Goodbye Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming Liang

Tsai, newly awarded with Medal of Honor by French government, is probably unknown outside film festival circuit. The slow pace and depressing themes have made his films not quite accessible for mainstream audiences. Even in Taiwan, he has trouble raising money for his new projects regardless of how critically acclaimed his previous films are.

His very first debut in 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, set the color and tone for all the following films he made. Working with the same actors and actresses and with loosely connected but largely different plots and settings, he created a bleak and oppressive world where his protagonists yearned for connections in vain and often set out for actions that only led to self-destruction and disappointment. 

Goodbye Dragon Inn is showing in this year's international film festival and it made me crave for a drink after it was over. All the signature styles of Tsai are here: Excruciatingly long shots, scarce dialogues, the desolate and dilapidated urban setting, heavy shadows and blinking lights. Even the tropical torrential rain, his favorite metaphoric subject, was pouring through the film. Loneliness, alienation, repression, the words that have been used to describe all his other films, fit perfectly well here. Beyond all that is the same nostalgia. The nostalgia is more explicit than ever: Dragon Inn, a popular martial-art film made in 60s, was showing through the film in the background. It represents a lost past, a death of cinema, an era when heroes and fairy tales still existed.

Gay subplots appeared frequently in Tsai's films. In Vive l'amour, in one scene the main character lied underneath the bed and was ultimately turned on while his object of desire was having sex with a woman. In The River, a father went to a bathhouse only to find out he almost had sex with his own son in the dark. Goodbye Dragon Inn also has one of the most intense and comical gay cruising scenes in cinema. But I heard Tsai himself is not gay. He is fascinated with gay sex probably because it gives him the best plot devices to portrait repressed desires and despairs for human intimacy.

All of Tsai's films can be seen as various explorations of the same theme. He never seems to succumb to the pressure of commercial films and stubbornly stick to his own vision and interpretation of the modern world. In the end, he finds himself a true artist who is revealing and continues to reveal the stark reality of modernization.