Good men, good women (1995)

I've been quite impresed by the contemplative, slow-moving films I've seen by the Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien. Good men, good women was for some reason somewhat disappointing for me. Its part of a trilogoy that very much engages with the history of Taiwan, and at times I felt the stupid viewer who doesn't really get the subtleties of the depictions of change.  The film contains several layers, one of which is a story about a married couple in the forties who go to China to fight against the Japanese. After the war, they return to Taiwan, where they are politically active, but end up as victims of the political repression of the Chiang Kai Shek regime. The other level is about an actor living in an anonymous flat in present-day Taiwan, grieving her boyfriend & drinking booze. Mysteriously, she receives entries from her diary on her fax machine. The parts are related through the actor's preparation of a role where she plays the woman we see in the other story. For me, the two level weren't really satisfactorily intermingled and I tried to guess at the point of having them both. I remember the film for its neat scene composition that often gave very minute descriptions of a life situation by briefly presenting it - and successfully conjuring up not only political tensions but also strong emotions; the scenes capturing the lively atmosphere among intellectuals making a newspaper are especially memorable, and so are the scenes from the gruesome political prison. The film exudes a deep sadness about the traumatic history of Taiwan and the image we get of the present (the 90's) is a country stricken with corruption and commercialization.  

The River (1997)

Tsai Ming-Liang makes movies about loneliness, about people occupying the same space without interacting. These films reveal the pain of loneliness as much through an investigation of lived space as the characters' trembling attempts at human closeness. The River opens with a bunch of seemingly disconnected scenes of three different people. Gradually, we learn that they are son, father, mother. The son is afflicted by a mysterious pain in his neck. The father tries to solicit partners at a bathing house. The mother is taking home leftovers and meets a lover in an anonymous room. We see them inhabit spaces of their own. Even when it dawns on us that they are related to each other, their isolation stands out even more. The routines and slow events of ordinary life is the core of this, and other films by Tsai Ming Liang. In a number of scenes, the father tries to collect the dripping water from a hole in the roof. The variations of this minimalist theme have the effect of a melancholy chord. As The River progresses, the young man's neck pain takes on an almost metaphorical meaning. It's a pain that has no clear explanation and no cure seems to help. The son is taken to various doctors and healers and even participates in a ritual, but nothing helps.

The cinematography creates a woozy, yet austere atmosphere. Bright colors and spare locations with next to no human action. What are we to look at? The River is a difficult film as it directs its attention to a puzzling symptom. The viewer is offered several elements and the task is not to piece these together in a neat assemblage. The challenge is to understand the kind of isolation Tsai Ming Liang depicts. What is it that afflicts these people? How is the silence of the film to be understood? An example: two guys ogle each other in a neon-lit arcade from which we see a McDonald's restaurant. Nothing happens in the scene, except this silent watching, their restless presence. The camera observes them, framing them from a distance, swallowed up by the neon-lit commercial environment but without losing the focus on the strange, silent communication.

Vive l'amour (1994)

Ming-liang Tsai is a very interesting director: his slow-building movies look at urban life from an angle that lets you see human fragility from a sort of cinematic distance. Vive l'amour is no exception in this respect. The ending scene of this film paradoxically exudes exactly this distance/bristling emotions. It's a strange thing to watch, indeed. There's a lot of other strange occurrences in this film. Let's start with the fact that the story revolves around an apartment which is shared by three people - and what is so eerie is that at first none of the people are aware of each other. There's the unhappy businessman who sneaks into the empty-seeming apartment. Then there's woman who takes a random guy, a guy who sells clothes on the street for a living, to the apartment for a rendezvous. She's some kind of broker and she is trying to sell this place. The guy she sleeps with steals her key and starts to move into one of the bedrooms... The loneliness of these people is painful to watch. The moments of intimacy are fleeting and often they only make the loneliness appear in even starker contrasts. Very few words are exchanged. It's the vacant-seeming apartment and its secretive inhabitants. The city is depicted as a place for an anonymous, unhappy life. A heartbreaking and very, very quiet movie.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is an extremely ambitious (237 minutes!) and well-directed movie about a transitional time in Taiwanese history. I can imagine this is one of the films that must have inspired Wong Kar Wai: it blends the wistful with the subdued. What characterizes this film is also the distance that is kept up at all time: this distance can be seen in the cinematography, in  the lighting and also in the way we are slowly, slowly introduced to characters.

The story takes place in the beginning of the sixties. The tense relation between gangs of teenagers - some of which are from mainland families - take a violent turn and one of the final eruptions of violence takes place in a seedy snooker bar. A wave of migrants came to Taiwan after the war that led up to the communist takeover. This film depicts a time of insecurity and state repression. The teenagers are heavily influenced by American pop culture and the music of the era plays a big - and moving! - role in A brighter summer day (the title comes from a snippet from a tune by Elvis). A tape recorder figures repeatedly as a treasured object, a center of gravity. Because of the bad copy I watched, there were some things I missed. Many scenes take place in scantily lit locations and there are a lot of long shots. This is also a context with which I am not that familiar. This is nonetheless a film I will bear with me.

The central event is the murder of a teenager. These bears witness of deep wounds within the community. Xiao Si'r is one of the main characters. His father is a civil servant, and he is also harassed by the secret police. Xiao Si'r and his brother steals their mothers watch and this comes to have fatal consequences. At night he attends school (!) where he meets Ming, a former girlfriend of one gangleader. Si'r is a steady part of one of the gangs. Yang weaves together accounts of family life and the life on the street. The film succeeds in showing how closed of these spheres of life seem to be from each other for these teenagers. The life of the family, the home, is one thing, the gang another. Rifts between generations are manifested in a way I found both subtle and illuminating. This is for sure a film that merits a second viewing. 

