Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Rating:
Summary: THE BEST FILM OF 2003 & 2004
Review: I initially saw "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" at the 2003 New York Film Festival, and the film has stuck with me ever since. Like "Stranger Than Paradise" on heroin, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", takes its time, but the pace is integral to the aesthetic of the film, accomplishing something entirely new: operatic ennui. Each character suffers in silence, never venting, ever on the verge of bursting into song. A mute musical? Whoduthunkit! That's the genius of Miang-liang Tsai's magnum opus, which reminds me of "Cinema Paradiso", if one extracted all the sentimentality: "Cinema Purgatorio", if you will.

Set entirely in a haunted movie palace on its closing night, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" follows the slight plights of both the movie goers and the employees.

Woody Allen once said that movie houses function as churches for the cowards of life. While this uncharitable appraisal rings true, the brilliant director Ming-liang Tsai endows these "cowards" with so much dignity, love, and understanding that it's impossible not to be moved.

A masterpiece. Fortunately, it opens theatrically today. Better late than never.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Tsai, and that's never a bad thing
Review: In Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, he says goodbye to Taiwan's old way of life with King Hu's seminal Dragon Inn unspooling in the background. It's really hard to review it as there isn't much of a plot to speak of, and the first line of dialogue is not even uttered until half way into this 82 minutes film. For the most of the film, characters just navigate the labyrinth-like theater in search of companionship that never materializes, which probably infers to the presistent alienation in our modern world. Tsai's usual theme of water returns here too, and his reputation as the world's greatest restroom director (by one critic) is also reinforced. Tsai's original intent was to make a short film, but later decided to expand it into a near full length feature. That decision might explain the film's lack of concrete material, as scene after scene the camera just lingers for minutes at a stretch without anything happening on screen. Then again, that self-indulgent style is exactly Tsai's hallmark ever since his first film. I am not exactly complaining though, even if I prefer a slightly faster pace and more meat to the story. Still, your patience will be rewarded by an outstanding final that's pure melancholic poetry, proving once again he is the master at constructing the romance of loneliness and alienation. BTW, the film has cameos of two original actors from Dragon Inn.

Rating:
Summary: Unique unusual concept film
Review: Though devoid of what would conventionally be termed emotional resonance, Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a unique film that stays with the viewer long after the closing song. Tsai here, in a clever psychological twist, equates the past with action and the present with inaction.

While the sparse members of the audience view the classic Chinese martial arts film Dragon Inn, from 1960, the old, vast theater in which they sit, wander about, crack sunflower seeds, and endlessly smoke cigarettes, is really the receptacle for their entrance to the past, full of swordplay, bravado, and high emotion. But as viewers, hangers on, drifters, casual strollers, smokers, and even the projectionist and the theater manager, they are stuck inside their own contemporary mode of existence that results only in what could here be called "static motion".

Every time the camera is on the audience in the theater, we see a slightly different duo or trio of people. One scene to the next provides shifts in the makeup of the audience, but we rarely see them move away; they're just there or not there. Meanwhile on the screen, warriors jump, slash, scream, and go through all manner of activity. In one telling scene--one of the only two in which there is any dialogue not part of the 1960 film itself--one character says to another, "Did you know this theater is haunted?" The character to whom he speaks, a young man, is one who in this and two other scenes leans perilously close to another character, and the latter seems not to mind, or even not to know the young man is there. This "leaning character", the young man, feels like the ghost to which the questioner refers. Yet in another scene, the young man is himself haunted by a voluptuous young woman constantly cracking seeds with her teeth, and moves away.

The only other dialogue not from the 1960 film in the theater occurs after the film is over when two old men, both of whom were in the audience, talk briefly to each other just outside the theater. One comments to the other that he misses the past and that no one knows who they are any more. Too true.

Full of long static scenes--in a bizarre one, three young men relieve thmselves at urinals for a completely non-credible length of time--Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a film whose title really means, Goodbye, Past. This is really a film about time, about aging. We go to the films, Tsai seems to say, to forget our static present and live in the past which is more active than our own lives. Any film we see, contemporary or not, is part of the past; any experience we have is momentary, instantly becoming the past. And as each experience occurs, we age.

A truly different film, Goodbye, Dragon Inn should be seen to give us a view of how we live our lives vicariously through the cinema--how the cinema is, Tsai says, far more than entertainiment, but a vehicle for us to remember, or try to remember, what we only vaguely know now--or maybe don't even know anymore.

Highly recommended.