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The final cry encapsulates the momentary bewilderment of the soul when one begins to sense the spurts of real life. Already the premonition of something invisible that surrounds us, and that is fundamental to our evolution, determines a suffering that is different from other times because it begins to be a conscious suffering.
Leaps and little jumps of "know yourself" are necessarily bloody and push towards an objective despair of abandonments. Securities shatter on transparent and immaterial rocks, the climb is without ropes, the trapeze exercise is without a net. And overcoming that fear of falling is essential to surrender, it's essential to fall. In the absolute solitude of the fall, there is the absence that brings us back to the essence of the All.
Wandering the streets meeting rejected brothers, rejects who reject conformism, drags on the roads of nothingness that call for translations into territories where our soul attains preeminence, nourish this absent sadness that characterizes the protagonists of this film which is an upward fall that tears away the convictions and considerations of a life of deceit and throws us all into a well of transcendental revisionism.
Looking at oneself in the mirror and not recognizing oneself, questioning who we are, then going into thoughtless eating rice vermicelli in shark fin sauce at two in the morning. Empty houses, stolen keys, extreme solitudes trying to keep each other company, shadows of feelings in the act of implementing them to see if one can still feel something human. Trying to escape through the spirit of conservation from that something that pulls you into the black hole is no longer enough.
Elements of rarefied substance ruthlessly mark the change, but how much pain. Trying on a dress to disguise the suffering, admiring oneself in the mirror chasing one's alchemical marriage, but not reflecting. And realizing one is lost in a labyrinth of identifications and asking for help to disappear. And that camera filming, as if it were forgotten and left on, the midst of lives that no longer seek anything formal.
In 1994 the Golden Lion in Venice, this film was shown on Rai 3 during the late night hours on New Year's Eve for some years, a unique compendium for throwing old "things" from the past year off the balcony. Rooting out and throwing away our skeletons in the closet, but also the closet itself...
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By O__O
Tsai Ming Liang manages to create cinema with nothingness. Beauty with emptiness.
Where cinema does not dare to approach, to not devastate every emotional stability, Tsai Ming Liang crosses the line with finesse.