Good-Bye, Dragon Inn (2003)

Ming-liang Tsai is known for his slow and aesthetically driven movies. I must admit that Good-bye, Dragon Inn was exhausting at times, but in the end, it is clearly a movie I would encourage you to watch; as in other movies in which there is no narrative to speak of, no clear center of a story that goes from a to b, you are really forced to watch as the images are not defined in the sense that it is self-evident what you should be paying attention to. Nonetheless, I was not able to suppress the question: what purpose does this extreme slowness (Tarkovsky's movies pale in comparison) serve? How is it connected with the themes of the film? The setting is a movie theater. It becomes clear that this cinema is about to close its doors. We see a woman working in the cinema, which seems almost deserted. The static camera (tilted at a strange angle) follows her routines: heating a snack, walking down a corridor etc.. The cinema is still showing movies, but only a couple of people show up. It's raining outside, and the rain is leaking into the roof. Sometimes, all you can here is the gentle sound of the rain. Good-bye Dragon Inn patiently sits down besides or behind the neck of these last movie-goers (one of whom seems more interested in flirting with men, another pair crying while watching the movie). I am not sure whether this is a wistful homage to a dying social institution, or whether the cinema is portrayed as a place that is bound to die out. Maybe the answer is: both.

Only a very few lines are spoken in the film. Ming-liang Tsai strips down cinema to its bare bones, at the same time he is showing patrons in a huge non-crowded room looking at bustling scenes on a screen - they are in fact watching a sword-fighting movie. This juxtaposition between film as engrossing viewing pleasure, as a flight, as a place for lonely contemplation, as diversion and as attention works pretty well, and I never thought that the result gets too self-conscious (we are not watching a Godard movie) but the risk is there. The eerie beauty of the film is rooted in everyday things, but at the same time the whole place is somehow cut off from reality (the entire film takes place within the cinema theater). I don't know whether I have seen any film in which the place of movie-watching is as nakedly exposed as in this film, where desperation intermingles with sadness and loneliness - and nostalgia (Aki Kaurismäki would perhaps like this stylized movie about the pleasure and strangeness of cinema).

So how does this work? I mean, the odds are small against a film that has no story, where the camera remains static and where we now next to nothing about the people we see. It still works. It's wrong to say Good-bye Dragon Inn is more style than content, but it is impossible not to mention its colors and its grasp of movement (even if these movements themselves remain at a snail's pace). If you've watched films by Wong Kar-Wai you know what I'm talking about (their cinematic sensibilities are somewhat similar).

Did I mention this is a funny movie? You might not believe it, but somehow, it is. If you've experience the dreadful company of popcorn-munching movie-goers, maybe you will get the kinds of jokes the film quietly deals in.

Café lumiere (2003)

Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiere is a movie that goes from touching to beautiful, eerie and slow. It's a good film. Take this scene for example: Yoko, main character of the film, goes home to visit her parents. She greets them, sits down on the floor. Her mother is preparing food and her father is busy with something. She coos for the cat and the cat jumps up on a shelf. The girl lies down and falls asleep. It's a really simple scene, but it contained a thousand emotions. We get to know that the girl is pregnant and her parents react to her saying that she won't marry the fellow because she won't become his business partner. There are no Announcements with dramatic gestures, no big family quarrels, nothing like that. Lots of silences, people eating food, glancing at each other, acting decent. Hsiao-hsien observes family life, but many scenes of the film has a completely different character. The girl is a freelance writer and she is writing a piece on a composer. She asks her friend to help. The friend records sounds in train stations. The girl takes the train somewhere. We are inside the train, looking out, hearing the noises. I don't know quite how the material of Café Lumiére fits together - the trains and the family drama - but that doesn't worry me so much.

The flight of the red balloon (2007)

There’s a surge of interest in “contemplative cinema”. I am not at all comfortable with the concept. I become all the more suspicious when I watch Flight of the red balloon, a pretty, yet timid, piece of slice-of-life. I’ve heard about Hou Hsiao-hsien, but this is the first time I see one of his movies. What didn’t work for me in the movie was its too overt use of cinematography, symbolism and “calming” music. To me, the film lacks the edginess it would need to keep it from becoming tepid. I can’t say I was bored by it, but some scenes annoyed me, being too pretty, lacking substance and a sense of cinematic urgency. Sure, I see where his style is coming from. I recognize the romantic sense of everyday life as present in Wong Kar-Wai’s oeuvre, and there are bits of pieces of Kieslowski, even Bresson, here, too. The title refers to red balloons. The red balloon is all over the place. It’s present in a slew of scenes, it’s talked about, it’s shown in a film-in-film, it’s even included in the music. If there is one example of overloading an image, this is it. I didn’t like the god damn balloon in the very first scene in the movie. It didn’t get better. The film, however, features some decent scenes as well. A young boy, Simon, lives with his mother in a crammed apartment. The new babysitter, Song, has just arrived. In the best moments of the film, we see the mother, the son or Song moving around in the apartment, going about their everyday business, perhaps angrily arguing with a bothersome neighbor. The balloon-free, music-free scenes, which are not so loaded with Meaning, are, to me, the best ones. They have a quiet sense of life passing by, everyday conflicts, mundane conversations.  I have to add I was a bit worried that Juliette Binoche would destroy this movie. I was surprised to see she performed her repulsive role with a, in the context of the film, liberating amount of gusto. The visual expression of the film is certainly pleasing to the eye (saturated colors, mesmerizing urban perspectives, reflecting images & shapes, a pattern of color scales) but regardless of this I could not stop feeling that the director was somehow trying too hard to make a serene movie.