Vive le cinéma!
Still from It’s a Dream, the segment directed by Tsai Ming-liang for the anthology To Each His Own Cinema (2007)
Tsai Ming-liang has been one of the most discussed filmmakers in the last several months, ever since the 70th edition of Venice Film Festival and his Grand Jury Prize for STRAY DOGS / JIAO YOU (2013). Then, despite his officially announced decision to quit cinema, this year’s Panorama Special at Berlinale was graced by JOURNEY TO THE WEST / XI YOU (2014). France, a country that has inspired and at the same time supported immensely Tsai Ming-liang’s career, dedicated two tributes to his work in the month of March – at Deauville Asian Film Festival and at the French Cinémathèque in Paris. Yoana Pavlova took the opportunity to watch all his features in a row and wrote Mr. Tsai letter. Want to open it?
Dear Mr. Tsai,
I apologize for addressing you in such a personal manner! Ten years of journalism have taught me to be very professional in my relationships with film directors and never mix up their personalities with their work. Yet, it has been a while since I felt so young at heart while end credits are rolling, like a true cinephile who can be once again enchanted by someone’s cinematic universe.
I believe it is fate that brought me to your films at this point of my life, just as it made it impossible to meet you at Deauville Asian Film Festival a few weeks ago, as I had planned in order to discuss with you my revelation. The same fate that you like mentioning in your interviews and probably that same kind of force (karma?) that back in the beginning of the 1990s made you choose Lee Kang-sheng for the role of Hsiao-kang, instead of Chen Chao-jung for example. So, please bear with my need to share with you, in public, my appreciation that took the form of an unexpected insight.
No wonder if your films are among the most scrutinized and interpreted pieces of contemporary art, especially in France, where I happen to live. Considering your zeal to blend traditional Chinese philosophy, literature, poetry, or calligraphy with modern European literature, drama, visual arts, and music, it seems like no analysis of your work can go wrong. In one movie you decode today’s face of the French New Wave, in another – the Bollywoodian perception of love. From Titian’s light or his preoccupation with the earthly and the heavenly love to Dorian Gray’s fear of aging, a westerner one can project on your work a great deal of cultural references, exactly the same way Asian viewers can spot various elements from Buddhist and Taoist mythology.
Nevertheless, as I had the luck and the luxury to explore your filmography chronologically, not without the help of your retrospectives at Deauville Asian Film Festival and at the French Cinémathèque, an ostensibly original idea occurred to me. With the theme tune of REBELS OF THE NEON GOD / QING SHAO NIAN NEZHA (1992) I had this flashback of an era full of technological progress and artistic nostalgia, with desolate anticipation of the simulated reality we all knew is about to come, yet with lust to step forward to the inevitable too. Your debut feature sets the map of a parallel existence, similar to the side-scrolling platform games your personages are playing without knowing they are also avatars in someone else’s world. In this context, the story with the divine reincarnation appears as a justification of what follows next – more game levels, with “jumps” through time and space, and, of course, many more sacrifices on the altar of the Neon God.
VIVE L'AMOUR / AI QING WAN SUI (1994) and THE RIVER / HE LIU (1997) corroborate this impression. Your characters eat, drink, bath, pee, hesitate, spy, cry, struggle with insomnia, long for intimacy, and most of all – want to be different. You gave them the same bodies and apparently new souls, but they have been trapped in the same old roles. The entire energy of their obsessions and compulsions is being consumed by the ultimate desire to create an image for the others they cannot sustain in “real life”. Pagers, paid phones, mobile phones – characters are authentic only when they communicate through technology (same goes for the online chat in HELP ME, EROS / BANG BANG WO AI SHEN, the spin-off universe Lee Kang-sheng created in 2007). Otherwise, when they attempt to interact in actuality, all emotional and social connections between them look dramatically damaged.
THE HOLE / DONG (1998) hit my soft spot – it reminded me of my favorite sci-fi thrillers from the end of the 1990s, so I would call it “spiritual cyberpunk”. It is remarkable how the suspense of the Millennium plus the Asian financial crisis of 1997 inspired you to shoot à la Cronenberg a story, in which the path to the absolute virtual reality goes through the horror of the physical. It is clearly not Lars von Trier’s EPIDEMIC (1987) but sooner a painful gameplay, in which the side-scrolling concept becomes palpable and jolly intermissions, designed as musical performances, mark each new level. The two leading avatars come to the realization that they cannot, in fact, come close to each other, unless they lose their human guise. Whether the cockroaches are their real nature or an advanced stage of eXistence, I would rather now know.
Clock chime, new phase – WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? / NI NA BIAN JI DIAN (2001). Once you have set the rules and mastered your creation, your hands were free to experiment with your elaborate gaming structure that shaped more and more like MMORPG. And you have entertained yourself, be it deconstructing cinema and devising virtuality with GOODBYE, DRAGON INN / BU SAN (2003), THE WAYWARD CLOUD / TIAN BIAN YI DUO YUN (2005), or VISAGE / FACE (2009), be it examining your personages detached from technology and civilization in I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE / HEI YAN QUAN (2006) or STRAY DOGS / JIAO YOU (2013) – living off the grid, like human bugs. Still, in I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE you could not resist featuring a small casse-tête with Lee Kang-sheng’s double part. As for STRAY DOGS, it resonates as your most intimate and truthful film, a delightful family reunion of beloved bodies and souls, a tender farewell within and to the complex labyrinth of your carefully mapped megapolis environment.
The press kit of STRAY DOGS contains the following acknowledgement by Apichatpong Weerasethakul: “Our house is made of wood. In the heavy downpour it turns dark brown. It constantly switches shades like an animal in disguise, the same way Tsai Ming Liang’s habitats do. I set a piece of the concrete path and think about a friend who said he could count raindrops. It happened when he meditated and his mind captured the flow of time. The movie THE MATRIX can accurately represent his experience. You just need to see Tsai’s films, I would add, because Lee Kang Sheng and Keanu Reeves don’t meditate, but they do stop time.” So, I am not alone in my theory, but why would I even bother sharing all this? Let me rephrase your own words: “I keep asking myself: what is cinema? Why write on films? Who am I doing this for? Who is the mass audience? Are they the people who watch Spielberg movies? Frankly speaking, I am not interested in this at all.” As my inner self is ready to turn its back to cinema and walk away with a limp, it is nice to know that your films are there, a slow and sublime quest to the West… or is it just a dream?
Best,
YP