Director: Ming-liang Tsai
Writers: Sung Hsi, Ming-liang Tsai
Photography: Pen-Jung Liao
Music: Yao Lee
Editor: Sheng-Chang Chen
Cast: Kiyonobu Mitamura, Shiang-chyi Chen, Kang-sheng Lee, Kuei-Mei Yang, Chao-jung Chen
In the Sight & Sound poll conducted every 10 years to ascertain a ranking, according to various cineaste pooh-bahs, of the greatest films ever made, Taiwanese director and cowriter Ming-liang Tsai has some reputation for voting for his own Goodbye, Dragon Inn, along with such usual suspects as Sunrise, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Night of the Hunter. In the latest results of the survey from last year, enough others followed suit to push this exemplar of “slow cinema” into a six-way tie for #108 (with Bringing Up Baby, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Touch of Evil, Wild Strawberries, and The Wizard of Oz). Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a weird one by anyone’s standard, practically guaranteed to test patience even at a relatively tidy 82 minutes. With some eight total lines of dialogue, it may be the longest 82 minutes of your life. It is exasperating, frustrating, and confusing, but also mesmerizing, and not without rewards. I often realize later that slow cinema has burned the images into my retina.
The premise is that a theater in Taipei is closing down and showing the 1967 martial arts picture Dragon Inn as its last show. At the beginning of Goodbye, it seems to be a fairly full house. But during the movie the theater is more often close to empty, sparsely populated by sentimental original players from the 1967 movie on the one hand, and people who seem to be cruising for sex on the other. By the end of what feels like a typical night for everyone involved, I start to wonder if this was really the last screening at that theater forever, or just the last screening of the night. There’s little sense of finality—more like just another slow night in a theater that admittedly doesn’t seem destined, in the fullness of time, to make it as a business enterprise.
In the Sight & Sound poll conducted every 10 years to ascertain a ranking, according to various cineaste pooh-bahs, of the greatest films ever made, Taiwanese director and cowriter Ming-liang Tsai has some reputation for voting for his own Goodbye, Dragon Inn, along with such usual suspects as Sunrise, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Night of the Hunter. In the latest results of the survey from last year, enough others followed suit to push this exemplar of “slow cinema” into a six-way tie for #108 (with Bringing Up Baby, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Touch of Evil, Wild Strawberries, and The Wizard of Oz). Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a weird one by anyone’s standard, practically guaranteed to test patience even at a relatively tidy 82 minutes. With some eight total lines of dialogue, it may be the longest 82 minutes of your life. It is exasperating, frustrating, and confusing, but also mesmerizing, and not without rewards. I often realize later that slow cinema has burned the images into my retina.
The premise is that a theater in Taipei is closing down and showing the 1967 martial arts picture Dragon Inn as its last show. At the beginning of Goodbye, it seems to be a fairly full house. But during the movie the theater is more often close to empty, sparsely populated by sentimental original players from the 1967 movie on the one hand, and people who seem to be cruising for sex on the other. By the end of what feels like a typical night for everyone involved, I start to wonder if this was really the last screening at that theater forever, or just the last screening of the night. There’s little sense of finality—more like just another slow night in a theater that admittedly doesn’t seem destined, in the fullness of time, to make it as a business enterprise.
If there is a lead player here I’m going to call it the Japanese tourist (Kiyonobu Mitamura), a sorrowful 20something figure with a pouty face of privilege, long suffering, and remote hope. He’s harassed by people who sit too close to him, eat their crunchy snacks too loudly, prop their bare feet next to his head from the row behind. Are these rites of casual pickup sex that I just don’t understand? Signs are yes—strange men who stand next to one another at urinals in the bathroom, rather than spacing out across them (with actually a large number of urinals in this bathroom) are one indication. One man coming out of a toilet stall and leaving another behind, fleetingly glimpsed, is perhaps a better indication.
Then there is a surrealistic, long interlude —everything in this movie is basically long interludes—where the Japanese tourist goes wandering into the back corridors and storage spaces of the theater even as the movie plays. Has he been spending the whole day there? Is he a ghost? Surreptitious sex play still seems most likely, but this is also some really strange stuff. There are quite a number of men wandering back there like that, even lurching zombie style a little. They have to squeeze past one another in close encounters through narrow apertures. It feels ghostly, unreal. It’s not really happening. It can’t be.
Is the theater haunted? It doesn’t seem unlikely. In fact, in the first of the two scenes of dialogue, which occurs nearly 45 minutes into the picture, that is exactly what is under discussion, albeit within the context of a potential hookup. It takes place between the Japanese tourist and one of the actors from Dragon Inn in attendance. The Japanese tourist has just made an obvious play for the actor, getting a light for his cigarette. “Do you know this theater is haunted?” says the actor. “This theater is haunted. Ghosts.” Then he walks away. The Japanese tourist calls after him, “I’m Japanese.”
