Adeus, Dragon Inn

Seeing this as part of the London Film Festival I had few expectations of the movie and was initially pleased to see the large cinema was a almost a sell-out. However, by the end of this 82 minute feature approximately a quarter of the audience had walked out and to be honest I am surprised that so many remained. Bravely, the film appears to ignore most conventions for film-making; dialogue, narrative and character development are rarely in evidence. The long still shots and selective use of sound (focusing primarily on footsteps and 'small' sounds from within the scene) created an eerie atmosphere but the film's content failed to capitalise on this platform to generate further interest in the characters or development of the themes.

Other films and directors (Tarkovsky) have created genuinely unique movies which have required significant commitment from the audience. However, on this occasion the director strays too far, the film demands too much from the viewer and offers scant return for this time. It reminded me of the experience of seeing a Russian film of the early 90s, The Stone (dir Sokurov), both these films require significant concentration and commitment from their viewers yet for me they both signify the excesses of arthouse cinema.

Tsai Ming Liang's recent piece "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" (Bu San) is a film chock full of beautiful color and rich, textured moods. It features the characteristic pacing of Taiwanese film, and it is composed of shot upon remarkable shot of a crumbling movie theatre in its final days, playing the last runs of "Dragon Gate Inn", a martial art classic Dir. by King Hu. Some of the stark imagery lingers, and it is just the pure action of the actors (there is no dialogue in the film for the first 45 minutes) that makes the film a profound stylistic achievement. There are some appearances by the original actors of The Dragon Gate Inn film (Tien Miao, for one); and Tsai Ming Liang's favorite actor Lee-Kang Sheng shows up at the end as the film projectionist. There's also a fine performance by Chen Shiang-chyi, who plays the limping "heroine" of the film, if such a thing exists in this movie. A great film overall, and a cinematic work that tries to say a very heartfelt and melancholic "goodbye" to not only "Dragon Gate Inn", but also to the old cultural and historical values that are perhaps beginning to fade in Taiwan.

Tsai Ming-liang's "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is a spectacularly dull movie, a limp ode to the bygone days of cinema-going. A film smitten with its own stasis, "Goodbye" culminates in a shot held for an obscene amount of time of an empty movie theater. Tsai's known for holding his shots way past the point most directors yell cut, and the result can be strikingly effective in the right context (the brilliant final shot of "Vive L'Amour") but "Goodbye" is almost an art film parody in its studied minimalism. The money shot in particular is a groan-inducer that makes you long for a fast-forward button.

"Goodbye Dragon Inn" sounds like it ought to appeal: a homage to the glory days of cinema by a great director, but Tsai seems to be resting on the assumption that anything he cranks out these days is destined for acclaim (which is true). However, ever since "The Hole" Tsai's inspiration appears to be running out; what in the earlier films seems innovative comes off as mannered in the later ones. "What Time is it There?" is a good flick but hardly feels like anything new from the filmmaker, "The Skywalk is Gone" is a short-film punchline for "What Time?," and "Goodbye" is just grinding. Tsai's probably incapable of making a thoroughly awful movie and there are spots of greatness in "Goodbye Dragon Inn," but hardly enough to justify a feature-length film. You can almost feel the director yawning behind the camera as he's filming, telling his actress to just continue sitting for an interminable amount of time so he can pad it just a little more (though the movie is only 80 minutes long it feels much, much longer). The director's always threatened to deadend his limited stylistic resources and "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is the wall he's always threatened to hit. I like Tsai and think he has some worthwhile things to say, but he's said the same things over and over again and the point's been made. People these days have trouble connecting, the values of the old days have become buried under the industrial rubble of progress, yes yes. Tsai fixates on the same themes in the same way he fixates on an empty theater or a woman hobbling slowly across the screen. Since there isn't too terribly much variety thematically or stylistically in the his films, familiarity with his past work leads to a feeling of having repeatedly tread the same path. It takes a true master to be able to be as stubbornly dwell on the same ideas in the same manner over the course of a career and pull it off, and Tsai is hardly a Bresson or Ozu. Flashes of brilliance and invention are certainly to be found in Tsai's movies, but "Goodbye" just uses minimalism to mask its lack of substance. Slow movies don't have to be tedious and unrewarding, as a few Tsai Ming-liang films have demonstrated, but often the tendency among art film devotees is to equivocate slow and good. "Goodbye Dragon Inn" isn't very good. The ideas are slight, the homage curiously lacks feeling, and the whole thing just drags along way past the point of interest like Tsai's lead actress down the corridor.

