Goodbye, Dragon Inn [Blu-ray] [2020]

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This gives rise to an amusingly peculiar moment when the tourist, after repeatedly glancing at a middle-aged man a couple of rows down, moves and sits next to him, then turns to curiously scrutinise his face, an oddly rude inspection that the man elects to ignore until the tourist gives up and departs. If you’re looking for a Taiwanese take on The Last Picture Show, however, you’ve come to the wrong film, as while there are indeed multiple characters to keep tabs on here, this is no coming-of-age story and there aren’t any real character arcs of note. If you watched it and felt nothing but exasperation, as some definitely have, then you’re probably thinking that this would be a good thing. On November 6, 2020, Weerasethakul tweeted, "THE best film of the last 125 years: Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Anyone who had a special place for movies, especially if it's gone, will be able to see that theater in the Fu Ho.

By the time he elects to move seats it occurred to me that I’d been watching this unfold in a single shot in real time, and that this was why it felt so familiar to me. MetrographPics will be releasing the new 4K restoration of GOODBYE, DRAGON INN digitally starting 12/18. I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of times I’ve fought to tolerate such a disturbance, and when my disapproving glares failed to have even the smallest impact I would often move seats to avoid a potentially unpleasant confrontation. After the premiere, Tsai approached the owner to shoot an entire film there, fearing the soon-to-close theater would be lost forever.I certainly experienced an initial uncertainty about whether I was going to be able to engage with a film that was unfolding as a series of long-held and only slightly animated tableaux, but just as I did with Sátántangó, once I adjusted to the pace and rhythm of Tsai’s approach I became completely absorbed in the small details and the half-told stories that are gently teased by the static camera’s unblinking gaze. If it seems as though I’m dancing around not just my own opinion of the film but what happens within it, you can put this down to the fact that Goodbye, Dragon Inn is not an easy film to start making even close to definitive statements about. Scott of The New York Times praised the film, writing, " Goodbye, Dragon Inn has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Reminded of the super-cinemas and the poetic King Hu films of his youth, he shot a scene in the theater and premiered the film there. It's as if the theater knows it's done for, resigned to its fate, not yet ready to die, too tired to fight.

On a dark, wet night in Taipei City, a cavernous old picture palace is about to close its doors forever. Given my initial uncertainty, I was surprised how involved I became in it and ultimately how much I gleaned from what is only suggested by what occurs on screen, and was certainly caught out by its poetic evocation of childhood memories, its moments of almost absurdist humour and its touching final moments. Instead she places it quietly in the entrance to the projection booth for him to hopefully find and gratefully consume, then slowly makes her way back to ground level.

Nostalgia for the cinemagoing days of my youth certainly played its part here, but if the film also works for you then the quality of the restoration and transfer and the Tsai Ming-Laing interview make this Second Run Blu-ray an easy recommend. This is an excellent extra that genuinely expanded my appreciation of the film itself, though it should be noted that the interview was shot outside and occasionally does battle with wind noise. When the woman approaches the ticket office, for instance, the angle chosen suggests the ticket seller was not in on the gag and was thus expected not to sell the woman a ticket because she is just short of the required fare, but when seller is encouraged by others to accept this lower payment she agrees, and a reason for declining this offer then has to be quickly manufactured, or at least that’s the way it seems.

This moving, deliberately slow paean to the faded splendor of old movie-palaces captures so much of what we love (and love to hate! This extended sequence reminded me of Shindō Kaneto’s The Naked Island, whose wordless opening half-hour consists solely of a husband and wife carrying water from the mainland to the island on which they have made a home and up difficult pathways to the fields in which their crops grow. An expansion Tsai Ming-Laing’s contribution to a project launched at the 2008 Lucca Film Festival in Tuscany in which twenty ‘experimental’ filmmakers were invited to make five-minute shorts to mark 150th anniversary of Giacomo Puccini.Lonely souls cruise the aisles for companionship while two actors from Hu’s film watch themselves writ large, perhaps for the last time. As someone for whom walking has become a problem in recent years, I am perhaps more sensitive to this aspect and really felt for the cashier when her shyness keeps her from handing the cake to a man to whom she is clearly attracted. All of them could seat hundreds of patrons, maybe a thousand even, and I never once saw them close to filled. Its lack of narrative and home video aesthetic is likely to infuriate as many as it intrigues, but while I understand how easily it might frustrate, I nonetheless had no problem sticking with it and found myself speculating not just on the possible backstory for the the woman’s current situation, but on the very making of the film itself.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn ( Chinese: 不散) is a 2003 Taiwanese comedy-drama slow cinema film written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang about a movie theater about to close down and its final screening of the 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn.

Using the composer’s most famous opera as its kicking-off point, the film is set primarily in a busy metropolitan bus station and focuses on a woman who is trying to get home but doesn’t quite have enough money for a ticket. Similarly featured is the handicapped box office cashier (Chen Hsiang-Chyi), who is first seen as her other duties cause her to just miss the arrival of the Japanese tourist and is then observed at length tucking into a sizeable steamed rice bun, a piece of which she decides to give to the projectionist (Tsai regular Lee Kang-Sheng). Slarek becomes absorbed by the film's lingering focus on suggestion and small character details and salutes the quality of Second Run's recent Blu-ray release. The film runs for 82 minutes, yet I have a feeling that if the footage was handed to most editors to assemble without guidance from the director then the length would be shortened by about two-thirds.