Vive L'Amour

There is a flat for sale in Taipei. Mei, the estate agent, forgets to lock the door. Hsiao-kang finds the key and moves in secretly. Ah-jung arrives with Mei and starts staying there too. Three people live in the same flat and for a long stretch are unaware of each other. The subject is not a triangle but loneliness. The film contains almost no dialogue; people do not talk, they eat, sleep, break something and wait. The city is crowded and the flat is empty, and that emptiness is the whole narration. The form is extremely rigid: long takes, a fixed camera, no music. Tsai Ming-liang keeps the viewer in the scene after the event is over, which makes waiting the material of the film. Its closing is among the most cited long takes in cinema: a woman crying in a park, running for minutes without a cut and without explanation. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kuei-mei and Chen Chao-jung play the three. Who it is for: viewers who like slow cinema and films told without speech. Who it is not for: anyone with limited patience; the narrative is deliberately uneventful and some shots run for minutes.