Movie of the Week: VIVE L’AMOUR (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)
The Last Screwball™
Two and a half years ago, “Movie of the Week” began with Tsai Ming-liang’s debut feature Rebels of the Neon God (1992) — so it’s only fitting that the week before I shoot my short Rahul & Rosa, I tip my hat once again to the Malaysian–Taiwanese master. An important element in my project is people sneaking around an apartment, an act that forms the physical, emotional, and existential center of Tsai’s sophomore effort. Vive L’Amour follows Hsiao-kang (perennial Tsai frontman Lee Kang-sheng), a salesman who discovers the key to an unoccupied Taipei flat. As Hsiao-kang starts scoping it out, his story quickly collides with those of May Lin (Yang Kuei-mei), the real estate agent trying to sell the flat, and Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung), the small-time criminal who sleeps with May Lin and steals a second key. All three of them continue to come and go as they please, often unaware that someone else is there. Like in Rebels, Tsai uses the loose template of a popular Hollywood film — in this case Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) — to both explore urban alienation and push cinematic form in new directions. Vive L’Amour is nothing if not dialectical: here is a silent comedy with sound, a screwball rom-com with nary a typical joke. When it’s funny, though, man is it funny. Images of people tiptoeing, hiding under beds, and falling on their asses are as old as the movies themselves, and the reason that Tsai is one of our greatest modern directors is because of his ability to breathe new life into things we’ve been watching for a hundred years. His determined queerness only adds to the feeling that we’re seeing the world as no one has ever quite seen it before. Rewatching Vive L’Amour, despite the unerring bleakness that punctuates its humor, was akin to a warm bath. I can’t imagine a better movie for my heart to be full of as I go off and chop it up next week.
Streaming on Metrograph and Kanopy; available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other major platforms.
this nails something crucial about the screwball genre ppl usually miss. The whole 'silent comedy with sound' thing shows how physical humor actually needs silence to breathe, like when I watched some old Hawks films the loudest scenes were also teh most awkward. Maybe turning comedy dialectical isnt about subversion at all but finaly letting the form be honest about its contradictions. good luck w/ the shoot btw