Goodbye Dragon Inn Review
With Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang distills his minimalist aesthetic to its very essence. Previous efforts like What_Time_Is_It_There? look almost baroque by comparison. There's barely any dialogue, and almost all of it consists of non sequiturs. It's essentially a feature-length experimental film that plays with cinematic language and history in ultimately very rewarding ways. The jokes -- and there are many -- are extremely subtle. They arise from Tsai's playful manipulation of sound, space, and duration. Tsai is a master at placing the camera at just the right place and letting scenes play out in front of it for just the right amount of time. A character in the film claims the movie theater is haunted, but the film, as a whole, is haunted, not only by King_Hu (Miao_Tien and Shi_Jun, the heroes of the original Dragon_Inn, play ghostly, forgotten figures in Tsai's film, lurking in the darkness, watching their younger selves onscreen), but by the great French director Jacques_Tati, as well. Goodbye, Dragon Inn plays like a Tati film in slow motion. In Tsai's hands, the smallest of gestures become sublime comedy, such as when two men try clumsily to squeeze through a doorway simultaneously, or an indescribably weird scene involving urinals, cigarettes, and lots of awkwardness. The net effect of Tsai's purposefully slow, meticulously crafted style is a film of lingering images, a mixture of humor and melancholy that stays in the memory long after it's over. Tom Vick, Rovi
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