Reviews
Hei yan quan (2006)
Definitely not life-altering
Honestly, I can't bring myself to like this movie, though I've to admit that the cinematography is gorgeous, and Lee Kang-sheng was very believable as the brain-dead patient. Many of the long, static scenes, especially the ones with the dark pool and the brain-dead patient with his urine bag, are completely pointless, and the scene with the lady boss masturbating the brain- dead man with Chen Xiang-chyi's hand filled me with disgust. I know it is a film that can't be judged by normal standards, but what's disgusting is disgusting, whether it's in the name of art or whatever. I really don't understand what kind of message Tsai Ming-liang was trying to convey in many of the scenes, and I doubt whether he himself knew what he was doing. Most of the time it just seems like a hodgepodge of random (and meaningless) ideas pieced together. OK, it's made by an auteur and it's supposed (or I should say, normal?) to be so, but it's definitely not what we called good story-telling. The relationships depicted here are so unclear (there's nothing apart from lust), and I find the characters (except the one played by Norman Atun) hard to sympathize with. The healthy Lee Kang-sheng was a dreadful hypocrite (not to mention being an ungrateful bastard), and the other two women are just soulless, sexually dissatisfied characters that afford some erotic excitement in the movie.