Goodbye Dragon Inn
dir. Tsai Ming-liang
HomeGreen Films
Casual moviegoers, used to the creature comforts of the new-fangled multiplexes dotting our suburban landscape, can never understand the attachment that develops between a true movie lover and their local theater. Whether the local grindhouse or the local arthouse, cinephiles — a perverse lot who are often forced to go out of their way to find the movies they want to see — begin to consider as virtues what most rational people would regard as flaws. Take the Majestic Theatre in Madison, Wis. — a vaudeville theater built in 1906 shoehorned into the awkward role of a cinema. Despite the cramped seating, terrible sightlines, poor acoustics and wildly fluctuating temperatures, I remember my first screening (Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad in 1995, the first foreign-language film I ever saw at the movies), my last screening (Donnie Darko) before it became a nightclub and all those in-between, with a clarity often missing when I recall my equally frequent visits to the modern multiplex. (To be fair, it may just be that sore buttocks lead to heightened alertness.)
Where does all of this reminiscence lead? Well, it leads to director Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a plotless examination of the actions, as well as reactions, of a few staff members and patrons of a decrepit, cavernous Taipei movie theater with an uncertain future. Faced with an imminent "temporary" closure by its new owners, the theater's final screening is the classic 1966 wuxia pan Dragon Inn by Taiwanese director King Hu, portions of which are both glimpsed and heard throughout the film. In fact, Tsai's film actually begins with a black screen, over which we hear in voiceover the opening narration to Hu's film. (Audio clips from Dragon Inn provide the majority of the dialogue heard in the film; Tsai, whose films could never be characterized as "wordy," has created a script where the first of about a dozen lines of dialogue is uttered an hour into the 82 minute film).
Tsai — whose films such as What Time is is There? show him to be like Michelangelo Antonioni, but with a sense of humor — builds his film around observations of the film's six main characters: the lame young woman who works as both a ticketseller and custodian (Tsai regular Chen Shiang-chyi); the largely unseen projectionist who does not make his actual appearance until the screening of Dragon Inn ends (another Tsai regular who is often marked as his surrogate, Lee Kang-sheng); a gangly teenager who alternates between disinterestedly watching the film and trying to pick up men in the upper rows of the theater; a middle-aged man who sits ramrod straight in his seat, and whose attention to the screen can not be broken; and an elderly man and his fussy grandson.
Most of the film is dominated by Chen's character as she shuffles through the corridors of the theater, doing this or that mundane task and vainly attempting to connect with the largely unseen projectionist, on whom she clearly has a crush. The teenager garners the second-most screen time; the frustrations surrounding his attempts to watch the movie supply the film with most of Tsai's deadpan humor, and are instantly recognizable to any moviegoer: fussy kids, noisy eaters and people who sit absurdly close together despite the spacious nature of the theater. His misadventures at cruising also lead Tsai to explore a eerier tangent — lured into the theater's dark, dank, labyrinthine back corridors, the youth finds the formerly deserted movie house now teeming with men prowling about. He runs into a nattily dressed man, who dryly intones in Japanese (the language of Taiwan's former colonizers) that the theater is haunted.
The idea that the theater is some type of purgatory fits nicely into Tsai's concerns with time, the past and memory. Despite Liao Ben-Bong's beautiful cinematography, the theater featured in Goodbye, Dragon Inn is no picture palace; in fact, it's quite drab, dominated by depressing grays and sickly greens. But despite the theater's many shortcomings, the film cannot help but evoke a sense of nostalgia and loss. Tsai's use of static camera set-ups, long takes and repetition may try your patience, but they also afford the audience the time to absorb everything in the fame, to feel what it is like to wander aimlessly around the corridors which have obviously seen better days. And there are moments where the people going about their business in the theater begin to connect with the sounds and images onscreen which can only be described as transcendental. The eptiome of the effect is a close-up of Chen's character, having wandered behind the screen, as she looks up enraptured at the swift, fluid motions of Hu's warrior women, something denied to her given her pronounced limp.
With moments like these, Tsai communicates not only the intensity of our reaction to the movies, but how that intensity is abetted by the theater itself. This intensity is hard to duplicate within the cookie-cutter architecture of the multiplex — it's a question of character. Not surprisingly, it's quite clear that the main character of Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the theater itself, and at the end of the film, we mourn its passing. As the lights come up after the last reel, just try not to drift into the reverie of your memories and mourn theaters long gone.
— Tim Eagon (tmeagon at tds dot net)
