Imitations flatter Taiwan Cinema

Taiwan's annual local film production dropped to eight films this year and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) seems to be the only person showing this country still has filmmakers who make quality films. Tsai and his pupil Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) made two films this year and both won critical acclaim and awards in major international film festivals.

In September, Tsai's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (不散) won the Fipreci Award at the Venice Film Festival, while Lee's The Missing (不見) took the New Currents Award in Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea. Goodbye, Dragon Inn was also chosen to represent Taiwan in the best foreign-language film category at the upcoming Oscars. Both films are being released this weekend.

"I don't think of my films as art films. I see them as a kind of handicraft, not an industrial product. So my films do not need big funds and probably don't cater to mass audiences. But they are good enough for a growing audience," Tsai said.

The story follows a young Japanese tourist (Kiyonobu Mitamura) who enters a run-down cinema that is advertising its last film, Dragon Inn -- which is a classic martial arts film of the 1960s. Inside the big theater are empty seats. The tourist, we learn, is not there to appreciate classic movies, but rather to look for sexual adventure as the cinema is used as a gay meeting spot. But he has no luck and only finds unattractive and a few old men. Strangely, some of the old people resemble those martial actors in the movie. "Did you know that this theater is haunted by ghosts?" says a handsome stranger, who offers the Japanese man a light for his cigarette. The film is a metaphor for the golden days of Chinese-

language cinema.

The film is populated with Tsai's familiar actors, all of whom give above average performances. The seed-cracking Yang Kui-mei (楊貴媚) has an excellent three minutes, which won her Best

Supporting Actress at the Asia Pacific Film Festival.

In Tsai Ming-liang's movies nothing much actually happens in the story. The actors do not kill. The lovers will be united. Those who desire will not be satisfied, most of the time. And those who lose their families cannot have them back.

If the above has more or less become the trademark of Tsai's movies, then Lee Kang-sheng's directorial debut The Missing is a very Tsai-style movie. The story, according to Lee, is based on true events, partly from his mother's own experiences and partly from TV news.

An elderly woman (Lu Yi-ching, 陸奕靜) loses her grandson in a local park. She desperately looks for him and eventually goes to the police station. Meanwhile, a teenage boy loses his grandfather who has alzheimer's disease.

There are some obvious traces of Tsai Ming-liang's style in this movie and resembles bits of Rebels of Neon God (1992), Tsai's early work, and What Time is it There? (2001).