Now streaming on:
Tsai Ming-Liang's debut film "Rebels of the Neon God," a youth-in-revolt
story that's finally being released to US theaters 23 years after its
debut, is the director's most accessible film. That will seem like a
funny observation once you've seen it, because Tsai's most accessible
film is more unusual and uncompromising than any you're likely to see
this year.
The movie starts with the offscreen sound of a
tropical storm battering a city, then observes two teenage
smartasses, Ah Tze (Chen Chao-jung) and Ah Bing (Jen Chang-bin),
crowding into a rain-smeared phone booth and robbing the coin box with
crude tools. Hardly a word passes between them. They're both smoking the
whole time; the cigarettes rarely leave their lips. The next half-hour
unfolds with a similar paucity of dialogue. You're just watching Ah Tze,
Ah Bing and a handful of other major characters walking, riding
scooters, talking, studying, stealing motherboards from video games,
arguing with parents, and acting and reacting within the context of
their gigantic home city, Tapei—which, despite the film's references to
established deities, is obviously the "neon god" of the title.
This
is one of the great modern films about big cities and the mostly
unacknowledged psychic toll of living in them. Early on, a dutiful but
frustrated student, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), impales a cockroach
with the sharp point of a compass and pins it to his desk to watch it
die slowly—an expression of astonishing frustration and anger expressed
in an offhand way. A couple of scenes later, he angrily tries to kill
another cockroach clinging to the outside of his bedroom window,
accidentally shatters the glass, cuts himself, and has to staunch the
blood, to the alarm of his parents (Lu Yi-ching and Miao Tien). There
are times when every character could be an inmate in a prison movie,
doing whatever he or she has to do to make the time go faster. There are
many shots of people in cot-like beds, sometimes having sex or
pleasuring themselves but more often smoking or sleeping or staring at
the ceiling. Tsai lingers on details that express great longing, sadness
and mystery, such as a when the camera tracks a series of objects
floating in floodwater on an apartment floor (including a crushed soda
can and a cigarette butt), or when we observe Hsiao-kang exiting a
campus building amid a sea of parked scooters to discover that his has
been towed, for some random reason. (In the background we hear a young
woman imploring cops not to tow her scooter as they're ignoring her and
hoisting it onto a tow truck.)
Incredibly, though, considering how unpleasant many of the situations are, this is a different, vastly less oppressive feeling than we get from watching later features by the director, such as "What Time is There?", "The River" and last year's "Stray Dogs"—works in which the artist's gaze is more merciless, his shots more carefully composed and held at much greater length, and the characters' psychodrama even more pitilessly observed, to the point where you feel as though you're watching a whole society being figuratively drawn-and-quartered on a coroner's examination table. Here, when we watch lives of the student, his parents, the two petty thieves and their tag-along gal pal Ah Kuei (Wang Yu-wen), the circumstances feel awfully dire a lot of the time—the thieves' apartment remains flooded throughout the film, and you often see debris and dead cockroaches floating on the surface of the water—and yet the youthful energy of the characters and the sheer ominous beauty of the movie's Tapei locations make the story, such as it is, feel oddly bouncy.
The stories of the petty criminals and the student are very loosely connected: Hsiao-kang follows Ah Tze around and spies on him, sees him smash the side view mirror of his dad's taxi, and spends the rest of the story trying and eventually succeeding at obtaining a petty and unimaginative sort of revenge (or "satisfaction"). But this attempt to connect or parallel the stories feels as arbitrary as those moments in a Robert Altman film where characters from different social strata are briefly glimpsed in the same scene or shot, riding the same bus or eating in the same coffee shop, as if to say, "Small world, eh?"106 minutes
Chen Chao-jung as Ah Tze
Kang-sheng Lee as Hsiao-Kang
Lu Yi-Ching as Mother
Tien Miao as Father