Help Me, Eros

In a big city it is easy to become a number, unknown too all but one self. This film shows the tale of a trader that lives such a life, down on himself and a phone helpline when he is in trouble.

Filled with additives like weed and graphic sex this slow film offers a clear picture of the desolation that is called loneliness but unfortunately it also manages to show the picture of boredom. Slowness in a film isn't bad but there is a thing called "too slow" and this one is just that. Events could have been packed in 30 minutes less and then the pace would have been high enough to make it interesting but this is just too much symbolism and sticking to scenes to express points that were already clear minutes earlier.

Nice imagery, some of it very nice, I will have to admit. Strong expressive film making, I will admit that too. But just stretched out far too long and therefore calling on boredom and even irritation more than on anything else.

4 out of 10 potheads blazing

I watched this film in a packed auditorium at the 2008 Istanbul International Film Festival, and what amazed me was that there was not a single audible laugh throughout the entire thing. The reason this was amazing is that the movie is, in parts, truly hilarious. Perhaps because the feel and movement of the production is so realistic, and there are long sequences of no dialogue, the audience didn't know what it was watching. Also, because the movie has a lot of fairly explicit sex scenes and lots of marijuana smoking, some people were likely shocked. On one side of me sat a middle-aged woman who was evidently there with her daughter. The woman shook her head and put her hand to her mouth several times, and might have got up to leave if she hadn't had to climb over several laps to get out.

The story follows a pot-smoking protagonist who has apparently fallen on hard times recently. He lives in a multi-floor apartment in Taipei that must be rather grand by the standards of Taiwan, but he's lost a lot of money in the stock market and now has to start selling his household goods to finance his pot habit. He's a small man in his mid- to late-thirties', and his girlfriend has recently left him. A few of the scenes of him stoned at home by himself are very funny. In one scene he is talking to (presumably) his ex-girlfriend on the phone while a kettle is boiling. He keeps walking back into the kitchen to take the kettle off the range and make it stop whistling, then going back in and putting it back on the burner, clearly having just forgotten why he took it off in the first place. People who have never experienced the effects of marijuana will not understand the humor, probably. In another scene he's watching a program on TV in which a fish is being prepared for some kind of traditional dish. The fish is scaled and gutted but is somehow still alive when served on the plate (a 'delicacy'). You can see the fish's mouth opening and closing in an obscene gaping motion, as our hero clutches a pillow and stares horrified and motionless at the screen.

He has an instant messenger chat partner he has never met. His chat name is "Marihuana is God," hers is "Little Cookie." Little Cookie is one of the main characters but she is fat, largely because her husband—evidently a professional cook—cooks sumptuous dishes for her all the time at home. He long ago lost interest in her physically, and when a male guest comes to stay, she understands that the two of them are carrying on together. She develops an online attachment to Marihuana is God, but the protagonist is busy luring young, attractive hookers to his apartment, getting them stoned, and having gangbangs with them. One of the hookers actually starts to become attached to him, then is heartbroken when he only cares about getting stoned and having it off with any of the girls at the "hooker depot" where he originally picked her up.

The value of this film, which is not high, is that it gives a vision of Taipei street life: strange, brightly-lit little kiosk-type shops where escort girls in see-thru skirts and hooker outfits sell cigarettes and other conveniences all night; credit hotline agencies where row upon row of girls in cubicles answer calls from the hordes of debtors in Taiwanese society; vans with screens on three sides broadcasting lottery news and results. It is ultimately a highly depressing image but it nevertheless feels real in its nihilism, and its examination of how debts and gambling affect Oriental societies more severely than Western ones. For anyone who wants a look at Taipei, this is worth a look. Otherwise this movie is just another post-post-modern slice of super-depression, depression that is not negated by all the laughs.

Lee Kang-Sheng's measured somnambulism arrives as a sexual novelty sapped of eroticism, settles in like a lingering fever dream of aggressive imagery and departs as an affecting malaise, deepening with its pervasive languor. Writer-director Lee's second film under the apprenticeship of his mentor and producer, Tsai Ming-liang, is one of similar phases and concepts – city isolation, sexual disengagement, spiritual disenchantment, deprivation and drollness. They are also decorated with similar technical approaches typified by a slow-burning static camera, recurring motifs and intense flourishes of non-verbal actions that shock, awe and delight.

But where Tsai's films revel in their metaphoric absences, Lee dwells on superficial excesses in "Help Me Eros". Through a methodical deconstruction of role-playing, desire, delusion and despair, Lee finds absurdity in its most raw and indecent. Taipei's neon-lit streets feel alive yet infected with rot, jangling with vociferousness and temptations with the city's glaring financial risks find salience in the hawking of promises rooted in sexual satisfactions and instant reverie. The mutual nihilism of the city and its decay is seen through an uprooted yuppie, Ah Jie (Lee), once a successful stock trader fell by a bad exchange and now living precariously by pawning his things while crossing and using his repossessed apartment and car.

