O Rio

This is the Tsai film that has gone the longest between my first and second viewings. I've lost my old review, but I think it was sometime in 2003. Although several key scenes have lingered in my memory, for some reason over the years I've downgraded it to "2nd tier Tsai". I think that's a good place for it, bearing in mind that 2nd tier Tsai is still really, really good. It builds on VIVE L'AMOUR and sets up more of his signature elements -- water, illness, isolation, urban decay. The only real problem with it is that there a few scenes that don't add anything. They're variations on ideas that have already been sufficiently expressed. However, the bulk of the film is compelling despite the typical snail's pace. Kang-sheng Lee's chronic sore neck (which I'm sure we're meant to infer is caused by submerging himself in the polluted river) is subtly horrifying, one of the most haunting images of pain I've seen. Although I think Tsai did better at expressing communication breakdown in other films, the theme is put across strongly, culminating in that deeply disturbing climax. If it doesn't all quite come together perfectly, it's nonetheless a film that resonates with me.

Xiao-kang (Kang-sheng Lee) is a teenage rube who gets hornswoggled into doing the dead man's float in a polluted river so a no-budget filmmaker can get her shot. The next day, a pain in his neck appears, and his father (Tien Miao) has every solution for it except the obvious one--a doctor. The curious web that connects Xiao-kang, whose pain grows from the noisome to the suicide-inducing, his dad, a divorcee with a penchant for male hustlers, and the kid's proper, upscale girlfriend (Shiang-chyi Chen), couldn't be guessed at by any movie you've ever seen or any novel you've ever read. And if the words "David Cronenberg" popped into your mind when Xiao-kang's neck started metastasizing, you're wrong again.

The writer-director Tsai Ming-liang has two primary interests in THE RIVER: water and alienated architecture. If you wanted to be really crude about it, you could say that on today's world-cinema landscape Wong Kar-Wai is a new Godard, and Tsai Ming-liang is a new Antonioni. He knows how to make a colloquy of old Taiwanese men at McDonald's look like Heywood Floyd's walk through the space station in 2001; and for a better picture of bottom-drawer loneliness you'd have to go back to Travis Bickle. But he has two secondary interests, too--bodies (Dad's pot-bellied but still lithe one, the son's with his ever-tilting neck) and organic human processes (peeing, washing, masturbating, frying stuff in a wok). The emphasis on forlorn public spaces justified the movie's presence in an absurdly titled recent L.A. retrospective called "Ultra Modern Loneliness," but if you think Ming-liang is an alienated King of Pain, you're still wide of the mark. He uses these quintessentially bodily moments to make hyperpoetic still lifes that evoke the paintings of Eric Fischl. Every scene is like a metaphor that doesn't point at anything but itself.

If you had to characterize Tsai Ming-liang's voice here, it would be like the sound of passing traffic heard from an apartment window. He so withdraws from the indicating and commentary that passes as ninety-nine percent of world moviemaking that the audience gets freaky nervous. But as much as any director that's emerged since David Lynch, he's a true-blue original--he don't owe nothing to nobody. Perhaps the most gorgeous aspect of THE RIVER is Ming-liang's focus on the cinematic potential of human touch, which fascinates him even more profoundly than it did Cassavetes or Pialat. The way a human touch can shade from pain-giving to pleasure, or vice versa, leads to the shattering climax of THE RIVER's seeming non-story--a narrative arc as unfettered, as personal and intuitive, as any in contemporary movies.

I have seen three of his movies, and i always got out of the theatre not knowing what to think of it. It is always well films and directed, but the themes he treats are so peculiar.. Once again, the plot is here that of a strange illness, a heavy neckache, that will start everything else. It seems that the boy got it from a polluted river where he shot a scene for a film, but who knows ? it may as well have no origin. But this will lead us into the life of a family, where communication isn't the best. Uncommunicability, strange illness and behavior, leaking roofs, seem to be Ming-liang's obsessions.

Every second of this film is calculated. Whether it is a shadow crossing a bed or the obstructed view out a doorway. It is an excellent story about taboo and how defilement can exist in many ways. The audience watches as a white-clad, pristine, Taiwanese youth is marred by his immediate environment, a close friend, and then his own family. The director illustrates Tai Pei as a filthy industrial cesspool by concentrating the film's landscape in the inner city.

Besides the subject matter, the director uses agonizing long shots to make the audience uncomfortable. There is no soothing music, only the roar of cars and other urban noise. It left me breathless. The best film I have seen to date.

