Vive l'amour (1994)

Ming-liang Tsai is a very interesting director: his slow-building movies look at urban life from an angle that lets you see human fragility from a sort of cinematic distance. Vive l'amour is no exception in this respect. The ending scene of this film paradoxically exudes exactly this distance/bristling emotions. It's a strange thing to watch, indeed. There's a lot of other strange occurrences in this film. Let's start with the fact that the story revolves around an apartment which is shared by three people - and what is so eerie is that at first none of the people are aware of each other. There's the unhappy businessman who sneaks into the empty-seeming apartment. Then there's woman who takes a random guy, a guy who sells clothes on the street for a living, to the apartment for a rendezvous. She's some kind of broker and she is trying to sell this place. The guy she sleeps with steals her key and starts to move into one of the bedrooms... The loneliness of these people is painful to watch. The moments of intimacy are fleeting and often they only make the loneliness appear in even starker contrasts. Very few words are exchanged. It's the vacant-seeming apartment and its secretive inhabitants. The city is depicted as a place for an anonymous, unhappy life. A heartbreaking and very, very quiet movie.