Goodbye, Dragon Inn
(Bu san)

An old Taipei on the point of closing down screens King Hu’s masterpiece, Dragon Inn, a film belonging to another age of Taiwan cinema. It comes as if to nostalgically haunt the theatre’s almost empty space – its dialogues offsetting the silence, the hesitations, the barely audible snippets of words of the audience and staff or their rare conversations. In the inn in the title of this sword-fighting classic, a bevy of characters follow each other in scenes with unexpected reversals of situation and somersaulting combats. In the film theatre where they meet, follow, lose or find each other, Tsai Ming-Liang’s characters are seeking in cinema the hope of a conclusive bond with the other. Another choreography coordinated differently by the angular geometry of the framing creates a labyrinth of lines, where each character, like the awkward Japanese tourist who arrives there by chance, seems absurdly lost between light and darkness. JB