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Earlier this week, I watched the first few movies Tsai Ming-liang directed. I’d seen *Goodbye, Dragon Inn *before, but none of the others. (I will be discussing plot details from all the ones I watched (Rebels of the Neon God, Vive L’Amour, The River, The Hole, What Time Is it There?), so I guess this serves as my spoiler warning, though I’m not sure I’d consider them particularly spoilable films.)
In any case, they’re really good. I love how obsessive he is. The same actors who play a family in his first film, Rebels of the Neon God, play a family in his third, The River, five years later – but not only do the actors recur, they live in the same apartment. (And I don’t have a good screen-grab of it, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same apartment in What Time Is It There?, from four years later. In *What Time, *the father has died, but the mother and son are the same actors again.)
Rebels of the Neon God (1992)
The River (1997)
What Time Is It There? (2001)
The movies are, in general – at least the ones I’ve seen – about people in the city having a specific kind of terrible time next to each other. The “alienation” of Tsai’s characters is always staged in close proximity to others. The protagonist of The River is visibly isolated by his pain: he writhes constantly, his face wrenched into a permanent wince; he does not respond to those who talk to him. In one of the most memorable and harrowing scenes of Vive L’amour (maybe my favorite of the five of Tsai’s films I’ve seen), the character played by Lee Kang-Sheng is trapped underneath the bed while two other characters have sex, the mattress bouncing inches from his face.
Oh hello there. Don’t mind me
As a lot of people have noted, he’s obsessed with water. Water is always getting inside. Beyond the countless scenes of bathing and showering, there are massive leaks everywhere: in the ceilings, in the floors. In Rebels, the floor of one of the characters’ apartments is totally flooded. We watch a cockroach drown. A flip-flop floats lazily across the surface.The resident just ignores it, peeling off his shoes before getting into bed. In the last scene of The Hole, a film filled with literally apocalyptic rain and flooding, one character hands another a glass of water through the gigantic hole between their rooms. *The River’*s Hsiao-kang starts to experience neck pain after acting as a floating corpse in a river for a film. (Tsai’s short documentary about returning to Kuching, Malaysia, where he grew up, is called “Walking on Water.”)
“For me, water means a lot of things,” Tsai has said. “It’s my belief that human beings are just like plants. They can’t live without water or they’ll dry up. Human beings, without love or other nourishment, also dry up. The more water you see in my movies, the more the characters need to fill a gap in their lives, to get hydrated again.”
This quote is hard to source – while it’s cited in a Chicago Reader article, I can’t find the interview from which it came – but it’s interesting. It’s definitely true, although all the characters in Tsai’s films very badly need to fill gaps in their lives basically all of the time, and there’s water everywhere constantly, so it’s not a huge clue or revelation.
But it’s an interesting equation, still. The movies are so palpably, tangibly literal – to speak of symbolism feels both essential and almost beside the point. In Vive L’amour, a character also named Hsiao-kang, played again by Tsai stalwart Lee Kang-sheng (who was apparently working in an arcade when Tsai recruited him to be in the television movie preceding Rebels), works for an ossuary; early in the movie, he tries to kill himself. Is his mode of employment symbolic? Yes, insofar as it resonates out beyond the container of the film, especially juxtaposed against the job held by real estate agent May Lin, the woman member of the love triangle (she sells the rooms we live in and he sells the rooms we’ll be in when we’re dead). Tsai’s films are filled with resonances like these, what Mike Archibald calls on the mubi.com blog “symbolic rhymes”.
Just working in my very real office
Beyond that, though, it seems like it really sucks for Hsiao-kang. (There’s a very funny and moving scene where the salespeople are doing what looked to me at least like kind of team-building exercise; Hsiao-kang enters late and stands to the side.) Tsai is too attuned to the human body to allow us to be swept away by the symbolic. The characters in his films very palpably subsist in a physical world. They eat and sleep, they masturbate and have sex, they shower and shave. In What Time Is It There?, we watch the Lee Kang-sheng character (named…Hsiao-kang) piss in bottles and bags so he can water his plants. Hsiao-kang’s wincing and writhing in The River is so visibly and vividly painful that I found myself massaging my own neck.
Tsai’s symbolic link between water and unfulfilled need is rendered more complicated by the fact that the water in these movies is usually abundant – it’s just in the wrong place. Humans do need water, but they also, at least in most modern urban environments that I’m aware of, need water not to be all over the floor of their living space. Water in the wrong place spreads rot, mold, disease. It encourages growth, but in a direction antithetical to ordinary life.
The astounding scene at the end of Vive L’Amour, a seven-minute shot of Yang Kuei-mei weeping in an unfinished park, is resonant not merely because it’s so visceral, but because it brings together so many of Tsai’s obsessions — water, the body, solitude, the built world.
If his characters need water, they get what we need, strictly speaking — but in the wrong way, so they can’t make use of it. In this, it resembles the social world of these movies. There are other people around, yes, and they’re not the faceless urban masses — they’re particular others, with inner lives as intricate and particular as anyone’s — but they still can’t reach us. It all means too much and none of it helps.
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