Goodbye, Dragon Inn

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN   ***1/2

Tsai Ming-liang

2003

IDEA:  On the final night before it closes, an old theater plays King Hu's 1967 Dragon Inn to a sparse audience.

BLURB:  The space that has historically grounded cinematic reception becomes its own object of aesthetic contemplation in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Through the camera’s extended gaze, the walls, seats, and labyrinthine back hallways of the theater – nearly everything but the screen – become animate, visible parts of the circuitry of our sensory experience. Their dual perceptual immediacy and multiply vacancy mirror the nature of film itself, displaced onto the (literal) architecture of spectatorship, a decaying cinema palace that seems aware of its own slow demise. Of course, this cinema exists on our screens, in agonizing suspension, as Tsai records and memorializes its disappearance. Sexual longings and nostalgia drift through its darkened corridors, the last remnants of the effects of this temple of desire; and always, in Tsai’s infinite temporizing, the sense of impossible consummation prevails. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn’s most breathtaking moments, including a hilariously protracted urinal visit and a late shot of the completely emptied, fully lit theater, Tsai encourages us to think about and corporeally feel time as cinema (his cinema) manipulates it, and to understand how the spaces of our spectatorship materially impact on this perception. And by slowing time to what feels like a standstill, he only intensifies our awareness of its passage; even the most static and “endless” of scenes must elapse. Goodbye, Dragon Inn may eulogize a communal moviegoing experience slipping into obsolescence, but in layering a fading reality with a dilated time, it makes loss, the past-ness endemic to all movies, into a concrete and lingering presence.