I particularly value what is often advertised as 'meditational' films. Visual mantras that demand stillness of mind and concentrated observation. But, although they have proliferated over the last 15 years, so few get the experience right, which seems to be the result of a younger generation of filmmakers who have merely studied the command Tarkovsky or Antonioni had over their camera but not the truthful seeing.

Tarkovsky and Antonioni swam in polar extremes of the same flow; inside and outside. The experience is the same. We flow with them to the place where we can get in-sight of what it means to flow in our world. In Solyaris, we flow inside the mind where our images are born. In The Passenger we flow outside self and identity into a liberating awareness of the world as is.

This could've been something special in this regard because there's a film-within to flow into from the one we are watching. But it never happens.

The two levels are not conjoined into a larger narrative, but rather contrasted. Inside the film the audience is watching (King Hu's Dragon Inn from the golden years of wuxia), the characters are free, passionate, filled with an ardor of life. Rigid hierarchies of clan or dynasty imply a comforting plan in this fictional life. Outside the film, life is a murk, a haunting of anonymous souls. The crippled girl is always struggling to get somewhere, up a flight of stairs or down the corridor. The Japanese guy is always constricted by indifferent strangers. Both their efforts inside the theater are with the sole end of watching the movie, the place where seems to be some purpose and things make some sense.

So, inside the preordained world of fiction the characters are strangely free, while the reality of ostensibly myriad possibilities is shown to be thoroughly aimless.

Being an art piece (what dreary connotations, no?), we get all these as elongated stanzas. We literally watch the crippled woman walk all the way up. It works barely enough to resonate with the ideas mentioned above, but it's very little for a feature film, very hollow. The few ideas here rattle in so much emptiness. Whereas in a Kiarostami film this elongated observation teems with life, here it is stylized to the point of a trinket that is perhaps pleasing to the eye but lifeless.

If you simply want to see a love letter to movies and movie- watching, seek out the Chacun sons Cinema compilation. Almost all the films are better than this, and they're all shorts. I have particularly fond memories of Andrei Konchalovsky's entry, Dans le Noir, which also takes place inside a cinema.

It's reasonable to assume that the Producer of this movie is one happy bunny because he sure didn't have to devote much of the budget to raw stock, in fact you could practically have shot it on short ends, a la Martin Benson. I doubt if there are more than 50 shots in the entire 82 minutes and possibly even less. The director's idea appears to be to nail the camera to the floor, snap on a wide-angle lens, shoot everything in deep focus and let the actors drift in and out of frame as and when the spirit moves them. The shooting ratio must have been an incredible one-to-one as opposed to an average six/eight-to-one. What happens? Well you might ask. It's a rainy night in Tapei. A guy ducks into an old barn of a cinema to beat the downpour. There's a movie in progress, Dragon Inn, a martial arts entry from another age. There's one employee, a lame girl who does everything but project the film. She leads us on a tour of the soon-to-be-closed-forever cinema. Leads is perhaps the wrong word. As I said the camera is nailed to the floor. The girl limps into frame and we follow her progress from our static vantage point. She prepares some kind of food that resembles coconut ice, eats some herself and takes the rest to the projection box which is all of twenty minutes walk away. in the absence of the projy she leaves the food where he will find it and repeats the journey in reverse. Meanwhile there are about three or four men watching the film. With something like six or seven hundred seats to choose from they opt for sitting together, moving several times til this is accomplished. At least one of the men was an actor in the film being shown and weeps to remember his youth. In one of the largest men's toilets I've ever seen in a cinema (at least 20 urinals) a single man is standing at one of them. Another man enters and with 19 urinals available opts to use the one next to the first man. Time passes. A lot of time. A third man enters, notices the 18 empty urinals and opts to join the other two. More time passes. A toilet flushes and a man leaves a stall and leans over the three men to collect his cigarettes from the ledge above them. More time passes. This is either a masterpiece or the worst thing to happen to movies since Peter Greenaway. Finally the movie ends the lights come up. The camera is nailed down approximately where the screen would be, looking out at the empty auditorium. Time passes. The girl enters from the left with a mop and bucket. She walks up three or four rows then between the seats and down the Right aisle. She exits. Time passes. A LOT of time. Finally we see the projectionist rewinding the film. The girl leaves the cinema It's still raining. A notice says the cinema is 'temporarily' closed. A jaunty yet melancholy 'pop' song from another age plays us out. End of story. Despite several walk-outs around me I stayed with it til the end. It does grow on you.