Last Chinese Picture Show
Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a lament for just that kind of ecstasy. It focuses on a run-down movie theater in Taiwan that is due to close and is running a 38-year-old action film (King Hu's Dragon Inn) as its final attraction. But a sense of ruin is already apparent in the theater's concrete, mall-like structure; it belongs to a later era than the movie palaces Lachman and I remember. The very idea of movie-going has not only lost luster; Tsai regrets that it has also lost mystery. So he provides the ineffable in Goodbye, Dragon Inn's concept. This elegy for movie-going mixes the sad desperation of the few last patrons haunting the box-like space with the ghostly manifestations of the movies that once played there. The trick is that Tsai presents them all on the same plane-as figures of human longing, all searching and anxious and unsatisfied.
In his previous films The River, The Hole and the alarmingly shallow What Time Is It There? Tsai established the sensibility and style that make him the master of modern melancholy. This bastard child of Antonioni, committed to the mundane, has never before asked the Big Question, but Goodbye, Dragon Inn does. Now exploring the essence of existence through moviegoing, Tsai climaxes his interest in both universal solitude and the cinematic template that was deliberately evoked by references to the French New Wave in What Time Is It There? Tsai's no match for the movie lore that Godard and Truffaut analyzed and celebrated inside-out, but he can certainly do his homegrown version of angst and anomie. And although none of the characters in this film have names (in the entire film there might be two brief dialogue exchanges at most), Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels like Tsai's most personal movie.
By deliberately breaking the ban against self-consciousness ("realism" gets overrated in this era when drab indie imports are esteemed), Tsai exhibits real heart by indulging his affection for cinema. His awareness of how movie culture gives vent to personal desire is a serious and mature approach. It deserves admiration, especially against the ongoing trend toward infantilization (represented this week by the gigantic meaningless toys of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). And yet, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is not a placebo for film buffs. Like Ed Lachman, Tsai measures life experience by contemplating the moviegoing habit. This personal approach is different from the style-hopping nonsense of Tarantino's genre games or Bigas Luna's Anguish, which was also set in a movie theater-but merely to show off a facile confusion between illusion and reality, fantasy and death.
Tsai's movie is more trenchant. The anonymous characters seen prowling the loges and restrooms of the theater, or gazing vacantly at the old images on screen, are nonetheless impatient. They await some fellow audience member to make furtive contact here and now. This points to a filmgoing experience much more profound than recognizing an homage or exercising juvenile fantasy. Furthering Lachman's steadicam marvel (which capped the widely praised one-take stunts in Goodfellas and The Bonfire of the Vanities), Goodbye, Dragon Inn finds genuine beauty and awe in the audience's desire-even when it is thwarted. Tsai uses fixed images to find moments when one is disconnected from the daydreaming masses. The unnamed characters in this movie are not martial-arts or Star Wars geeks, but their passions share with such fanatics a deep, private alienation from the general, superficial, fully socialized appeal of movies.
The onscreen martial-arts action of Dragon Inn is no more than a wishful metaphor; these characters (a lame theater matron, a secretive projectionist, a gay patron on the prowl) are intensely devoted to finding an emotional outlet. This yearning is perfectly represented by Tsai's emphasis on lonely gestures and echoing sound-footsteps, an air conditioner's whirring motor-aural images of estrangement. In the midst of this shadowy dislocation, various characters cruise each other; the nooks of a neighborhood theater give way to panicky rendezvous.
Hollywood and mindless critics pretend camaraderie, especially around movies that ignore life's complications in preference of fantasy or hollow "dreams." For Tsai, the 1966 Dragon Inn affords a unique exploration of movie love. He simultaneously shows history and a passing way of life on the theater's screen. Instead of reducing movies to the childish fantasy of robots, planes and joke-trading lovers, Tsai's reminiscence recalls the sophisticated, anguished nostalgia of Andre Téchiné's French Provincial, Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes and Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show.
However, the film that Goodbye, Dragon Inn most resembles is Jacques Nolot's Porn Theater. The anomalous cruising that goes on (a cleverly timed sequence of men smoking at the urinals suggests a T-room Tati) literalizes the desire for sexual/romantic contact that is at the root of the public movie ritual. Several scenes show solo characters watching a nearby necking couple, or an eroticized pair of bare feet hanging over a row. Tsai emphasizes the longing to join in as a basic human characteristic, but Nolot's film dared to give this desire a specific designation. Porn Theater was about the congregating of unsocialized types. It's ironic that film buffs-many of whom are gay (or somewhat sexually repressed)-ignored Nolot's film. But Tsai derives emotion and rich substance from recognizing how movie culture resolves repression. Despite the emanation of ghosts, the desperation in Goodbye, Dragon Inn is real.
Tsai shot the film in an actual Taiwanese theater, and in the press kit, he observed, "After declining popularity, but before closing down, [the Fu-Ho theater] was said to have a few people of the gay community patronize the place?I'm very moved by this. Though it has lost its glitter and you have forgotten about the theater, it still continues a long journey and still welcomes the outsiders of society, the old, the crippled girl, the lonely ghosts and spirits? Until today, it will be torn down and it will disappear? That is what I want to present."
At the end, Tsai's long take of the empty auditorium is audacious. It actually evokes the eruption of feeling that has long passed from that place. This is a genuinely cinematic representation of what academics call reception studies. Emotion is contrasted with materiality. In the final scene, Tsai cuts to an exterior shot where a remnant of traditional movie music is heard over a desolate nighttime rainfall. It's a very Terence Davies image-a heartbreaking summary of what today's moviegoing has lost.
IF CHE GUEVARA had gone to the movies even once in The Motorcycle Diaries, I might have been willing to buy this bio-pic's deification of him in his younger years. Instead, it patronizes the privileged, handsome Guevara's fascination with "the people"-especially those suffering from leprosy. This may be historical truth, but when decked out in prestige-movie pomposity, it feels like a crock.
Some reaction to pop culture might have confirmed Guevara's "humanism" and made it credible. Instead, director Walter Salles is only interested in making Guevara seem ideal. He dances to folk music and listens to poetry and writes letters of unctuous sincerity. He's a goddamn saint to which Gael Garcia Bernal brings fashion-mag piety.
Never before has a commie cartoon been as self-serious as The Motorcycle Diaries. It uses Guevara's decision to join his horndog friend (Rodrigo de la Serna) on a biker tour of South America as if it were a Dionysian Stations of the Cross. Salles' Che avoids specific ideological argument. "Politics" are reduced to travelogue. Commitment is reduced to condescension. o