Tsai Ming-liang - He liu ('The River') (1997)

A mother, father and son live together in a small apartment in Taipei but lead very separate lives. The son, Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) drifts through life without a job; the mother is an elevator operator having an affair with a man who pirates pornographic movies; and the father pursues illicit pleasures in the city's gay saunas and is on a mission to stop the leaking water from the apartment upstairs. When the son is stricken with an agonizing pain in his neck and shoulders, seemingly from taking an ill-advised dunk in the polluted Tansui River, the family is driven on a quest to alleviate the son's pain. (-DVD cover)


A young man is wandering aimlessly through the streets of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. He comes across a girl he has met before and gives her a ride on his motorbike, they drive to the river where a film is being made. The film director persuades him to "play the part of the corpse" in her film -the body is to be floating down the polluted river. (-Film Festival brochure)


The young man returns home but soon begins to feel an awful pain in the nape of his neck. We see that he lives with his parents but the three people hardly communicate at all. They each live their own life -the father spends most of his time at the sauna where he tries to pick up a gay lover, the mother works in a gaming saloon and has a lover who makes his living by selling illegally made porno-tapes and whose relationship towards her is void of any emotion. (-Film Festival brochure)


Water is dripping into the apartment in some mysterious way, but nobody investigates where the water could be coming from. The son's pain get worse and worse, he can hardly move his head and shoulders, the doctors have no idea what it could be. His father takes the young man to a faith healer in another town... (-Film Festival brochure)


Already in his two previous films, "Rebels of the neon god" and "Vive L'Amour" , Tsai Ming-liang brought characters to the screen who live in an over-populated metropolis and suffer from absolute estrangement and emotional deprivation. Those who were mesmerized by the last shot portraying the face of a crying girl in "Vive L'Amour" , will find that Tsai Ming-liang's "The River" embarks on the search for a labyrinthine identity embracing, in his own words, the different characters with whom he identifies. (-Film Festival brochure)


Focusing on a family where all normal relationships have been severed, where love is reduced to sex without emotion or passion, "The River" looks at the basic issues of suffering, family taboos and the buttressing of a complicated character who even considers committing suicide, going way beyond simply pondering on human nature. (-Film Festival brochure)


In Taiwan, Xiao-kang, a young man in his early 20s, lives with his parents in near silence. He is plagued by severe neck pain. His father is bedeviled by water first leaking into his bedroom and then flooding the apartment; rain is incessant. Xiao-kang's mother is overcome by sexual longing for her son, sometimes making seemingly incestuous overtures. They try virtually every intervention for Xiao-kang's neck: Western medicine, a chiropractor, acupuncture, an herbal doctor, and a faith healer, Master Liu. Are the family's silent dynamics and Xiao-kang's neck pain connected? And what about the body floating in the Tamsui River: is everything dead? (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/plotsummary)


`He Liu' is a disturbing tale of urban disruption, solitude and rot, not told but evolved in a series of carefully composed real-time-scenes circling about a family afflicted by a sudden and scary medical condition befalling the Son after he took a plunge in polluted river: Their harrowing quest for a cure just serves to depict the utter hopelessness of traditional (Chinese and universal) values in modern society. The disruption of the individual has gone to a degree that it takes the audience about 45 minutes to even get the fact it is watching the plight of familially related protagonists. We watch people engaged in homosexual intercourse without feeling they're gay: In their context, homosexuality is a token of disorientation as much as the porn-watching of the mother whose lover is as little interested in her physically as her husband: Satisfaction is beyond reach for every inhabitant of this chill world - a place not geographically limited to Taipeh but given as a state of present time urban society. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


There is a great deal about this movie which is going to bother audiences with short attention spans. The director Tsai Ming-Liang has a trademark style that is not to everyone's taste: long, static scenes; no background music; and dark, unsentimental realism. All of these elements are present here as they were in his much better-known film "Vive l'Amour." (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


There are horror films which frighten us with supernatural forces and crazed psychos, frighten us with things that hardly exist or which most people never encounter, and then there those movies which present the far more terrifying horror of real calamaties that befall real people every day: chronic illness, environmental catastrophe, familial dissolution, hopelessness, depression. Such films are tremendously unpopular for one very simple reason: they tell the truth, a truth which practically everybody would much rather pretend doesn't exist. Even when such disasters are presented to us in film and literature, there is often a tendency to try to soften the blow by sugar-coating it with some kind of hope, redemption, turn-around, religious awakening, catharsis, etc. This film does no such thing: it tells a believable story and follows it through to its logical "conclusion"--the realization that there are some things from which one will never recover, that there are some cases in life where there is no hope. There are very few people who can stomach such a bitter truth, but that doesn't make it any less true. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


Only a very brave and talented artist can present a story like this without descending into sentimentality on the one hand, or schadenfreude on the other. Tsai forces us to observe carefully, and observation is the first step on the road to compassion and understanding. He sees the pathos of the situation but also its black irony and humor. What's more, in this little story about a handful of ruined lives, he has found a parable that applies to the larger world, one which forever seems to teeter on the brink of destruction, most of the time at its own hands. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


Tsai Ming-Liang offers viewers in "The River" an honest chance to take it or leave it right from the first sequence. If you make it through and enjoy (or rather, are puzzled by) this first sequence - a film shooting in a river, depicted in a long, almost real-time pace - you will for sure be caught in his stream, because what follows is simply great, original, surprising, offbeat, funny, alarming and often mind-boggling. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


Tsai is a Taiwan filmmaker whose cinematic grammar apparently owes a lot to Westerners - especially to Europeans. You can spot Truffaut in his love for his characters, in the way he always casts his favorite actor Lee kang-Sheng much in the way Truffaut did with Jean-Pierre Léaud, and in the mysterious and surprising ways love expresses itself in his films. You can feel the influence of Antonioni in the long sequences without dialogue or music, in the urban chaos leading to lack of communication between the characters, in the forces of nature (the heavy constant rain, the omnipresence of water in this case) responding to "civilization's" abuse - the echologic chaos. You can feel a touch of the Godard of "Le Mépris" in the total lack of communication between very close people (the couple in Godard, the family here) and the kind of non-conform sexuality of the Pasolini of "Teorema" (sexual repression and catharsis among the family members, in both cases). (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


But Tsai has got something all his own. I've seen now all his feature films and it's very impressive to see how he has developed a language of his own, through his imagery, his pace, his actors' performances, his conflicts, his endings. He is sure to always include unforgettable sequences (here, for sure, the sequence in the sauna between father and son) that will haunt you, delight you, disgust you, move you and stay with you long after you've left the theatre. That's a rare accomplishment in any visual arts these days. For me, "The River" is surely Tsai's masterpiece to date, a film that flows slowly, harmoniously, hauntingly, effortlessly to its destination, catches you in its stream, and leads you to a free-meaning ending - which, in this case, is something warmly welcome. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/usercomments)


The director of the movie in which Xiao-Kang floats in the river is played by real-life Hong Kong director Ann Hui. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0119263/trivia)


'The River' won The Silver Bear award in Berlin in 1997.





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