Vive L'Amour

VIVE L'AMOUR    ****

Tsai Ming-liang

1994

IDEA:  A realtor, a salesman, and a seller of counterfeit goods tenuously orbit and occupy the same empty Taipei loft, searching for intimacy.

BLURB:  The characters of Vive L’Amour inhabit the material reality of a rapidly modernizing Taipei, cast adrift in its simultaneous proliferation and shrinking of space. For Tsai, the conditions of this material space are necessarily poetic and affective, generating an embodied urban liminality that precludes the rootedness of human subjects. His characters drift and dwell, but the spaces that hold their torpid bodies are too unstable to retain them or facilitate their unity – an architectural crisis, perhaps, of a colonial island nation transferred between so many owners. The anonymous, mostly barren loft that becomes the locus of Vive L’Amour thus reads as a metonym for Taipei: rendered spatially nebulous by Tsai’s camera and edits, it’s a provisional site for the construction of human life in a quickly growing capitalist city. Crucially, none of the characters in Tsai’s alienated would-be love triangle own or even rent the space; they can only occupy it discreetly, and never to each other’s knowledge all at once, walls and doors and the undersides of mattresses just more barriers between private, atomized lives. In his exquisitely modulated accretion of individual anomies and yearnings, crystallized here in only his second feature, Tsai viscerally gets to the heart of the relationship between modern urban space and human sociality, depicting with a supreme aching warmth how often physical proximity is incommensurate with actual connection.