Goodbye, Dragon Inn

At the risk of coming on too strong, I think the other posters here who disliked this film were idiots. True, Good-bye Dragon Inn is EXTREMELY slow. Almost nothing happens in the film. Nonetheless, it is truly excellent. A great, subtle ghost story...

It's especially good if you have ever been to any of the big, old, concrete movie theaters in Asia... Theaters that are now being totally replaced by multiplexes.

Good-bye Dragon Inn is basically a poem to the old cinema culture of Asia. I have great memories of going to those huge, decaying movie theaters... in summer to escape the heat... during the rainy season, when the sound of the rain almost drowned out the film itself. Great stuff.

It has been nearly two weeks since I saw Bu jian bu san (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and I still can't get some of the images out of my mind. This is partly due to the fact that the director (Ming- liang Tsai) holds onto an image, a scene, long after, or before any action occurs. In doing so he insists the viewer bear witness to its own self re-presentation in the form of characters in a film they are watching.

Two of the finest moments in the film are moments where the camera is pointed back towards the mostly empty chairs of the cinema itself. In one, an actor who appeared in the original kung-fu film Dragon Inn watches a scene from the original. As the camera settles on his face, we are pulled ever closer, listening to the original's soundtrack while watching the actor as a receptive viewer. We are watching the emotions of time and change develop on his face. Finally, with his face in extreme close-up and the water glistening in his eyes with the film's light reflecting in them a single tear falls down his cheek.

Near the end of the film as the old classic has ended the camera is again pointed to the empty chairs of the cinema. There is no one there, then on the far side of the frame the ticket woman enters with bucket and mop. She walks across, up the stairs, back down and out the left side of the screen, literally walking off the frame as the camera remains motionless. He holds this shot for what many will argue is an interminable time. But he wants you to really take in this shot, consider what you are witness of, think about your own place now, viewing a film.

There is far more to this film than just these two scenes. They just exemplify the kind of artful ways this film explores the nature of action and reaction. What adds to this already complex and studied examination of cinema and the cinema viewing experience is the exquisite cinematography done by Ben-Bong Liao. If you love film, especially film that asks you to fully participate in the moment, then find a screening of this film and get lost in it.

If you've read the other reviews, you know what you're in for. Don't worry about spoilers (none here, but don't worry about others'), because not much happens in the movie. Tsai paints his movies at the speed of Michelangelo painting a ceiling--no, he unreels them at the speed of the epic that's played this old movie house a thousand times. As in other Tsai movies, the colors are rich, and even the starkest images are carefully composed, allowing the film to convey the full depth of feelings.

That's what this movie does. It doesn't tell a story, really, but conveys what it's like to walk along empty city streets on a rainy night, alone. And what it's like to be in a dying old movie palace. The community that has outgrown the old Fu Ho cinema seems to tell its patrons, its employees, and even the building itself that all of them really ought to be somewhere else. But there they are, where they need to be, for the last show.

The movie's point of view is variously that of the young limping woman, the Japanese kid, and the old actors, but ultimately, Tsai tells the story from the theater's point of view, as if he interviewed it Tsai-style, pointing the camera at it and letting the theater speak at its edificial pace. You feel all that it's seen and sees, every day. It's as if the theater knows it's done for, resigned to its fate, not yet ready to die, too tired to fight.

It doesn't matter that the theater is in Taipei. Anyone who had a special place for movies, especially if it's gone, will be able to see that theater in the Fu Ho. I thought of my last visits to Seattle's Coliseum, King and United Artists theaters, and how they clung to life in their final days. All of them could seat hundreds of patrons, maybe a thousand even, and I never once saw them close to filled. The King is now a megachurch, the Coliseum is a Banana Republic, and the UA is dust, with the marquee sign marking its grave. The movies that played there live on in DVDs and shoebox megaplexes, but their days of playing in grand auditoria to great audiences are largely gone. How can "Lawrence of Arabia" be "Lawrence" in a shoebox, or on any CRT or LCD screen?

Norma Desmond told us about the pictures getting smaller. Tsai warns us that the last days of the big screen are here, and that the credits are rolling. Many loved the old moviehouses in their grand glory days, but in "Goodbye Dragon Inn," Tsai shows the beauty of the big theaters as their curtains slowly fall.

I particularly value what is often advertised as 'meditational' films. Visual mantras that demand stillness of mind and concentrated observation. But, although they have proliferated over the last 15 years, so few get the experience right, which seems to be the result of a younger generation of filmmakers who have merely studied the command Tarkovsky or Antonioni had over their camera but not the truthful seeing.

Tarkovsky and Antonioni swam in polar extremes of the same flow; inside and outside. The experience is the same. We flow with them to the place where we can get in-sight of what it means to flow in our world. In Solyaris, we flow inside the mind where our images are born. In The Passenger we flow outside self and identity into a liberating awareness of the world as is.

This could've been something special in this regard because there's a film-within to flow into from the one we are watching. But it never happens.

The two levels are not conjoined into a larger narrative, but rather contrasted. Inside the film the audience is watching (King Hu's Dragon Inn from the golden years of wuxia), the characters are free, passionate, filled with an ardor of life. Rigid hierarchies of clan or dynasty imply a comforting plan in this fictional life. Outside the film, life is a murk, a haunting of anonymous souls. The crippled girl is always struggling to get somewhere, up a flight of stairs or down the corridor. The Japanese guy is always constricted by indifferent strangers. Both their efforts inside the theater are with the sole end of watching the movie, the place where seems to be some purpose and things make some sense.

So, inside the preordained world of fiction the characters are strangely free, while the reality of ostensibly myriad possibilities is shown to be thoroughly aimless.

Being an art piece (what dreary connotations, no?), we get all these as elongated stanzas. We literally watch the crippled woman walk all the way up. It works barely enough to resonate with the ideas mentioned above, but it's very little for a feature film, very hollow. The few ideas here rattle in so much emptiness. Whereas in a Kiarostami film this elongated observation teems with life, here it is stylized to the point of a trinket that is perhaps pleasing to the eye but lifeless.

If you simply want to see a love letter to movies and movie- watching, seek out the Chacun sons Cinema compilation. Almost all the films are better than this, and they're all shorts. I have particularly fond memories of Andrei Konchalovsky's entry, Dans le Noir, which also takes place inside a cinema.

Tsai Ming Liang's recent piece "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" (Bu San) is a film chock full of beautiful color and rich, textured moods. It features the characteristic pacing of Taiwanese film, and it is composed of shot upon remarkable shot of a crumbling movie theatre in its final days, playing the last runs of "Dragon Gate Inn", a martial art classic Dir. by King Hu. Some of the stark imagery lingers, and it is just the pure action of the actors (there is no dialogue in the film for the first 45 minutes) that makes the film a profound stylistic achievement. There are some appearances by the original actors of The Dragon Gate Inn film (Tien Miao, for one); and Tsai Ming Liang's favorite actor Lee-Kang Sheng shows up at the end as the film projectionist. There's also a fine performance by Chen Shiang-chyi, who plays the limping "heroine" of the film, if such a thing exists in this movie. A great film overall, and a cinematic work that tries to say a very heartfelt and melancholic "goodbye" to not only "Dragon Gate Inn", but also to the old cultural and historical values that are perhaps beginning to fade in Taiwan.