The River

After the film, my immediate reaction was it felt like the other extreme of "American Beauty," call it "Taipei Beauty". It's about a dysfunctional family, but in a much quieter, subdued way. It's dark, rather Kafka-est, and at times reminds me of Jim Jarmusch's black and white films. This film is in color, yet the mood and tone somehow felt sparing and heartlessly detached. There's not a whole lot of dialog. Very often we have long shots/scenes - and I mean both in the sense of camera held duration and reach of distance. Director Tsai Ming-liang definitely is not shy at giving us the real-time experience: the stillness of waiting, the (long) pause of a character just standing there, sitting there motionless, alone in the dark in dim lighting, or just going through the routine of munching food. Mind you, it may seem like nothing's going on, but the underlying emotion or turmoil within the character is silently felt. He even repeats (similar) scenes - it has a French film flavor: the actions/motions the characters go through seem to come so naturally, like ordinary daily life routines.

Ambient sound effects play an effective role in "The River," and they're constantly there, aptly applied complementing the scenes instead of musical tracks. Besides the two critical boldly captured intimate scenes of the son, the other intimate scene of the father, another of the mother, are all presented in a transitional flow, unobtrusively natural way. Sensitive portrayals all round - the demonstration of utter unawareness of each other, as a family unit or floating bodies in the circle they're in, is complete. Lee Kang-sheng (apparently a regular in director Tsai's films), playing Xiao-kang the son with the murderous neck pain, was so unbelievably real - so comfortably natural in every scene and situation.

I thought of Jacques Rivette's 1990 "La Belle Noiseuse" which I recently viewed, where Emmanuelle Béart told Michel Piccoli a riddle: "What is something that travels on a hollow track, never sleeps, never goes back?" "It's a river, a stream." It squarely describes this Taipei family of three: the father, the mother, and the son, each are quite lonely by him/herself, leading a hollow existence. You might say 'fate' has a hand in the flow of events: if the son did not casually happen to meet his old girlfriend at the escalators of the mall, leading to his 'extra' actor role of a floating corpse in a movie shoot, when his body being soaked in the river wetness, followed by his riding the scooter with his neck exposed to the breezy wind, hence the chill giving rise to the agonizing neck pain unable to get rid of… As a river has converging tributaries joining its course, we see the father's simultaneous harassing frustration with the non-stop ceiling water leaks in his bedroom - quite a pouring river whenever it rains, plus his unspoken secret; we also get to see the mother's lonely occupation and preoccupation. Like any river, there are unexpected rapids, and the family of three copes. Yes, in Tsai Ming-liang's "The River," the events just happen, and there is no going back - life goes on a-flowing.

There are two other films titled "The River." Jean Renoir's 1951 "The River," a beautiful sensitive film shot in Indian, about three teenage girls growing up in Bengal; Mark Rydell's 1984 "The River" with Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek in a Hollywood 'disaster' save-the-family-farm movie. Tsai's 1997 "The River" may be hard medicine, yet beyond the bitterness, a flavorful taste shall emerge. It's more than thought provoking. To some, I agree, this tastes like a masterpiece.

I have seen three of his movies, and i always got out of the theatre not knowing what to think of it. It is always well films and directed, but the themes he treats are so peculiar.. Once again, the plot is here that of a strange illness, a heavy neckache, that will start everything else. It seems that the boy got it from a polluted river where he shot a scene for a film, but who knows ? it may as well have no origin. But this will lead us into the life of a family, where communication isn't the best. Uncommunicability, strange illness and behavior, leaking roofs, seem to be Ming-liang's obsessions.

Although the first thing that strikes you about 'The River' is its measured pace and relaxed narrative style, you will soon feel yourself giving up the rein to this film that demands respect.

It is a film that documents social decline in the modern world, a kind of alienation and dysfunction that has become a staple of arthouse cinema, and yet treats it with such originality and audacity that it seems brand new all over again. It is the kind of film I like: the kind of film that uses 'dead time', the type pioneered by Antonioni, that establishes the film within a natural context and long takes that never disrupt the time-truth of the images, resulting in film that hardly ever manipulates or patronizes the audience. It relies instead on the understanding that the audience will accept (or possibly relish in) the films distinctly alternative themes and form. Indeed, the film has its flaws, as all films must, but I feel that it is the measured pace that will test most- don't let it! After-all, it is only 114 minutes long.

