Perhaps the Flood: The Fiery Torrent of Tsai Ming-Liang's Films

Goodbye Dragon Inn, directed by Tsai Ming-Liang. The New York Film Festival, October 2003.

Perhaps the flood will destroy all
Perhaps its absence . . .

With Goodbye Dragon Inn, which was shown at the New York Film Festival in 2003, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming- Liang has enchanted us again, this one following the critically acclaimed films whose internal consistency revealed, unmistakably, the director's signature style. The story, as usual, is deliberately simple, taking place in a derelict movie theatre, condemned to closing. It is nighttime in Taipei, we feel the endless pouring rain and dark, empty streets, and inside a movie theatre the same desolate, decayed ambiance: lives deprived of pleasure and connection, clinging to some phantoms, the unfathomable objects of desire. A half dozen lonely souls are watching a famous old hit movie, King Hu's Dragon Inn. Or rather, they are just marking time or looking for love. "This theatre is haunted" someone says, and it is—by these people and their desire to connect. They are solitary, mostly gay men, sitting in the dark, empty theatre, reviving their has-been memories. A sense of longing for past traditions, silent, hesitant attempts for any kind of relationship, and hopelessness fill the scenes. "I am very moved by this," the director has stated. And the compassion, the intensity of the emotions, is rendered in the most minimalist way. The director's restrained rapport speaks with bold sensuality: "For me tradition is manifested in the details of daily routine."

The title of Tsai Ming-Liang's best-known work, The Hole, has not been translated in any language. In French and in various filmographies it is simply referred to as The Hole. It seems that the concept is difficult to pin down and render in another language. The French word trou, the German Loch or the Italian buco are all more limited in their connotations than the English hole, perhaps because we simultaneously hear its homonym whole and sense the solid weight of "fullness" and "satiety" being revealed with sudden and unexpected force. Indeed, for Tsai the hole is not a rupture, the accidental unraveling of spontaneous relations or the decay of organic tissue. Though in the film's intentionally threadbare narrative there is actually a gaping hole connecting the two lead characters' apartments, this is just a starting point, a physically defined location serving as a bizarre tool for observation, communication, and the free flow of water. In Tsai Ming-Liang's films, the hole stands for the immense void surrounding his protagonists, the bleak fulcrum of the aimless rat race that defines the entire urban landscape; the ruthless order of modern life and endured condition of existence. Here the hole represents emptiness and absence, that peculiar and elusive liberty that renders everything volatile and fugitive, bereft of any substance.

Tsai evokes nothingness, an all-embracing void that envelops his characters and pins them under some kind of constant physical (metaphysical) pressure. The hole is a nebulous sphere of existence, a forlorn realm where characters serve out the time of their life sentences. The hole, like an epidemic that is given physical form in some of his films, continues to spread relentlessly, though initially its threat is barely perceived. Despite the infinite monotony of time, the hole keeps expanding like the universe to remind us of its pervasive presence and suggests the diffusion of some invisible disease. The film starts with a blank screen and the voice-over of a radio broadcast announcing the breakout of a new infection: the Taiwan virus. It warns the population against drinking tap water and, in addition to ordering the immediate quarantine of the infected citizens, it recommends that people leave all danger zones. When the first image lights up the screen, all we see is pouring rain and two people left alone in their adjoining apartments...