Tsai Ming-Liang's latest effort, Goodbye Dragon Inn is a tribute to cinema and, even before that, to the places where cinema is consumed and shared. The entire film takes place inside a theater that is about to close for good. The spectators, little more than ghosts, watch the screening of a blockbuster from the sixties, Dragon Inn. While the sequences of this action film run quickly on the screen, the theater is filled with ghosts, Pirandello-esque characters in search of their author, who wander along the endless corridors.
A lover of elegantly packaged sequences, in which for the majority of the time the presence of the actors is pure physicality, without any dialogue - so much so that Tsai's writing manages to visually charge the film with meaning -, the director conveys the poignant awareness of the uniqueness of a moment.
Suspended in a timeless dimension, in which there is no lack of moments of humor, Goodbye Dragon Inn ends leaving the viewer with the same feeling of confusion and bitterness that its characters seem to feel.
(Luisa Ceretto)
source
www.mymovies.it
The criticism
Tsai Ming Liang's sequences, long to the point of exhaustion, until the camera runs out of film ("I couldn't stop" said the director in a press conference), are at the basis of the estrangement that those who watch his films feel: very few filmmakers make their works a real experience for the viewer, Tsai succeeds. It is therefore difficult to resort to the usual parameters and categories: the Taiwanese film is a film system in itself, a hypnotic trip in which very few words are spent and which, in its long shots, of minutes that seem to dilate out of all proportion, always hosts an ironic twist, a paradoxical fact, a mocking key. If a character takes five minutes to perform a gesture, the director thinks it best not to waste even a second of it: if this seems absurd, then what is a frenetic montage? The director's choices are not provocation but stylistic code, and if there is a danger it is that this choice passes for pure manner, something from which it is very far. In Goodbye Dragon Inn the author's obsession with flowing water is still present: you can hear it inside the pipes of this cinema which is the exclusive location of the film, you can feel it in the long pisses of the customers in the urinal scene, in the toilet flushes, in the torrential final rain: the environment participates in the film as always, you enter it, you live it, you question the inscrutable faces of the characters who inhabit it, close in space while sidereal distances separate their souls. The setting - a half-empty movie theater where Dragon Inn is being shown, now a gay hangout, a receptacle of various solitudes - has a static nature that is matched by the kinetic nature of the film being shown: Tsai's work lives on contrasts, once again closed and crepuscular, composed of paths far and wide, of wandering vacuously in a place haunted by the ghosts of a dying cinema, once again terminal and apocalyptic after the drafts of What Time Is It Over There?. Bu San is above all, in fact, a reflection on the sunset of an era: the theater is at its last screening, a world is disappearing, the camera's gaze fixed on the completely empty stalls coldly bears witness to this, two of the spectators of the film being shown are the actors from Goodbye Dragon Inn (one of them cried when he saw himself on the screen) who exchange a couple of melancholic lines ("No one remembers us anymore") in the beautiful finale. The shutter is lowered. The theater closes forever. (Luca Pacilio) The Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang has now accustomed us to his vision, through a cinema that can be defined as absence. Absence of rhythm, events, dialogues, often even music. Yet in his feature films the interiority of the characters represented appears forcefully, usually victims of incommunicability, repressed impulses and devastating loneliness. Themes that run through the director's entire filmography, from the Golden Lion "Vive l'Amour" to the more optimistic "The hole - Il Buco". In "Bu San" the fulcrum of the action is a decadent cinema, in which an old film entitled "Dragon Inn" is projected. In the eighty minutes of the screening we witness the chronicle of the last day of operation of the theater before its definitive closure: the limping of the cashier who cleans the bathrooms, eats, brings food to the projectionist and the comings and goings of the audience, almost exclusively male, who exploit the darkness to improvise sexual approaches. The first dialogue, in addition to the background dialogue of the film being shown, comes after an hour of film ("It's haunted!", "The cinema is ...", "... spirits!") and says too much. More evocative, in their slow reiteration, are the and images in succession, almost all fixed shots or long sequence shots. At times unbearable, however exhausting despite the short running time, the film manages to be forcefully communicative and to make the torment of the characters alive and pulsating. The dead times cubed break out of the authorial affectation and imprint personality on a courageous and unexpectedly powerful style. It's a shame about the nostalgic air that one breathes. From such an extreme language one expects a look at the future, if not of hope at least of lucid pessimism, at most a reflection on the present, but not a refuge in the past and in the nostalgia of the good old days.
(Luca Barboncini)
