User Reviews

In Taipei, a middle-aged real estate agent, May Lin (Yang-kuei Mei), goes about her daily routine of putting up signs, inviting potential customers to an open house, then sitting and waiting for them in empty apartments as the hours drag by. Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour is an honest and beautiful film about three lonely people whose lives become inextricably bound in a chance encounter. Dialogue is minimal and no one speaks for the first twenty-five minutes, creating a pervasive tone of emotional numbness. Hsiao-kang (Kang-sheng Lee), a young gay man who sells wall space for burials, soon finds the key to an apartment being shown by May Lin and moves in, taking a bath, getting dressed, then almost matter of factly cutting his wrists with a pocket knife.

When May Lin meets Ah-jung (Chao-jung Chen) a slick street vendor of women's clothes during a lunch break, they coyly size each other up, then use the apartment for casual sex. Ah-jung, unaware of Hsiao-Kang's presence, takes the key from May Lin and also moves in. The characters live an existence surrounded by silence, unwilling or unable to reach out to each other, living in the empty spaces. They spend their time aimlessly, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, and just watching the time pass without any apparent connection to the teeming city they live in. Ming-liang's camera views the characters from a distance, at times simply watching them for minutes at a time go through a period of silent suffering. One of the most heartbreaking scenes is when Hsiao-Kang hugs and kisses a watermelon as if it were the responsive companion he so desperately needs.

When May Lin comes to the apartment to rest, the two clandestine guests forge an alliance to avoid being seen. In an unforgettable sequence, Hsiao-Kang hides under the bed masturbating while May and Ah-jung make love directly on top. After May leaves, the young man crawls into bed with the sleeping Ah-jung and creeps his way inch by inch toward the sleeping man in a scene of heartbreaking loneliness and conflicted emotions. The film ends in a five-minute close up of one of the characters sitting alone in a newly-opened park that made me reflect on similar periods of loneliness in my own life. It also caused me to wonder if our modern cities have become little more than sanctuaries for the walking dead where everyone is a stranger, crossing paths in silence without a hint of recognition of a common humanity.

I enjoy a good, slow-moving drama. Christmas In August, Chungking Express, Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, The Way Home, Springtime in a Small Town, Hana bi, Eat Drink Man Woman, Dolls, In the Mood for Love, and Spring Summer Fall Winter Spring are all enjoyable films – just to name a few.

Unfortunately, there is a subset of films within the drama genre that attempt to ride the coattails of good films while providing nothing of interest themselves. These are what I call IAN films – "Incomprehensible Artistic Nonsense." Tsai Ming-liang is the king of this subgenre, and Vive L'Amour is his "masterpiece." In fact, this is the crème de la crème of crap-infested garbage under the guise of "art." People walk around in their apartments, drink water, stroll back and forth waiting for pay phones to become vacant, hang posters, staple papers together, go to the bathroom, eat, do pushups, have sex, slap at mosquitoes, etc. I'm not joking when I say that is an accurate synopsis of the entire film, which is the quintessential posterchild for pointless art-house trash. There is no plot, no storyline, no interesting or noteworthy events, no emotion, no meaningful dialogue, and most importantly – no drama.

The most eventful scene has two people "banging" on a bed with a person masturbating underneath the mattress – ironic that it's also totally tasteless and gratuitous. The relationship of the characters on the bed is practically non-existent. Tsai apparently didn't feel like communicating anything to the viewer regarding these people other than the obvious fact that they like to "bang." The person under the bed is just as one-dimensional and uninteresting. He likes to drink water, makeout with melons, and stroke himself. This is Tsai's idea of "character development." A truly misguided "entertainer" indeed.

Tsai's true contribution in Vive L'Amour is perhaps the most atrocious scene in art-house film history. He first shows the lead actress walk all the way from one end of a park to the other for 285 consecutive seconds, only to then show her cry hysterically – for absolutely no reason whatsoever – for another 356 consecutive seconds. The film then abruptly ends. No point. No entertainment. Just pure, concentrated torture inflicted on the viewer.

In an effort to beat a dead horse. The underlying theme of loneliness is mishandled so greatly that the only true feeling of this film is that of boredom. In fact, Kiyoshi Kurosawa provides a much better exposition on loneliness in his horror film Kairo. And guess what? It's actually INTERESTING! That film moved as slow as molasses in January, but there are better ways of addressing the concept of loneliness than the utter waste known as Vive L'Amour. Kairo is a perfect example of that.

Fans of cinema may thank Tsai Ming-liang for directing this film, as he has provided irrefutable evidence that art-house cinema can be just as poorly made as B-grade, made-for-television horror flicks. Art-house snobs have now officially lost their pedestal of self-righteousness. The quality level of your precious genre now overlaps films like Army of Darkness and – gasp! – Showgirls. How do you like them apples?