Painting An Eloquent Parting Shot

When you go to see Tsai Ming-liang’s latest film, Goodbye
Dragon Inn, opening today at Cinema Village, you will sit at a
movie screening and watch another screening proceed in a different
theater over the course of just over 80 minutes. That theater is an
old cinema, the Fu-Ho moviehouse in the Yung-Ho district of Taipei
where Tsai lives, and it was torn down three months after the
shooting of the film.

That is to say, Goodbye Dragon Inn fixes on a place rather than
a group of characters. At the center of this movie is the way we
inhabit a place, give meaning to this space, and allow our feelings
to resonate within it. Developing a continuous line of action
propelled by something other than the coincidence of events in this
place—in other words, a well-formed, substantial
plot—is not on Tsai’s mind, nor need it be.

So what’s this place like and who’s there? The
decrepit building shows its age in its lobby posters and theater
cards, and in its dilapidated architecture—evidence of a
series of social changes and also a vestige of a passing era in the
history of film exhibition. Giving the film its English title, the
scratchy old print being projected is the Hong Kong wuxia classic
Dragon Inn (1966), one of the master director King Hu’s many
balletic swordplay sagas. Though filled to capacity as Tsai’s
credits and then Hu’s credits run, the auditorium reappears
nearly empty, only a half-dozen or so scattered patrons occupying
the venue. Might these be the first of many phantoms in
Tsai’s self-described “ghost story”? After all,
nearly forty-five minutes later, the first of only 12 lines of
dialogue in the entire movie (except for those in Hu’s
feature) occurs: “Do you know this theater is
haunted?”

Playing against the panorama of Hu’s production are the
many gestures and activities of the spectators: wandering eyes
meeting in shared glances, various states of inattention and idle
distraction, and an aggregation of discrete sight and sound gags
that Tsai always stages to inflect the surrounding malaise. A gay
Japanese man (Kiyonobu Mitamura) cruises, hoping to find some
comfort, with little success. A raven-haired temptress cracks
sesame seeds while swinging her legs over the seats and dangling
her high heels. Outside there is the ticket booth clerk (Chen
Shiang-chyi) who goes upstairs in search of the missing
projectionist she loves (played by Lee Kang-sheng, the Dietrich to
Tsai’s Sternberg). Carrying half of a steamed bun as a
present and hesitant to express her love any other way, she inches
along with every clack of her leg brace, as the film slows to a
crawl.

The way Tsai prolongs these durations of time won’t
surprise those who have seen his work before. His first feature,
Rebels of a Neon God (1992), the exquisitely sad Vive l’amour
(1994), the mysterious and foreboding The River (1997), the rainy,
apocalyptic musical The Hole (1998), his Paris-Taipei story of
metaphysical and globalized displacement What Time Is It There?
(2001)—Tsai’s whole corpus takes a minimalist stance,
employs little dialogue, and thrives on the repetition of
micro-motifs. But in its starkly defined limits, Goodbye Dragon Inn
could be called even more spare, minimal, and now structuralist in
style. At times it may even seem fit to be a looped gallery
installation.

Tsai holds his static master shots (there is only one camera
movement in the film) for minutes on end, far longer than many
others would. These precisely composed shots of the
characters’ trips through the maze of cramped corridors,
hallways, and steeply-raked auditorium aisles lay out the whole
theater in sparse, diagrammatic terms with geometric reversals in
angle of direction and breathtaking recession in space. Every
smaller area seems to become a deep movie-theater-like space filled
with pools of lambent light and shadow. Each shot is sustained and
transfixing with multiple planes of focus, just as the carefully
orchestrated soundtrack is formed out of the ceaseless rainfall in
the Taipei night, the soundtrack of Dragon Inn, and a sharp musique
concrète of clanking metallic stairs and creaking seats.

The notes that constantly recur in Tsai’s cinematic
world—disconnection, social breakdown, sexual frustration,
quiet deadpan comedy—resound here too, having spread into the
moviegoing experience and its sense of being alone among others. In
fact, Goodbye is one of the most acutely perceptive films
I’ve seen that deals with the experience of
moviegoing—of being in a theater while not engaged with the
movie, of walking into and out of a theater while the movie is
showing.

Moreover, the film is also a moving and inventive re-visitation
of a great, popular film of the sixties. A formal interplay emerges
between the fiercely frenetic and graceful montage of blue sky and
wilderness we glimpse in Hu’s work and the slow absence of
interaction within the enclosed theater. But it’s a uniquely
oblique tribute to Hu, since the audience largely ignores the
feature, the screen is seen cropped and from shifting perspectives,
and the action is condensed to fit Goodbye’s running
time.

However, there is another more resonant and involuted link
between Tsai’s filmmaking and that of Hu. Two actors stand as
ghosts who haunt Tsai’s own body of work and also as
revenants in relation to their own past careers with Hu. The pair
of elderly men who watch the screen raptly and exchange a few
poignant words about remembering at the film’s conclusion are
the actors Miao Tien and Chun Shih, who starred in Dragon Inn 37
years earlier as the hero and villain waging battle against one
another. (Certainly these two actors are more recognizable to an
Asian general audience familiar with Hu’s influential piece
of popular genre cinema than to us.) As a sort of apparition, Tien
has incarnated the main father figure in four of Tsai’s
films, last appearing as the patriarch who dies early on in What
Time Is It There? (a film that suitably has the French legend
Jean-Pierre Leaud as its own ghost).

Once Dragon Inn ends, the lights come up, and the seats empty,
Tsai’s melancholy film is not quite over. The theater’s
final night before closing only ends after the auditorium has been
cleaned and the building shut down. The ghosts leave their
shadow-lives in the dark. And the film makes its final act of
recording and saying goodbye to the cinema a shot of monumental
dimensions and a memorial for the seats that every spectator will
soon leave vacant.��