La rivière

In The River (1997) by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), meets a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) on an escalator in a downtown Taipei mall. The woman introduces him to a film director (Ann Hui) who recruits him to play a corpse floating down a polluted river. Shortly afterward, Xiao-kang mysteriously experiences severe neck pain. Although he receives medical, chiropractic, and acupuncture treatment, his condition worsens and he spends most of the film groaning in pain and holding his neck. As in Todd Haynes' Safe (1995), another film about illness that worsens despite treatment, it remains uncertain whether the cause is physical or psychological.

There have been many films about the failure of modern society to provide a coherent set of values for people, particularly Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, and Michael Haneke's Code Unknown, but none convey the feeling of emotional deadness and isolation more effectively than The River. It is so alienating in its lethargic pace that it makes Andrei Tarkovsky look like Michael Bay. With no close-ups, no soundtrack other than environmental noises, minimal dialogue and plot, and long takes that focus on objects for minutes at a time, the film challenges us to stay tuned in.

Relationships in The River are cold and impersonal, and Xiao-kang's family is about as profoundly isolated as can be imagined. All we see in the beginning are three individuals going their separate ways, performing most of life's routine chores exclusively by themselves. It is well into the film until we even know they are a family unit. They never speak to each other, sleep or eat together. The father (Miao Tien) is a retired, dumpy-looking man who frequents the Gay saunas. Xiao-kang's mother (Lu Hsiao-ling) is an elevator operator who watches pornographic videos that she obtains from her secret lover, a seller of such material. Xiao himself has a brief affair with the young woman he met at the beginning of the film.

There is no emotion in the film. Only the brief, anonymous sexual encounters provide any form of intensity. All of these scenes, however, are shot almost entirely in the dark with only little snippets of light showing parts of trembling bodies. This technique creates a sensual but rather unnerving and distancing experience. Water is a prevalent thread throughout the film -- in the polluted river, the leaking ceiling of the father's bedroom which ultimately floods the apartment; rain showers, bathing showers and baths at the sauna. It plays a central symbolic role, perhaps as a metaphor for the flow of life. As Jonathan Rosenbaum concludes: "Sex and plumbing, seduction and infection, a river and a spray of steam and a torrent of rain are all part of the same inexorable flow."

The River says a great deal about people thrown together in big cities, living in close proximity, and yet emotionally and psychologically distant. They live an existence surrounded by silence, unwilling or unable to reach out to each other, handling problems with inaction and patchwork solutions. I found The River to be a very unsettling experience, unpleasant to watch but very powerful in its dark message. In a shocking scene towards the end of the film, father and son meet in a sauna at a gay bathhouse but fail to recognize each other. In this tender but disturbing depiction of emotional disconnect, the film is succinctly summarized.

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.

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.

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.

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.