment in contemporary Taiwan is made all the more jarring by the obnoxious sound of a clamoring telephone. A young woman rises slowly from her bed, retrieves the phone (no answer), sips from bottled water, then tears a sheet of paper from her fax machine. The remainder of the film rewrites the forgotten narratives that connect these seemingly opposed worlds: mainland China and Taiwan, the past and present, truth and fiction, the personal and political.

The young woman, we eventually learn, is Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh), an actress who is preparing for her role as Chiang Bi-Yu in an upcoming film called, interestingly enough, Good Men, Good Women. This film within the film tells the true-life story of Chiang and her husband, Chung Hao-Tung (Giong Lim), who moved to the mainland in 1940 in order to join the anti-Japanese resistance movement. Chiang would eventually be forced to give up her children for the cause, and would be widowed by it as well. By cutting constantly between the “real world” of Liang’s life and black and white footage from the completed film, Hou blurs the boundaries that might otherwise separate Taiwan from its past, the actress from her role.

And yet even that complex description is a gross oversimplification of Hou’s narrative, which further problematizes any simple notions of the “present” by adding to the mix sequences from Liang’s recent past. Five years earlier, she had been a promiscuous, drug-addicted bar maid, who had found solace only in her relationship with the surprisingly tender gangster, Ah Wei (Jack Kao). Liang is forced to revisit this period of her life when a stranger steals her diary and begins faxing pages of it to her. It’s a remarkable story-telling device, allowing Hou to sound echoes of Chiang’s experience through these various versions of the actress who plays her. The women (all played, of course, by Inoh) share so much in common — in particular, the timeless sorrow over lost lovers and children — but, as the film forces us to acknowledge, the selfless struggle of Chiang’s generation has been realized, tragically, in only the empty consumerism of Liang’s.

In lesser hands, a film like Good Men, Good Women would likely collapse into either a turgid technical exercise or a vehicle for didactic moralizing, but Hou avoids both traps by investing his characters with recognizable life. The film’s most joyful moments emerge from Liang’s and Ah Wei’s lazy familiarity with one another. Like Godard thirty years before, Hou allows his camera to capture the Gangster and His Girl at their most ordinary — impromptu dances in their bedroom, everyday conversations about their future. When watching Flowers of Shanghai and Puppetmaster, I am often frustrated by Hou’s elliptical style, but here — perhaps because of the nonlinear narrative — I feel as though I am being granted brief glimpses into beautifully rich lives. Knowing that Liang’s happiness, like Chiang’s, will be short-lived makes her/their struggle all the more compelling.

Good Men, Good Women would make a textbook study of aesthetic harmony in function and form. Unlike so many recent American films that have reordered the traditional narrative in service of empty excitements or trite analyses of “postmodern truth,” Hou’s cuts and splices history into a well-told tale, revealing those relationships between action and consequence that are so easily elided in our short-term, soundbite memories. Like fellow Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour, Good Men, Good Women concludes with a remarkable image of mourning, but here the scene is tempered by some promise of potential change. The film ends as it began: with the sight of those marchers, their identities now revealed to us, and with the joyful sound of their voices echoing through the mountains.

October 21, 2002
Vive L’Amour (1994)

Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

Images: Congested and noisy exteriors contrast sharply with starkly decorated (or empty) interiors. Very little dialogue — perhaps ten minutes total in two hour film, the majority of which is built from long takes, often shots of solitary characters suffering in silence. Favorite images: Hsiao-Kang carressing and kissing a melon; Ah-Jung sillhouted against a large apartment window overlooking Taipei; May Lin looking down a stairwell, where Hsiao-Kang hides unnoticed; Ah-Jung emerging slowly from underneath a bed on which May Lin is sleeping.

• • •

Vive L’Amour ends with two stunning sequences. In the penultimate scene, Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), a closeted and suicidal young man, crawls into bed with Ah-Jung (Chen Chao-jung), an acquaintance who is sleeping soundly. Tsai’s camera lingers on the two men for several minutes, allowing us to watch — trapped in a moment of almost Hitchcockian suspense — as Hsiao-Kang leans closer and closer, finally kissing the other man on the mouth without waking him. It’s a remarkable performance. Lee’s face is written with conflicted emotion: curiosity, terror, longing, shame, joy.

Tsai then cuts to his heroine, May Lin (Yang Kuei Mei), who is now walking quickly and alone through a park that is muddied by construction. She wants only to put some distance between herself and Ah-Jung’s bed, from which she has recently escaped quietly after another night of anonymous sex. Lin finally rests at an outdoor amphitheater, where she sits and begins to cry. Typical of the director’s style, Tsai frames her in a medium close-up, then simply allows the camera to run. The scene lasts for five and a half minutes, during which May Lin struggles to find composure. But she is able to do so only temporarily before surrendering, again and again, to the sobs. As Dennis Lim has said of the scene, Tsai fades to black “just as you’ve convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.”

I recently read an essay by Walker Percy in which he characterizes (somewhat glibbly) the 20th century American novel as a recurring investigation of “the essential loneliness of man.” It’s hardly an original conceit, but I was reminded of it constantly yesterday as I watched Vive L’Amour, a film that represents the alienation of modern life as effectively as any of our great novels. Tsai’s Taipei borders Hemingway’s Paris — both are worlds populated by frightened individuals unable to connect meaningfully with anyone around them. So, instead, they turn to temporary, unfulfilling escapes. One of the most memorable scenes in Vive L’Amour comes just before the two described above. Hsiao-Kang, hiding beneath their bed, masturbates while May Lin and Ah-Jung have sex above him. Their act, though shared, is no less self-satsifying and empty than Hsiao-Kang’s. All three characters end the film as they began it: alone, homeless (literally or figuratively), and incapable of communication.

This preoccupation with communication — or, more precisly, the failure of language — is another interesting affinity shared by Tsai and Hemingway. Someone (and it may have been Hemingway himself) compared the author’s dialogue to an iceberg: what we read is only 10% of the message; 90% is hidden beneath, left unspoken. His characters don’t communicate, they trade in banalities, because what they refuse to share is too personal, too painful, or too frightening. A reader who fails to seek that subtext is missing the point entirely. The same could be said of Vive L’Amour, a film that, when reduced to a simple plot synapsis — two homeless men move into a vacant apartment, where one of them shares romantic encounters with the apartment’s realtor — sounds like an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (and a really slow, unerotic episode at that). But in Tsai’s hands, the story serves a profound meditation on our inability to connect: May Lin and Ah-Jung sit beside one another, sharing glances, but never speaking; Hsiao-Kang hides at the bottom of a stairwell, unwilling to reveal himself to May Lin; Hsaio-Kang closes his door to Ah-Jung, refusing to answer the other’s questions.

I now wish that I had seen Vive L’Amour before watching The Hole, Tsai’s most recent release. For whatever reason, I lacked patience for, and interest in, that film. But I now see the end of The Hole — when one of the two main characters quite literally reaches out to the other — as a moving portent of optimism and human triumph. Quite a step beyond May Lin’s endless tears.

December 2, 2001