Ah Jie lives the remainder of his previous life indulging in sexual fantasy and wanton marijuana use that he grows in his closet. Having fallen out of society, desperately in need of validation, calls a suicide hotline and becomes infatuated by the woman who talks to him. The woman, an overweight and depressed Chyi (Jane Liao), forms the film's sadder, parallel story of a deaden society's need to feel something – anything – to prove that it is still alive. This is where genuine humanity can be sensed behind the lens and through the film's pro forma gratuitously explicit scenes. Ah Jie pursues this joyless tract through acrobatic encounters with scantily clad, drug chasing betelnut salesgirls. The difference lies in the former's need for physical intimacy and the latter's pursuit of ritualistic depersonalisation.

With "Help Me Eros", Lee trades on Tsai's (serving as the set designer) art-house stock here for an appreciate core audience, but the film is bold and intriguing in its own right. The approach remains Tsai's but its glorious conflagration of striking aesthetics and insistent contemplations feel almost quaint and altogether poignant.

If one has seen films made by Tsai Ming-Liang, one would recognize Lee Kang Sheng, the actor and director of Help Me Eros, as he is the main character in all his films. Thus, it is no surprise that Help Me Eros feels like an extension of Tsai's films, as it mimics his style and atmosphere. Sadly, Lee Kang Sheng has not learned his mentor's directing touch. As a result, his work becomes a muddling piece of junk and I consider it a complete failure.

In Help Me Eros, the film opens with a memorable opening scene, similar to Tsai's films, and appears to head in a promising direction. However, by the end of the film, the film bored me to death, as I struggle to finish the film, and I ask the question: Is this an art film, or a soft-core porn film? Even though its style is reminiscent of an art film, the director is unable to convey a message to the audience. At the same time, although the explicit sex scenes definitely belongs to the porn film category, they do not go far enough. Instead, they become out-of-place and unnecessary. Help Me Eros, in the end, is a hybrid soft-core porn and art film. Sadly, the result fails to deliver the mystique of either an art film or the "satisfaction" and "fulfillment" one get from a porn film. It is just a messy piece of work.

There is absolutely no point to this film. Don't bother with this film. Check out Tsai Ming-Liang's films instead.

Gorgeous. I was just expecting more Tsai Ming Liang super-freaky alienation porn, full of campy soul music interjections, but this was surprisingly emotional and ethereal. Unlike Antonini and even Tsai (his mentor) actor turned director Kang-sheng Lee understands expressing alienation doesn't mean every environment must be cold, dreary, and colorless. The world of "Help Me Eros" is neon lit from start to finish like a minimalist version of Coppola's "One From The Heart" with every frame worthy of being hung in a museum. The bright colors of Lee's world are indeed beautiful but they create a fake rainbow, like the manufactured brightness of a red-light district.

A stockbroker lost all of his money for reasons that are never disclosed, sits in his apartment "Leaving Los Vegas" style watching his world fall apart one trip to the pawn shop at a time. He smokes joints constantly and tends his marijuana plants growing his closet, the only living things in his apartment. He calls a suicide hotline, where he has feelings and fantasies for a specific operator and the two begin communicating via email.

This woman and her life with her chef husband who feeds her exotic animals like Ostrich and Eel to distract her from their non-existent sex life, forms the main sub-plot as these two lonely souls seek connection. In between this our hero falls in lust with several girls who sell some kind of nuts outside of his building in enticing outfits to attract repeat clients/johns. There are two sex scenes, neither as graphic or as numerous as Wayward Cloud's or Nine Song's, and both arising within a context of the story, not as just a rhythmic "device" or stylistic detour. The music far from being inorganic to the script, is pulsating electronic or soothingly acoustic and vulnerable, each underscoring the specific emotions of longing, regret, exhilaration, and emptiness that the rest of the film echoes.

Shots of standing in a moving car through the sun roof as the city flood by in a blur, of beautiful Tai girls lounging around a neon lobby like cat's on a hot day, and a disturbing but tasteful bathtub full of eels, linger and don't dislodge themselves from memory easily. Kang-sheng Lee's themes are not original, but his delivery is immaculate, his fantasies genuinely erotic(something Tsai's stilted humping though more naturalistic rarely achieves, or seeks to), and his art design courteousy of Tsai himself, a joy for the eyes.

Searching for affection and finding only sex, waiting for the sun and seeing only halogen and strobe, sitting in a deserted cafe in front of a River called "Love River"(according to an observant IMDb writer from Indonesia) and trying not to appear lonely, have rarely seemed so convincing or heartfelt. Like Movern Callar, the film is not the plot, but the sensual accumulations of sights and sounds, that drown the viewer like a warm bath. Dryly deadpan, minimal dialog, glowing with life, and cinematic daring, "Help Me Eros", would along with "Wayward Cloud" serve as perfect introductions to Taiwan's burgeoning avant garde aesthetics, which if you are not familiar with you need to see for yourself.