Tsai Ming Liang
Vive L'Amour

Very difficult.

It is very difficult to identify and perfectly frame the art of this Taiwanese filmmaker of Malaysian origin. Very difficult to expose oneself to his charm and his cinema without being touched deep in the soul. Because cinema like that of Ming Liang has never been seen: his are alienating and sick life stories, lost in the crucible of rhythms, sounds and colors of a metropolis like Taipei, where every individual seeks their own completeness without (most of the time) succeeding. 

Stories of lonely, empty, and ethereal bodies immersed in a desolate city where the search for love, or rather sex without love, seems to be the only way out from emptiness, but in the end, one discovers to be sadder and emptier than before. A pessimism that remains on the surface and that has always contrasted Ming Liang’s alienating works: from the splendid "The Hole," a story of two tenants of the same apartment complex who fall in love through a hole caused by a negligent plumbing system, to the more playful "The Wayward Cloud," pornography, but not just of bodies, of the merchandise of sex, but also of the soul. And how can one forget the sick "I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone," the cold and glacial, yet suspended "What Time Is It There?" and the love testament to the seventh art of "Goodbye Dragon Inn"? 

And "Vive L'Amour"? The testament, the heart of a filmography that would launch him towards the West and worldwide recognition.
An exquisite film that lives on strictly fixed frames, with meticulous attention to the environments and the bodies living within those environments.

Real stories that intertwine like a spiral of sensations and moods: a gay man who works in a funeral urn shop and takes over an empty apartment, which must be sold by a beautiful real estate agent, who falls in love with a street vendor. The apartment becomes the fulcrum of this devastating tangle, as the protagonist had thought of ending it all in that strange and silent place, not considering it would become the meeting spot for the agent and the vendor for their exchanges...

Three non-stories that continue to intertwine with a continuous winding, silently. All without a word too many, without a superfluous dialogue, without a superfluous shot. No plot twist, no real development.

Tsai Ming Liang manages to create cinema with nothingness. Beauty with emptiness.

Strong cinema, true and vital, that stands apart from any cinematic preconception.

The beauty of what is raw, pure, and solid in this world. Where a woman's cry is not glossed over but shot into the gut from the beginning to the end of her despair, in a raw, very raw final long take.  Where cinema does not dare to approach, to not devastate every emotional stability, Tsai Ming Liang crosses the line with finesse, fearless of making the spectator experience ecstasy instead of joy and despair instead of sadness. In the end, even the spectators themselves are the characters of his film. Lost in a river of tears that does not end, not even after the credits roll.

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