The River
Bi-ying, and Tsai Yi-chun
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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That I regard The River as a masterpiece and the work of a master doesn’t mean that I consider it fun or pleasant–terrifying and beautiful would be more appropriate. It’s been a subject of dispute ever since it won the special jury prize in Berlin in 1997, and I can’t exactly quarrel with those who complain that it’s sick or boring; I can understand how one could have these responses, even though I don’t share them.
Tsai is a Taiwanese director who was born in Malaysia in 1957. He started out in TV dramas (1989-’91) and has made one TV documentary, about AIDS (My New Friends, 1995), and four features: Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l’Amour (1994), The River (1996), and The Hole (1998). All of the features are set in Taipei and deal with loneliness and isolation; The Hole, a postmodernist musical of sorts, has also been seen on U.S. cable and elsewhere in a shorter version called Last Dance. The River, in some ways the most powerful and accomplished of the last three features–I still haven’t seen the first–has been screened the least, probably because people don’t quite know what to make of it.
Ever since I first encountered Tsai’s work, when I saw Vive l’Amour, I’ve tended to regard it as a kind of update on the urban melancholia Michelangelo Antonioni used to specialize in, especially during the 50s and 60s. Using Antonioni as a reference point can take one only so far, and the same is true when he’s used as a reference point for another Taiwanese modernist, Edward Yang. One of the main differences may be that Antonioni is a master of alienated moods, but atmosphere tends to be more a given than a creation in Tsai’s movies, which conjure up more mysteries about subjects the characters tend to be inarticulate and confused about–sexuality most of all.
Squaring Tsai’s acute grasp of the contemporary with a particular intentionality may ultimately be beside the point, especially for work that’s coded and inflected in so personal a manner. The characters and their repressions and longings are so palpably realized that one simply accepts all sorts of improbabilities. Sex and plumbing, seduction and infection, a river and a spray of steam and a torrent of rain are all part of the same inexorable flow.
