The River

In Taipei a young man plays a corpse floating in a polluted river for a film shoot. The next day an unbearable pain starts in his neck. Hospitals, massage, acupuncture, a temple, none of it helps. In the same flat his mother is seeing another man, his father meets men at bathhouses, and water leaks endlessly through the ceiling. The three live under one roof and barely speak. The subject is not pain but the inability to touch. Water is everywhere: in the river, in the leak, in the steam of the bathhouse. The final scene breaks the family's silence in a way that cannot be repaired, and the film ends after that break without explaining anything. Tsai Ming-liang directed. Lee Kang-sheng has the lead, with Lu Yi-ching as the mother and Miao Tien as the father. The neck pain is not invented. Lee Kang-sheng suffered the same complaint for months, and Tsai wrote it into the script; the actor's own condition was the film's starting point. It won the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1997. Who it is for: anyone who likes Taiwanese cinema built on long static takes, and Tsai. Who it is not for: anyone who wants an easy watch. There is almost no dialogue, the scenes are very long, and the final section is deliberately shattering.