The River was Tsai's third feature film after Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L'Amour. While both films feature many of Tsai's trademarks— including his frequent collaborator Kang-sheng Lee who always plays a character named Hsiao-kang (whether it's the same character is debatable) The River definitely feels the most indicative of the direction that Tsai would go with his next several features, eventually culminating in his masterpiece Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Here Hsiao kang is a young man who lives with his father and mother but almost never communicates with them. One day Hsiao-Kang is asked by a film director to play a floating corpse in a nearby river and, though reluctant, he agrees. Thenceforth he finds himself plagued by a bad neck ("Postmodernity is a Pain in the Neck" as one IMDb review wittily spoke). Though he goes everywhere and tries everything to get relief (hospital, acupuncture, spiritual healer, chiropractor); nothing helps, and his life begins to become unbearable. His parents have problems of their own: his father frequently, but secretly, goes to the local gay bathhouses while his mother is starved for sexual attention. The River contains many of the director's trademarks alluded to above, but it's less rigorously formal than the films that followed. Here, Tsai's camera is still mostly tied to its characters, panning, tilting, moving, tracking to follow them. His long take aesthetic isn't as extreme here either, and while scenes still usually play out in single takes, the scenes aren't quite as elongated. These qualities give The River a looser aesthetic and greater dynamics. Tsai makes excellent, and often quite disturbing, use of juxtaposing short scenes of movement with long scenes of stillness. That stillness is especially potent inside the bathhouses, which are swimming in darkness with just a small light illuminating the bodies of the figures inside. Tsai stays with these sexual encounters for an uncomfortable amount of time, never blinking in order to catch every undulation, every hand movement, every orgasmic exultation. This motif culminates in the film's most devastating scene where father and son accidentally meet in the same bathhouse. The River also marks Tsai's first extended use of his continual visual motif of water, and it's never been more apropos than here. Most crucial is the scene where Hsiao-kang agrees to play a dead body in the local river, but not before stating, "that river's filthy." In his later film, The Wayward Cloud, Tsai used water as a symbol for something organically essential to life. The water shortage in that film, combined with the substitution of watermelon juice, seemed to suggest the substitution of pornography for real human connection. Here, the pollution of water carries the disease that will afflict Hsiao-kang throughout the film. That disease seems to be the erosion of human connection and communication. The fact that Hsiao-kang plays a corpse, floating aimlessly in a polluted river, surrounded by a film crew seems to suggest a multiplicity of artificial layers surrounding individuals, infecting their humanity to its very core. It's telling that Tsai returns to the (rather humorous) image of the leaking roof inside the family's home, tracking their efforts to keep water out by any means necessary. Water is also intricately connected to the film's obsession with sex and bodily fluids considering that the father goes to the bath houses to court his homosexual liaisons. Early in the film a sex scene between Hsiao-kang and an old girlfriend is preceded by her insistence that he turn off the lights and close the windows so she can pee. This early scene itself is connected to the film's opening scene, which features an up-and-down escalator where Hsiao-kang and this girl first pass each other. The encounter is indicative of the film's concern with the autonomous movement and separation of individuals, and is especially funny when Hsiao-kang turns around and tries to go down the up-escalator but finds himself unable to make any progress. Tsai's wickedly biting and absurd humor is pervasive in the film though many seem to miss it, perhaps because of a natural tendency to take such obvious art-films so seriously. One perfect example finds Hsiao-kang's mother giving him an "electric massager" to help ease his neck pain. The next scene finds her alone in her room, watching a porno film and visibly lamenting the lack of her "massager." All of the "healing" scenes take on a kind of satirical quality with Tsai mocking the scam artists who are obviously powerless to help Hsiao-Kang. Another funny scene finds the father riding with Hsiao-Kang, holding his head upright so he can drive his motorbike. If anything saves Tsai from the accusation of artsy-fartsy pretentiousness, it's his sense of humor that suggests he probably doesn't take himself as seriously as his fans do. While The River isn't as "silent" a film as Goodbye, Dragon Inn where Tsai managed to reduce the film's dialogue down to less than 10 lines, it's certainly pointing in that direction. Most of the film's best scenes play without any dialogue, and what dialogue exists seems utterly banal and almost inconsequential. Tsai is already forging his unique visual style, but he hasn't yet achieved that pristine sense of metaphysical mystery that will pervade What Time is it There?, or that sense of architectural abstraction that will pervade Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The River still feels rough and a bit juvenile. Its frames are opaque and muddy, almost echoing the idea of the dirty river itself. But if this isn't Tsai at his most pure or most profound, it's probably Tsai at his most depressively powerful. This is a film that will probably leave you feeling as unclean as that titular river, and it's guaranteed to be a film that will grime and gunk up your subconscious. A perfect 100/100 if not more. Rarely Have I seen a Tsai film (and not to forget Jia ZhangKe too) reveling in mediocrity.