22nd of May, 2020
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com I was reviewing Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the film by Tsai Ming-liang.
Opening with the picture within a picture is a difficult gambit to get away with, but Ming-liang here uses it to condition us into noticing all of the different frames within his frames. Shooting in a cinema leaves us open to the impression that the camera (which crucially barely ever moves) is placed in every instant so as to divide the geometry of the interior into as many distinct rectangular regions as it can. The arrangement of frames within the frame is unintrusive and poetic, and it results in images that blossom into flowering tangrams. The finality of the empty theatre with rows and rows of empty seats sitting in the cold grey light manages to transcend what ought to be an inherent sadness in the scene by instead presenting the image as the culmination of that series of divided shots, which finally reaches its dizzying climax as hundreds of seats stand as so many possible perspectives. The slowness of its slow cinema isn't punishing and spartan as in Tarr, but instead charitable. The viewer needs each shot to last as long as it does so they can explore the perspectives it offers.
Characters shamble about across these images to steady the eye as it drags around the image. For instance: the bathroom scene. Every man at his urinal stands pissing for an impossibly long time, the Japanese man bubbling with nervous energy as he is surrounded by the inert bodies for whose attention he begs. The stall directly behind him opens and out comes a man who makes his way to a sink as though to wash his hands, but instead he stands miming this action for far too long. Some time later, in the (presumed empty) stall he emerged from, a hand reaches from within to close the door. This sort of dark comedy (given the cluelessness of the Japanese man who is unaware that the exact homosexual encounter he is looking for is happening behind him) also manifests in the receptionist being made to hobble at a crawling pace through the cavernous labyrinth of the mostly empty theatre looking for a projectionist she never finds while wearing an iron leg brace.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn is never mean spirited in the way it presents these images. The receptionist's journey isn't a cosmic farce at all because her journey serves the noble purpose of mapping out the depth in the images for us, as she moves from background to foreground. The old actor crying contextualises the film as an honest, loving chronicle of these stories even as it makes fun of them. It suggests that Ming-liang cares deeply about the lives of these slow moving and feckless humans—he knows that the breathtaking natural beauty of Guo just isn't quite as beautiful as an imperfect world with humans in it.
