| Details | View the trailer “Between Rebels of the Neon God, my first feature, and Vive L’Amour, my second, there is a huge difference. In the first, the characters spend their time surrounded by noise and other people, whereas in the second it’s the opposite. . . . And that’s exactly how I wanted it. I even took things to extremes.” —Tsai Ming-liang Tsai Ming-liang’s second film exchanges the gritty urban realism of his debut, Rebels of the Neon God (playing at the AFI Silver Theatre on March 24 and 25) for the more languid rhythms of erotic longing. Unbeknownst to one another, a harried real estate broker (Yang Kuei-mei), her street vendor lover (Chen Chao-jung), and an eccentric loner (Lee Kang-sheng) all use a vacant luxury apartment for their own secret purposes—until chance brings them together in an unexpected way. Essentially silent (not a word of dialogue is spoken for over twenty mesmerizing minutes at the beginning), the film concludes with a stunning emotional climax that is a tour-de-force of Tsai’s direction and Yang’s acting. Vive L’Amour earned Tsai comparisons to Michelangelo Antonioni and Buster Keaton, and it won him the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival. (Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1994, 118 min., 35mm, Mandarin with English subtitles) |
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