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| Director Tsai Ming-liang |
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| Lee Kang-shen with the director |
REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (Qing shao nian nuo zha) B+ Taiwan (109 mi) 1992
Do you have nothing better to do with yourself? —Mother (Lu Hsiao-ling)
In the eighties and early nineties Taiwan witnessed an unprecedented cinematic portrayal of the contemporary urban sensibility, perhaps best reflected by Edward Yang’s modernist exploration of the alienation of the individual in the barren urban landscape of contemporary society, with his films emphasizing psychological complexity, That Day, On the Beach (Hai tan de yi tian) (1983), Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma) (1985), The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986), and A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), or the adolescent street gangs of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s autobiographical A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), yet also the hauntingly quiet poetry of Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986). At the time, government film grants allowed budding directors like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien to get their start, creating the Taiwan New Wave, breaking away from locally made melodramas or kung fu movies in favor of location shooting, long takes, and deliberate editing to reflect the rapidly changing world around them. Born in Malaysia, having moved around from school to school, typically the kid nobody wanted to talk to, finding it difficult to make new friends, Tsai moved to Taiwan in 1977 at the age of 20 to discover an emerging generation in the thrall of Western values, where the soaring high- tech economic growth drove people to the cities, creating a society filled with contradictions in a clash between the old and the new, enrolling in Taipei’s Chinese Culture University, majoring in Dramatic Art, where he was exposed to European art cinema, including the aesthetics of Truffaut, Antonioni, Bresson, and Fassbinder. After writing and directing several plays, Tsai went on to work in television, where it was during the making of The Kid, a 1991 TV film, when he was scouting for an actor that he encountered Lee Kang-sheng, who would eventually star in every single one of his feature films. Writing his own scripts, Tsai’s characters are trapped in the banality of their existence, desperately trying to overcome their loneliness and inability to connect with others, making films that are distinctive in capturing the absurd frustrations and numbness of urban alienation, using long silences and almost no camera movement, eloquently shot by Liao Pen-jung, Tsai’s longtime collaborator, where his aesthetic is essentially minimalist and existentialist to the core. In a strange twist of fate, this film was not released in America until 23 years after it was made, digitally restored as part of a traveling retrospective assembled only after the critical success of Stray Dogs (Jiao you) (2013). The words Tsai Ming-liang and realistic action adventure wouldn’t usually be found in the same sentence, much less the same movie, instead we’d expect to see melancholic actor Lee Kang-sheng barely uttering a word, along with deluges of rain, a love for old style movie theaters, an uncommon interest in sex, the inside of the exact same apartments featuring a familiar rice pot on the table, in this case either his own or his sister’s apartment, and plenty of long slow takes, occasionally leading to an offbeat punch line, most often expressed through Tati or Chaplinesque silent film era sight gags. Unlike his Taiwanese compatriots Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang who thrive on narrative detachment, Tsai’s films possess near perfect comic timing, not afraid to spend minutes setting up a single laugh. This film actually foreshadows by a decade Jia Zhang-ke’s UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002), as both are unflinching looks at alienated youth, one in Datong, a large city in the northern Shanxi province in China, almost to Inner Mongolia, the other in the bustling city of Taipei, both shot in near documentary form, featuring plenty of long tracking shots of excitable kids on motorbikes frenetically exploring their individual freedom only to discover their own restless energy turning against themselves, as there’s little hope for the future.
