Vive l'amour

Modern alienation Please pay attention to the movie making time first. Making this movie in 1994 and in Taiwan is a great cinematic event. The film is a masterpiece in this respect. I refer to my memory a little and remember the important films of 1994 as much as possible. Kieslowski's "Red", " The Shawshank Redemption", "Forrest Gump", "Death and the Maiden", "pulp fiction", "Leon", and "Ed wood", but in my opinion, this movie is better than all these movies. This film has a deep and detailed look at today's human world. At a time when the 20th century is coming to an end, the film shows the perspective of the 21st century. Human loneliness in the modern world is not even a shoulder to cry on, how bitter and how effective it was. "Tsai Ming Liang" shows how respectable he is in his second production. His film has everything, from calculated direction to good performances, all three actors are wonderful in their roles. The long shots are very practical, appropriate and correct, and the power of the film and its effect lies in the fact that it advances its narrative with minimal dialogue. Movies with little dialogue have always been attractive and lovely to me.

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.

I suppose it's nice and trendy to see wonderful things in the absolute emptiness of a film like this. With the sometimes pointless excesses of many Hollywood films, we can relax and enjoy a scene devoid of explosions, foul language, and corny one-liners. Minimalism has its place, and can be very effective when employed properly. However, this film is not one of those cases.

Take the long scenes with no dialogue and dreary, sparse scenery. I'm sure that they must hold some great meaning and insight, because the implied message in shrouded in bafflement. The acting is poor... bland and pedestrian... and features one of the worst crying scenes in history (at the end of the film, if you can sit through it to the end). The scenery is drab, and the ridiculously long ending sequence of the girl walking through the barren park is as pleasurable as having a tooth pulled. I would call this anticlimatic, but as the film didn't build to any sort of climax whatsoever... not even in the "erotic" scenes... it would be untrue. I'm sure that there was a script employed during the filming, but with the amount of dialogue, I think it might have been written on a cocktail napkin. Basically, this film offers nothing to interest or amaze... no great story, no stunning insights, no visual drama, no excitement. Apart from two or three amusing moments, this film is a waste of two hours. A tragically boring and dreary film.

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.

First, the video box is very deceptive. This film is NOT about intense, erotic encounters with some hidden gay voyeur taking it all in.

Somewhere in Taipei is a nice apartment. A young gay guy, (who is lonely as hell and sells cremation urns) gets the key by bolding plucking it out of the lock while no one is looking. An attractive young female real estate agent who, while trying to sell or rent the place, also uses it, checks up on it, stops in to take a crap, or a lie down, or take a guy there for hot, but causal sex. The guy she takes up there is a well off street vendor. He gets his key by swiping it from her after the sex. It is more of a situation than a story.

Vive L'Amour takes a studied, hypernaturalistic approach that is a strong style statement in itself (an effect partly due to turning up the 'natural' sounds accompanying an action a notch or two and by not using music.) And despite her good looks and movie actress head of hair, the real estate agent is presented again and again as completely nonglamourous. She is always behaving in slightly exaggerated ways that show she is just a woman like any other. This is epitomized in the crap taking scene in the apartment, but there is also the scene where she cries: beautiful women in the movies usually cry with just their eyes, but here we get rich, rolling, mucal snorts that come straight from the nose. A lot of the film is spent following her completely unromanticized daily routine trying to sell or rent properties. As counter-point, and equally deliberately, we there are little movie touches: the big hair, all the actors are attractive, little bits of romantic/comedic chatter, the comedy/buddy goings on between the guys (who of course run into each other in the apartment--more movie comedy stuff), and so on.

In the end Tsai manages to masterfully blend these contradictory forces into a climax that interweaves three (one per character) magical cinematic moments: Tenderness, Innocence, and Sadness. Vive L'Amour is fine, intelligent and moving film making.