Tsai Ming Liang’s Movies: Inside The Dark

 

Tsai Ming Liang’s Movies: Inside The Dark

Mousumi Bilkis

Tsai Ming Liang’s characters are always trapped. They are covered by a dark shadow. A sad tune dominates his each and every film. He portrays alienation, inner sadness, complicated relations and struggle for existence. He focuses on the dark crudity of urban life. His story telling technique is completely different from the Hollywood. In most of his movies he does not follow the western rules of drama structure. There are melodramatic events in his films, but he tells the story of life as it goes in reality. Sometimes the reality mixes up with the surreal.

                                                                

• Tsai is not in a hurry. Most of the time, the camera is fixed with a normal lens and characters are moving, very slowly changing their positions or doing some actions. The shots are long, even more than thirty seconds. The duration is really long for a moving image. It’s like there is no oxygen to breath which is the final destiny of his characters. The audience get an uncanny feeling almost without catharsis.    
• A young girl works as a nurse of a man who is in comma and she lives in a tiny airless place. Her face is pale, her eyes are hopeless and her hands have lost softness. She touches the senseless man every day and gets lost in the sensuality of the first touch of a lover. The wife of the ill man is well dressed with huge make up but is exhausted without any man in her life. I’m talking about ‘I don’t want to sleep alone’. There is a Bengali working class man from Bangladesh who cares for an ill man and gets involved with him emotionally.

                                                                             

                                                 A scene from 'Goodbye Dragon Inn'

• In ‘Goodbye Dragon Inn’ a lady struggles throughout the film with her uneven legs. She searches for the projectionist & never finds him. Meanwhile, the projectionist checks his future with a print out from a machine. Inside a theatre which is about to close, a film from sixties ‘Dragon Inn’ by King Hu is being screened. There is little audience, but a number of incidents are continuously happening between them. The haunted theatre and the characters are struggling for their existence. The light scheme and the set décor of the film also lead to sadness.

                                                                        

• Tsai’s ‘The Wayward Cloud’ does the same. There is water crisis throughout a city. The crisis is so acute that a porn actor doesn’t get water to wash him after a sticky bed scene. Television channels have launched a ‘drink water melon juice campaign’ to combat the situation. The porn actor is fed up of having sex and avoids intimacy with girls in real life. But he meets a lonely girl by chance. She aggressively falls in love for him. Then they rush towards a bizarre tragic end.

                                                               

                                                     A scene from ‘Journey to the West’ 

• In the movie ‘Face’ everybody is trapped. A lady is literally trapped within her huge costume and struggles to be free. A monk is walking very slowly throughout the film ‘Journey to the West’.

Tsai stands alone amid the glossy world of films with the darkness, his style.  

                                                                      

                                                             Tsai Ming Liang 

Courtesy: Stills from internet sources.