Message from smilanick

[Anonymous]

Note to self: actually read the back summary of the movie before renting it and not rely on a good DVD cover with no rating. This is the latest installment of a Chinese movie I viewed and it is without a doubt the most bizarre and sick film I’ve seen in a long time. I would never show this to students or subject anyone I know to watching it. The River, a film by Tsai Ming-Liang follows a weird family that lives in Taipei, the son who apparently contracts some excruciating neck condition after playing a floating dead body in a movie that was being filmed. This event lasted all of 1 minute. The mother and father sleep in separate bedrooms and you later learn that she is dating a porno distributor and the father frequents homosexual bathhouses. The are generally always eating some sort of take-out food and the apartment appears not to have a real kitchen.

I’ll spare all the twisted weird details. Unlike other Chinese films I’ve seen this one did not have the aesthetic beauty and cool camera angles. It actually had these long drawn out shots that lasted to long and made the film just drag on. But perhaps the director did this on purpose to show how drawn out and painful their lives are. As with the other film I saw which took place in Taipei, there was very little dialogue, but unlike it no visual eye candy.