Ai qing wan sui

One of the best of Tsai Ming-liang's glacial case studies of contemporary isolation and alienation in Taipei/the world, VIVE L'AMOUR is gripping in spite of it's extreme slowness (his work shares this quality with Tarkovsky or Antonioni). Tsai's work is superficially very chilly and ultimately heartbreaking - though Tsai also (as always) manages to also sneak in a little deadpan humor, which in this case includes the rather ironic translated title.

Three young, outwardly successful Taiwanese happen to cross paths - unknowingly at first - in the empty Taipei condominium one (a real estate agent) is attempting to sell. Through a bare minimum in dialogue - VIVE L'AMOUR is essentially a silent film until about 20 minutes in - Tsai charts their isolation and fumbling attempts at various kinds of human connection and finding some personal sort of peace. Tsai's scenario and characters are globalized, stripped of most marks of identity, and very much adrift, and their growth (or lack of it) is communicated through sparse forms of acting, direction and cinematography that reinvents seemingly antiquated forms of film-making (again, silent film) into a new-millennial era. In this, Tsai crafts a sort of haunted, elegaic drama that slides around the limitations of language, inhabiting a dreamlike, if also very dark, psychological territory.

Typically Tsai uses no musical score, and the dialog is very sparse, with the film favoring the natural sound of whatever environment the characters find themselves in, so the many memorable scenes do tend to sneak up on you. The finale is unforgettable.

This film is about 2 guys and a girl, whose lives primarily intersect in an apartment that the girl, who is a real estate agent, is trying to sell. She brings guy #1, a street vendor, to the apartment for a sexual encounter, and he later ends up living there without her knowledge. Unbeknownst to both of them, guy #2, a suicidally lonely gay man, has already crashed the place. Guy #1 and Guy#2 eventually bump into each other (it's a large apartment), and Guy#2, in his need for companionship, becomes attracted to Guy #1, despite the fact that Guy #1 does not possess very many redeeming qualities.

I can't say that I enjoyed this film very much. The acting was good, the directing was frank. But throughout most of the film I kept asking myself where it was going. There was very little development or dialogue. However, while I didn't particularly like watching the seemingly infinite shots, at the same time I appreciated the way that they developed the mood, perspective, and bleak tone of the film. Mind you, this didn't don on me until near the end. These 3 people were each very much alone, especially the girl and the gay guy. Alone, and yet living in a large metropolis and surrounded by people. The "climax" of the film, where the girl is walking through the park, (the most barren, dead, and desolate public park I've ever seen.), made perfect sense. The surroundings were an achingly appropriate reflection of the girl's emotional state in life and the starkness of what her outlook must have been. When she sat down on the bench and started to sob, everything just clicked. I thought to myself "My god, I know exactly how she feels." That was my big revelation with this movie, when I related to her character. And because of this, the film held a special poignance to me. While I can't say that I was entertained by this film, I can say that I was impacted. It reminded me that the point of a movie can serve a more dignified purpose than just appealing to an audience as entertainment.

Yes, I timed it. It's exactly six minutes and 25 seconds of a closeup (stationary camera) of a woman crying. She pauses once to light a new cigarette, and then she resumes crying.

This example is designed to illustrate how tedious the movie can be. Don't get me wrong; slow is good sometimes. Ketchup, mango sorbet, a sunrise... yes, these things are best enjoyed slowly. But now imagine a spoonful of mango sorbet that just refuses to leave your spoon. You shake it, you bite at it, you pry it with your tongue, but it just won't budge.

That's when slow crosses into annoying.

Before you dismiss me as some MTV-generation ADHD kid, let me mention that two of my favourite movies are "Werckmeister Harmoniak" (camera shots that last up to 13 minutes) and Kieslowsky's "Trois Couleurs" (where we watch an old woman struggling with a rubbish bin for 2 minutes, repeated 3 times). "2001: A Space Odyssey" is another winner. And I wish "Russian Ark" could've been an hour longer. Those are all painfully slow films. But this film makes them look like the Indy 500.

Ming-liang Tsai's later work, "The Hole" is much more substantial. It's just as slow but with one important difference: "The Hole" keeps us interested with it's cryptic plot and imaginative setting. Here we have no such incentive to stay awake. The plot is banal, colours are drab, acting is concrete (deliberately, I'm sure), and the camera is as lethargic as a kid on dope, only without the potato chips.

In my opinion, the movie reaches its only high point halfway through when we are shown a very clever and poignant analogy which I won't ruin for you. It was absolutely brilliant, and it's the only reason why I'm rating this movie a 6 instead of a 3.

I think the director just pushed it one step too far with the slow pace. At first it works, but after a while--just like an old joke--it fails to carry any more punch, and it seems gratuitous and gimmicky.

My suggestion is for you to watch "The Hole" first. Even though it's done in the same slow style, it's much more challenging and intriguing (see my review of "The Hole"). If you really like that movie (and I mean REALLY like it...rating it an 8 or better) then try "Vive l'Amour". Otherwise, you might want to think twice. This movie just sucks the life out of you. And the crying scene freaked out my dog.

This movie was truly awful. I am sorry, I gave this movie the benefit of the doubt as I watched it, but as the movie progressed I was became more and more confused. At first I attributed it to the fact that perhaps I had missed something or I wasn't paying close enough attention. That being said, afterwards I read an article discussing this movie and the Wikipedia article, and I suddenly became so angry. This movie was truly awful. Critics say it was minimalist, I say it lacked a complete plot and anyone writing positively about it simply is full of themselves. For the ignorant raters that gave this film an average rating of 3.9/5 or an 8.1/10, I see absolutely no justification for this. The lack of plot is not "high art" or "abstract" or even a symbol for anything about Taiwan. This movie was just an incomplete film that wasted two hours of my life. For the people who may disagree with my thoughts, all I can say is, if you guys enjoy the movie so much, re-watch the scene where Mei licks Ah-Rong's nipple. That was enough for me. However, it is a shame to say that the ending was even worse than that atrocity.

I've seen a lot of movies and this might very well be my favourite ... it just gets me, probably because of how much I identify with Hsiao-kang and May Lin. It was my first taste of "slow cinema" and of minimalist film, and I loved it. I've seen it many times now. It's meditative and sad and funny. Nobody does loneliness and anomie like Tsai Ming-liang.

But please be aware of what you're getting into before you watch this film and leave a 1-star review. Slow cinema is not for everyone. For some people, watching this movie will be like picking up difficult poetry when all they've ever read up until that point was popular fiction. Vive L'Amour is not the most inaccessible work from Tsai Ming-liang, but it is not accessible to the average person who expects a certain level of pacing and noise and motion from a film (there is barely a line of dialogue in the film's first 20 minutes). Ideally, audiences should dabble in more accessible art house films before coming to slow cinema. Or they should check out Tsai's Rebels of the Neon God before this.