Vive L'Amour

viewed October 2, 1999 on PBS

For full information about this film, click here

Michaelangelo Antonioni and absurdist theater are alive and well in Taiwan, at least among its filmmakers.  Watching this movie you either feel that Taiwan is finally reaching a phase of interrogating the existential problems made possible by its recent entry into latent capitalism and relative democracy, or that its filmmakers are among the very few that claim that the questions Antonioni posed forty years ago are still unanswered.  Maybe the first world has lived with capitalism so long that we accept its faults much more than Tsai Ming Liang, the director of this exercise in how people avoid the emptiness that lies in the center of their busy, money-grubbing lives.   Kuei Mei Yang (the oldest daughter in Eat Drink Man Woman) is a lonely real estate agent who lives in one of the apartments she's trying to sell.  A random lover comes in and out, as well as another timid man who is attached to the first man.  The three of them drift in and out of the apartment to sleep, wash, have sex... Whatever.  By the end we get the point that it's all a Beckettian play, each character avoiding emptiness until it can't be avoided any longer, in which case we get one of the longest uninterrupted crying scenes ever filmed.  The point is well taken, and it is relevant to our times, and it's noble that one person bothers to film something addressing this social and existential crisis, especially with a crazy, materialistic society like Taiwan.  The main problem I have with the film is that I feel like I've seen it before, in a film called L'Avventura made  40 years ago -- which makes me appreciate that film all the more.  I'm glad to see that Tsai is aspiring to important work.. I wish it were in a less derivative manner, but even so, it's still a landmark in Taiwanese cinema.

Home