A film laced with a quite understatement that explodes towards the end in a finale that is, in my viewing experience, un-equaled in its shocking power. Recommended.

There is a great deal about this movie which is going to bother audiences with short attention spans. The director Tsai Ming-Liang has a trademark style that is not to everyone's taste: long, static scenes; no background music; and dark, unsentimental realism. All of these elements are present here as they were in his much better-known film "Vive l'Amour."

As fine as that film was, this one is even finer, and much more harrowing. An aimless young man runs into an old fling who happens to be working on a film set. He goes one day to watch the filming and the director, who is trying to film a scene of a corpse floating down a river, is having trouble with the dummy they're using to play the corpse. The director talks the young man into playing the corpse. He hesitates, as the river is clearly polluted to ridiculously toxic levels, but the desperate director is persuasive enough to convince him that everything is going to be all right as long as he takes a shower afterward.

In the days and weeks that follow, the young man develops a tic that steadily develops into severe spasms and partial paralysis in his neck and shoulder. Director Tsai presumes the audience is intelligent enough to see the connection between the polluted river and the sudden neurological catastrophe, and never makes the cause of the illness explicit.

The young man's life steadily unravels. He goes to Western-style doctors; he goes to Traditional Chinese Medicine practictioners who violently massage him, poke him with needles, force him to consume revolting medicinal broths, and perform various rituals to scare off the evil spirits. Nothing works, many of the healers are quacks, and the hopelessness of his situation settles upon the viewer like a radioactive cloud.

The rest of his family is only slightly better off. His father is a closeted gay who relentlessly cruises and constantly gets rebuffed. His mother, for obvious reasons, is sexually frustrated. They barely know how to communicate with one another and the son's worsening condition merely exacerbates the fissures that already existed in the family. One top of that, their house is leaking water and the ceiling is on the verge of collapse.

There are horror films which frighten us with supernatural forces and crazed psychos, frighten us with things that hardly exist or which most people never encounter, and then there those movies which present the far more terrifying horror of real calamaties that befall real people every day: chronic illness, environmental catastrophe, familial dissolution, hopelessness, depression. Such films are tremendously unpopular for one very simple reason: they tell the truth, a truth which practically everybody would much rather pretend doesn't exist. Even when such disasters are presented to us in film and literature, there is often a tendency to try to soften the blow by sugar-coating it with some kind of hope, redemption, turn-around, religious awakening, catharsis, etc. This film does no such thing: it tells a believable story and follows it through to its logical "conclusion"--the realization that there are some things from which one will never recover, that there are some cases in life where there is no hope. There are very few people who can stomach such a bitter truth, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Only a very brave and talented artist can present a story like this without descending into sentimentality on the one hand, or schadenfreude on the other. Tsai forces us to observe carefully, and observation is the first step on the road to compassion and understanding. He sees the pathos of the situation but also its black irony and humor. What's more, in this little story about a handful of ruined lives, he has found a parable that applies to the larger world, one which forever seems to teeter on the brink of destruction, most of the time at its own hands.

