Quest Status: 762 / 1000
TSPDT Rank #752
In the opening shot of Vive L'Amour, we see a young salesman (Lee Kang-sheng) steal a key. The camera focuses on the door where the key has been absentmindedly left in the lock, because everything that happens from now on will essentially revolve around this room. The salesman soon visits the empty apartment and seems to be turned on by being there. Another man (Chen Chao-jung), who sells imported goods on the black market, seduces the real estate agent (Yang Kuei-mei) in charge of the empty apartment building. Conflicted about her feelings to the handsome stranger, she takes him back to the empty apartment rather than her own, leading her seducer to frequent the apartment in hopes of meeting her again.
Like all "slow cinema," Vive L'Amour features many long takes filled with silence. This makes it difficult to learn anything about the characters apart from what we see on screen. The initial theft of the key is the spark that brings the three characters together, but their relationships to each other remain perpetually ambiguous. Why does the black market rebel set his sights on the real estate agent? Why is he so attached to the apartment where they had their one night stand? And what about the salesman, who tries to kill himself one moment and makes out with a melon the next?
Instead of giving us the information in a typical narrative fashion, Tsai Ming-Liang gives us time to ponder these questions and examine the characters and their motions, as well as the setting. The most stylistically daring shots come at the end of the film, as the camera follows the real estate agent walking through a park for close to two minutes in tight close-up, only to abandon her and pan out to a wide shot of an endless stream of cars bustling past the park. What moments like these mean is open to interpretation (the easy one being social commentary on urban alienation), which is what makes films like this a valuable alternative to the mainstream. But if you're looking for answers, you won't find them here. More than anything, slow cinema is a vehicle for solitary meditation.
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