After an amusing opening that oddly enough involves a mathematics compass and a cockroach, REBELS follows the exploits of two petty criminals Ah-tze and Ah-ping, Chen Chao-jung and Jen Chang-ben, who are seen expertly looting the cash boxes from several telephone booths before spending their idle time in a video arcade where Lee Kang-sheng by chance happens to notice them. This is ironic, as that’s exactly how Tsai met Lee Kang-sheng, the phenomenally gifted non-professional actor who would not only become the camera’s focus for the rest of his career, but he would come to define Tsai’s work in the same way Jean-Pierre Léaud was associated with the work of Truffaut in the 60’s and early 70’s. What immediately stands out is the depiction of urban malaise, where globalization has created small cracks for those living on the fringes of society, where we see parked scooters bordering the busy streets, and narrow lanes jam-packed with food stalls and hawkers selling their wares, with giant billboards advertising various products, as people must compete within this congestion for every little ounce of space. Shot in the Southwest section of the city known as the West Gate District, the seedy neighborhood where Tsai lived as a student when he came to Taipei, so it has some personal significance, as it was known as a teenage district, the center of Taiwan cinema, with as many as 37 theaters clustered into the compact neighborhood in the early 90’s, becoming the neighborhood where he was introduced to world cinema. At the time of the shoot, it was an old, run down, and crowded neighborhood under construction that has now been transformed into a worldwide shopping district, attracting more than 3 million shoppers per month, turned into a pedestrian area where vehicles are prohibited on weekends and holidays, where the film is an homage to the neighborhood’s nostalgic history. Focusing on the details of daily habits, offering insight into the lives of listless young men in crumbling inner cities, Tsai’s characters are often engaged in trivial jobs that hold little meaning, giving rise to petty thieves who prey on the periphery. Not only are there several quick cuts of bored teenagers dangling cigarettes out of their mouths, also (drawing from Hollywood) an image of Lee standing in front of an iconic movie poster of James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) which looms above him at the video arcade (though his character is more akin to Sal Mineo’s Plato), but there’s a pulsating, bass heavy musical soundtrack by Huang Shu-jun, the only canned music in any of his films, used quite effectively here as it matches the portrait of Taipei as a dingy, neon-lit wasteland, Tsai Ming-liang - Rebels of the Neon God 1992 YouTube (1:19), where disconnected relationships are short-lived and pointless, and meaningless violence can erupt at any minute over the least provocation. Of course there’s a girl, Ah-kuei (Wang Yu-wen), the bored, yet hot to trot, short-skirted, roller rink attendant who tightens skates with a few pounds of a hammer, who flirtatiously tries to interest Ah-tze, but nothing holds his attention for long as his mind wanders with that typical male urban syndrome common in video arcades known as attention deficit disorder. It’s amazing the girl gives these creeps the time of day, but she keeps coming back for more. Lee Kang-sheng as Hsiao-kang hatches his own interest in them after witnessing Ah-tze brazenly destroy his father’s outside cab mirror with a tire iron, a senseless act that does get to the heart of what this film is about, a lifetime of a neverending series of senseless acts.
In preparation to taking the standardized college entrance exams, Lee drops out of cram school and pockets the refunded tuition money, leaving his parents who paid for it outraged, knowing where reckless irresponsible acts will lead him, especially when his mother, invoking her folk beliefs, thinks he’s been infected by an evil spirit, describing him as the “reincarnation of the Neon God.” About the same age as Ah-tze, Lee is drawn to him, shadowing his every move, as their lives mirror one another, often seen paired together in parallel shots making identical gestures, and while they lead very different lives, it’s clear the aimlessness and uncertainty of their futures are connected in this study of disaffected Taipei youth, offering insight into the lives of lost young men living in urban wastelands. While Lee is physically and psychologically confined to a tiny room in his parent’s home, subject to their rules and jurisdiction, Ah-tze has apparent mobility and freedom to go where he pleases, yet it’s largely symbolic, as both move in restricted space that can feel suffocating. The audiences in Tsai’s films are able to see things the characters can’t, as they’re too busy occupying the cramped space they live in, while viewers sitting at a distance who have the opportunity to observe what happens within that space. Using an anti-narrative technique, feeling more like various slices of life episodes strewn together, the film explores how Lee attempts to push the boundaries of his physical constrictions, using a carefully choreographed visual design where the paths of two characters are constantly crisscrossing, Rebels of the Neon God (1992) - MEETING YouTube (1:39). Ah-tze’s apartment continually floods with sewage water backing up from the drain, one of Tsai’s most common themes, where throughout the film he amusingly sloshes his way through the water which has a mirror-like reflection on the ceiling. When he does a good deed, the water mysteriously flows back down the drain, but don’t expect that condition to last long. The kinetic energy in this film is highly unusual for Tsai, a style he’s never returned to, instead becoming enamored with extended takes, but really the movie is a mysterious interconnection of several different Taipei-based storylines, the two goofs and a girl, rounds of casual sex, an elevator that always stops on the wrong floor, a dysfunctional family unit that never once feels like home, and Lee Kang-sheng slowly exacting his revenge, trashing Ah-tze’s scooter, cutting the seat and tires, spray painting AIDS on the side, while pouring glue into the ignition switch, which brings him a moment of temporary ecstasy, but ultimately a profound sadness at the realization of just how aloof and isolated he is from anyone else’s life, which is the true nature of any Lee Kang-sheng character. The real irony here is that the two goofs have a love interest, someone who actually wants to love them, but their hedonistic, self-centered lives leave them no place for love, so they casually throw it all away as if it were worthless, replaceable parts. This single act of throwing away what is most meaningful in life is similarly reflected back in all the less significant instances when they’ve done exactly the same thing, where the totality of arrogant disregard and nonchalance leaves them with no meaningful connections in the future.
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