Tsai Ming-liang’s noir-tinged feature film directorial debut, 1992’s Rebels of the Neon God, emphasizes how the soulless façade of Taipei’s neon-lit modern cool makes young people restless and prone to criminality. His follow-up, 1994’s Vive L’Amour, retains that view of Taiwan’s capital, but it shows the filmmaker moving away from genre trappings toward the minimalist aesthetics that define his later work.
Like a number of Tsai’s films, Vive L’Amour is mostly set in a space that’s both a haven and a prison. Here, that space is a vacant duplex apartment that’s used by a realtor, May Lin (Yang Kuei-mei), for hookups. One night, she enters into a pas de deux on the streets of Taipei with the rakish Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung) and the two head back to the flat. Unbeknownst to them, though, the suicidal Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) is secretly squatting in the apartment. Tsai doesn’t often get credit for his dark sense of humor, but when Hsiao-kang hears May Lin and Ah-jung making love and wanders out into the hallway, his awkward confusion as he’s distracted from his freely bleeding wrist makes for a bleakly funny image.
From here, Vive L’Amour proceeds to tell the story of a love triangle of sorts, though one where the points of that triangle never realize just how exactly they’re connected. Throughout the film, collisions and near misses sometimes play out as pure comedy. Ah-jung also begins squatting inside the central apartment, where he eventually meets Hsiao-kang and berates the man for trying to claim a space that Ah-jung feels that he’s more entitled to use. Meanwhile, May Lin has no clue that either man has taken up occupancy there. Indeed, when she shows up unexpectedly one day, the two men sneak away from her like a pair of teenage delinquents.
With Vive L’Amour, Tsai began to emerge as one of our great poets of modern alienation. A number of his trademarks also appear here for the first time, from long takes that key us to the characters’ torpor to the use of melons by lonely hearts struggling with a powerful sense of sexual displacement. As funny as Vive L’Amour can be, it’s the intense stillness that grips the characters that defines the film. The final scene, a protracted take of May Lin sitting in a park and sobbing freely to herself, is the tacit thesis statement of Tsai’s subsequent career.
Image/Sound
Film Movement’s robust transfer sports healthy grain patterns and rich colors, particularly on the florid, sign-filled streets of Taipei. The dominant palette of blues in nighttime interiors reveals subtle gradations of lighter and darker hues, while object and facial details are sharp throughout. Given the film’s minimal dialogue, the lossless mono track is most notable for how well it distributes ambient city sounds and the purposeful silences of the soundtrack without any extreme discrepancies in volume levels or noise artifacts.
Extras
The disc comes with an interview with Tsai Ming-liang, who talks about how he entered the Taiwanese film industry at its commercial nadir, which perversely helped him as studios were more willing to take a chance on projects like his. He also discusses aspects of Vive L’Amour’s production, such as Yang Kuei-mei not being the original lead actress and how their initial friction over his methods blossomed into a long-lasting collaboration. In an accompanying booklet essay, critic Nick Pinkerton zeroes in on the way the film cements Tsai’s mastery of conveying the longings—romantic, existential, and otherwise—of his characters.
Overall
Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting, bleakly comic sophomore film, Vive L’Amour, receives a starkly beautiful transfer from Film Movement.
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