The River was Tsai's third feature film after Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L'Amour. While both films feature many of Tsai's trademarks— including his frequent collaborator Kang-sheng Lee who always plays a character named Hsiao-kang (whether it's the same character is debatable) The River definitely feels the most indicative of the direction that Tsai would go with his next several features, eventually culminating in his masterpiece Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Here Hsiao kang is a young man who lives with his father and mother but almost never communicates with them. One day Hsiao-Kang is asked by a film director to play a floating corpse in a nearby river and, though reluctant, he agrees. Thenceforth he finds himself plagued by a bad neck ("Postmodernity is a Pain in the Neck" as one IMDb review wittily spoke). Though he goes everywhere and tries everything to get relief (hospital, acupuncture, spiritual healer, chiropractor); nothing helps, and his life begins to become unbearable. His parents have problems of their own: his father frequently, but secretly, goes to the local gay bathhouses while his mother is starved for sexual attention. The River contains many of the director's trademarks alluded to above, but it's less rigorously formal than the films that followed. Here, Tsai's camera is still mostly tied to its characters, panning, tilting, moving, tracking to follow them. His long take aesthetic isn't as extreme here either, and while scenes still usually play out in single takes, the scenes aren't quite as elongated. These qualities give The River a looser aesthetic and greater dynamics. Tsai makes excellent, and often quite disturbing, use of juxtaposing short scenes of movement with long scenes of stillness. That stillness is especially potent inside the bathhouses, which are swimming in darkness with just a small light illuminating the bodies of the figures inside. Tsai stays with these sexual encounters for an uncomfortable amount of time, never blinking in order to catch every undulation, every hand movement, every orgasmic exultation. This motif culminates in the film's most devastating scene where father and son accidentally meet in the same bathhouse. The River also marks Tsai's first extended use of his continual visual motif of water, and it's never been more apropos than here. Most crucial is the scene where Hsiao-kang agrees to play a dead body in the local river, but not before stating, "that river's filthy." In his later film, The Wayward Cloud, Tsai used water as a symbol for something organically essential to life. The water shortage in that film, combined with the substitution of watermelon juice, seemed to suggest the substitution of pornography for real human connection. Here, the pollution of water carries the disease that will afflict Hsiao-kang throughout the film. That disease seems to be the erosion of human connection and communication. The fact that Hsiao-kang plays a corpse, floating aimlessly in a polluted river, surrounded by a film crew seems to suggest a multiplicity of artificial layers surrounding individuals, infecting their humanity to its very core. It's telling that Tsai returns to the (rather humorous) image of the leaking roof inside the family's home, tracking their efforts to keep water out by any means necessary. Water is also intricately connected to the film's obsession with sex and bodily fluids considering that the father goes to the bath houses to court his homosexual liaisons. Early in the film a sex scene between Hsiao-kang and an old girlfriend is preceded by her insistence that he turn off the lights and close the windows so she can pee. This early scene itself is connected to the film's opening scene, which features an up-and-down escalator where Hsiao-kang and this girl first pass each other. The encounter is indicative of the film's concern with the autonomous movement and separation of individuals, and is especially funny when Hsiao-kang turns around and tries to go down the up-escalator but finds himself unable to make any progress. Tsai's wickedly biting and absurd humor is pervasive in the film though many seem to miss it, perhaps because of a natural tendency to take such obvious art-films so seriously. One perfect example finds Hsiao-kang's mother giving him an "electric massager" to help ease his neck pain. The next scene finds her alone in her room, watching a porno film and visibly lamenting the lack of her "massager." All of the "healing" scenes take on a kind of satirical quality with Tsai mocking the scam artists who are obviously powerless to help Hsiao-Kang. Another funny scene finds the father riding with Hsiao-Kang, holding his head upright so he can drive his motorbike. If anything saves Tsai from the accusation of artsy-fartsy pretentiousness, it's his sense of humor that suggests he probably doesn't take himself as seriously as his fans do. While The River isn't as "silent" a film as Goodbye, Dragon Inn where Tsai managed to reduce the film's dialogue down to less than 10 lines, it's certainly pointing in that direction. Most of the film's best scenes play without any dialogue, and what dialogue exists seems utterly banal and almost inconsequential. Tsai is already forging his unique visual style, but he hasn't yet achieved that pristine sense of metaphysical mystery that will pervade What Time is it There?, or that sense of architectural abstraction that will pervade Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The River still feels rough and a bit juvenile. Its frames are opaque and muddy, almost echoing the idea of the dirty river itself. But if this isn't Tsai at his most pure or most profound, it's probably Tsai at his most depressively powerful. This is a film that will probably leave you feeling as unclean as that titular river, and it's guaranteed to be a film that will grime and gunk up your subconscious. A perfect 100/100 if not more. Rarely Have I seen a Tsai film (and not to forget Jia ZhangKe too) reveling in mediocrity.