The River (1997)

Tsai Ming-Liang makes movies about loneliness, about people occupying the same space without interacting. These films reveal the pain of loneliness as much through an investigation of lived space as the characters' trembling attempts at human closeness. The River opens with a bunch of seemingly disconnected scenes of three different people. Gradually, we learn that they are son, father, mother. The son is afflicted by a mysterious pain in his neck. The father tries to solicit partners at a bathing house. The mother is taking home leftovers and meets a lover in an anonymous room. We see them inhabit spaces of their own. Even when it dawns on us that they are related to each other, their isolation stands out even more. The routines and slow events of ordinary life is the core of this, and other films by Tsai Ming Liang. In a number of scenes, the father tries to collect the dripping water from a hole in the roof. The variations of this minimalist theme have the effect of a melancholy chord. As The River progresses, the young man's neck pain takes on an almost metaphorical meaning. It's a pain that has no clear explanation and no cure seems to help. The son is taken to various doctors and healers and even participates in a ritual, but nothing helps.

The cinematography creates a woozy, yet austere atmosphere. Bright colors and spare locations with next to no human action. What are we to look at? The River is a difficult film as it directs its attention to a puzzling symptom. The viewer is offered several elements and the task is not to piece these together in a neat assemblage. The challenge is to understand the kind of isolation Tsai Ming Liang depicts. What is it that afflicts these people? How is the silence of the film to be understood? An example: two guys ogle each other in a neon-lit arcade from which we see a McDonald's restaurant. Nothing happens in the scene, except this silent watching, their restless presence. The camera observes them, framing them from a distance, swallowed up by the neon-lit commercial environment but without losing the focus on the strange, silent communication.