Vive l'amour

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.

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.

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.

Great movie if you want to know more about life in Taiwan anno 1994

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.