La rivière

There is a great deal about this movie which is going to bother audiences with short attention spans. The director Tsai Ming-Liang has a trademark style that is not to everyone's taste: long, static scenes; no background music; and dark, unsentimental realism. All of these elements are present here as they were in his much better-known film "Vive l'Amour."

As fine as that film was, this one is even finer, and much more harrowing. An aimless young man runs into an old fling who happens to be working on a film set. He goes one day to watch the filming and the director, who is trying to film a scene of a corpse floating down a river, is having trouble with the dummy they're using to play the corpse. The director talks the young man into playing the corpse. He hesitates, as the river is clearly polluted to ridiculously toxic levels, but the desperate director is persuasive enough to convince him that everything is going to be all right as long as he takes a shower afterward.

In the days and weeks that follow, the young man develops a tic that steadily develops into severe spasms and partial paralysis in his neck and shoulder. Director Tsai presumes the audience is intelligent enough to see the connection between the polluted river and the sudden neurological catastrophe, and never makes the cause of the illness explicit.

The young man's life steadily unravels. He goes to Western-style doctors; he goes to Traditional Chinese Medicine practictioners who violently massage him, poke him with needles, force him to consume revolting medicinal broths, and perform various rituals to scare off the evil spirits. Nothing works, many of the healers are quacks, and the hopelessness of his situation settles upon the viewer like a radioactive cloud.

The rest of his family is only slightly better off. His father is a closeted gay who relentlessly cruises and constantly gets rebuffed. His mother, for obvious reasons, is sexually frustrated. They barely know how to communicate with one another and the son's worsening condition merely exacerbates the fissures that already existed in the family. One top of that, their house is leaking water and the ceiling is on the verge of collapse.

There are horror films which frighten us with supernatural forces and crazed psychos, frighten us with things that hardly exist or which most people never encounter, and then there those movies which present the far more terrifying horror of real calamaties that befall real people every day: chronic illness, environmental catastrophe, familial dissolution, hopelessness, depression. Such films are tremendously unpopular for one very simple reason: they tell the truth, a truth which practically everybody would much rather pretend doesn't exist. Even when such disasters are presented to us in film and literature, there is often a tendency to try to soften the blow by sugar-coating it with some kind of hope, redemption, turn-around, religious awakening, catharsis, etc. This film does no such thing: it tells a believable story and follows it through to its logical "conclusion"--the realization that there are some things from which one will never recover, that there are some cases in life where there is no hope. There are very few people who can stomach such a bitter truth, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Only a very brave and talented artist can present a story like this without descending into sentimentality on the one hand, or schadenfreude on the other. Tsai forces us to observe carefully, and observation is the first step on the road to compassion and understanding. He sees the pathos of the situation but also its black irony and humor. What's more, in this little story about a handful of ruined lives, he has found a parable that applies to the larger world, one which forever seems to teeter on the brink of destruction, most of the time at its own hands.

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.

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.

Although the first thing that strikes you about 'The River' is its measured pace and relaxed narrative style, you will soon feel yourself giving up the rein to this film that demands respect.

It is a film that documents social decline in the modern world, a kind of alienation and dysfunction that has become a staple of arthouse cinema, and yet treats it with such originality and audacity that it seems brand new all over again. It is the kind of film I like: the kind of film that uses 'dead time', the type pioneered by Antonioni, that establishes the film within a natural context and long takes that never disrupt the time-truth of the images, resulting in film that hardly ever manipulates or patronizes the audience. It relies instead on the understanding that the audience will accept (or possibly relish in) the films distinctly alternative themes and form. Indeed, the film has its flaws, as all films must, but I feel that it is the measured pace that will test most- don't let it! After-all, it is only 114 minutes long.

A film laced with a quite understatement that explodes towards the end in a finale that is, in my viewing experience, un-equaled in its shocking power. Recommended.

Tsai Ming-Liang offers viewers in "The River" an honest chance to take it or leave it right from the first sequence. If you make it through and enjoy (or rather, are puzzled by) this first sequence - a film shooting in a river, depicted in a long, almost real-time pace - you will for sure be caught in his stream, because what follows is simply great, original, surprising, offbeat, funny, alarming and often mind-boggling.

Tsai is a Taiwan filmmaker whose cinematic grammar apparently owes a lot to Westerners - especially to Europeans. You can spot Truffaut in his love for his characters, in the way he always casts his favorite actor Lee kang-Sheng much in the way Truffaut did with Jean-Pierre Léaud, and in the mysterious and surprising ways love expresses itself in his films.

You can feel the influence of Antonioni in the long sequences without dialogue or music, in the urban chaos leading to lack of communication between the characters, in the forces of nature (the heavy constant rain, the omnipresence of water in this case) responding to "civilization's" abuse - the echologic chaos.

You can feel a touch of the Godard of "Le Mépris" in the total lack of communication between very close people (the couple in Godard, the family here) and the kind of non-conform sexuality of the Pasolini of "Teorema" (sexual repression and catharsis among the family members, in both cases).

But Tsai has got something all his own. I've seen now all his feature films and it's very impressive to see how he has developed a language of his own, through his imagery, his pace, his actors' performances, his conflicts, his endings. He is sure to always include unforgettable sequences (here, for sure, the sequence in the sauna between father and son) that will haunt you, delight you, disgust you, move you and stay with you long after you've left the theatre. That's a rare accomplishment in any visual arts these days.

For me, "The River" is surely Tsai's masterpiece to date, a film that flows slowly, harmoniously, hauntingly, effortlessly to its destination, catches you in its stream, and leads you to a free-meaning ending - which, in this case, is something warmly welcome.