The evident night manager of the theater, credited as Ticket Woman (Shiang-chyi Chen) though we never see her taking tickets, is disabled, with one bad leg and a slow, rolling gait. Many scenes involve her making her way slowly through the theater. She brings a steamed bun to the projectionist upstairs in a long sequence. She also seems to make rounds, spending a lot of time at one point methodically flushing the toilets in both the women’s and men’s bathrooms (leaving alone two specific stalls in the latter). Goodbye, Dragon Inn is classified as a comedy as well as a drama, and it’s true there is a keen edge to much of this action that makes it vaguely, almost delicately comical.
We also see (or hear, with the camera trained on the seats) bits of the Dragon Inn movie, which I enjoyed as a general thing. For some reason I always like scenes in movies where people are watching movies. But like many elements of this picture, it is confusing, if not outright obscure. Why this movie? This may be a matter for me of not knowing much about Taiwanese culture. Why so sparsely attended (except at first)? Why so unclear about this audience? It is at once a sentimental gathering of Dragon Inn players, a movie 36 years old, and a kind of hothouse cruising ground.
I’m not sure this is the place to address “slow cinema” but it’s certainly one place. Scanning the lengthy list of examples offered by Wikipedia I see a lot of movies I both love and hate. From 2006 alone, for example, there is Still Life, a movie I love, as well as both Colossal Youth and Syndromes and a Century, two movies with which I have a good deal of trouble. With these extremes (love: Balthazar, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu; hate: L’Eclisse) it’s probably safe to say that “slow cinema” is more merely descriptive than some self-evident virtue (or pejorative), and one that could well be in the eye of the beholder. That said, the chief feature of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, it must be said, is that it is very slow.
Then there is a surrealistic, long interlude —everything in this movie is basically long interludes—where the Japanese tourist goes wandering into the back corridors and storage spaces of the theater even as the movie plays. Has he been spending the whole day there? Is he a ghost? Surreptitious sex play still seems most likely, but this is also some really strange stuff. There are quite a number of men wandering back there like that, even lurching zombie style a little. They have to squeeze past one another in close encounters through narrow apertures. It feels ghostly, unreal. It’s not really happening. It can’t be.
Is the theater haunted? It doesn’t seem unlikely. In fact, in the first of the two scenes of dialogue, which occurs nearly 45 minutes into the picture, that is exactly what is under discussion, albeit within the context of a potential hookup. It takes place between the Japanese tourist and one of the actors from Dragon Inn in attendance. The Japanese tourist has just made an obvious play for the actor, getting a light for his cigarette. “Do you know this theater is haunted?” says the actor. “This theater is haunted. Ghosts.” Then he walks away. The Japanese tourist calls after him, “I’m Japanese.”
The evident night manager of the theater, credited as Ticket Woman (Shiang-chyi Chen) though we never see her taking tickets, is disabled, with one bad leg and a slow, rolling gait. Many scenes involve her making her way slowly through the theater. She brings a steamed bun to the projectionist upstairs in a long sequence. She also seems to make rounds, spending a lot of time at one point methodically flushing the toilets in both the women’s and men’s bathrooms (leaving alone two specific stalls in the latter). Goodbye, Dragon Inn is classified as a comedy as well as a drama, and it’s true there is a keen edge to much of this action that makes it vaguely, almost delicately comical.
We also see (or hear, with the camera trained on the seats) bits of the Dragon Inn movie, which I enjoyed as a general thing. For some reason I always like scenes in movies where people are watching movies. But like many elements of this picture, it is confusing, if not outright obscure. Why this movie? This may be a matter for me of not knowing much about Taiwanese culture. Why so sparsely attended (except at first)? Why so unclear about this audience? It is at once a sentimental gathering of Dragon Inn players, a movie 36 years old, and a kind of hothouse cruising ground.
I’m not sure this is the place to address “slow cinema” but it’s certainly one place. Scanning the lengthy list of examples offered by Wikipedia I see a lot of movies I both love and hate. From 2006 alone, for example, there is Still Life, a movie I love, as well as both Colossal Youth and Syndromes and a Century, two movies with which I have a good deal of trouble. With these extremes (love: Balthazar, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu; hate: L’Eclisse) it’s probably safe to say that “slow cinema” is more merely descriptive than some self-evident virtue (or pejorative), and one that could well be in the eye of the beholder. That said, the chief feature of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, it must be said, is that it is very slow.
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