"Goodbye, Dragon Inn"

This stunning film from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang is virtually wordless, yet speaks volumes about what it means to love the movies -- and the cavernous theaters in which they once played.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sep 16, 2004 | We often speak of moviegoing as a communal experience, a way of bonding with others over the images in front of us. But moviegoing is more like a very public kind of intimacy: When groups of us gather in a theater, we may be seeing the same images, but we're never seeing the same movie. The one-to-one relationship each of us builds with the picture in front of us may have its shadow twin in the viewer sitting right next to us, but it can never be identical.

Even so -- and despite the unassailable convenience of watching movies at home on DVD -- most people who love movies yearn to be part of the life of an audience, at least part of the time. Huddled together in our isolation, we're reminded how alone we are, and at the same time, that we're all in it together.

Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's stunning "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," which takes place in a faded, decrepit Taipei movie palace on the night of its last-ever showing, is a paean to the togetherness of isolation among moviegoers. There are two sets of characters in "Goodbye, Dragon Inn": those in the movie that's being shown -- King Hu's lush-looking 1966 swordplay classic "Dragon Inn" -- and those who sit in the seats as it unfolds before them, either romantically rapt or comically distracted.

Which group is more ghostly, and which more alive? There's no specific answer, the suggestion being that whenever we give ourselves over to movie images, in some ways we become ghosts ourselves, while the celluloid figures in front of us can seem more real than our flesh-and-blood neighbors.

If you've never seen a Tsai Ming Liang picture, you should be forewarned that there's no real plot in the 81-minute "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" -- only delicate traceries of feeling, conveyed by sound and images and actors' faces, that, by the end, become nearly overwhelming. Save for the snippets of dialogue that drift to us from the movie-within-the-movie, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is virtually wordless. Tsai tells us everything with his long, unbroken shots, capturing the essence of the theater as if it were a human character.

Cinematographer Liao Pen-Jung's camera shows us desolate corridors (graced by a scurrying, secretive cat or two) and cluttered storage rooms, a small corner of the projectionist's cramped lair, a lobby lined with brightly colored posters that might look garish if they weren't so inviting. These are all places that should be empty and silent while Hu's "Dragon Inn" is living its life on-screen -- like a rare insect that lives only while there's an audience to observe it -- and yet Tsai shows us how life spills into them even while the movie's running.

The ticket girl (Chen Shiang-chyi), a mousy but pretty young woman who walks with a limp, passes the time until the movie's over, at one point heating up a sweet bun in her rice cooker. She saves half of it and carries it to the projectionist (Lee Kang-Sheng, the marvelous actor with whom Tsai always works) in his room, and although he isn't there, she leaves it for him as a wisftul love token (although later, when she realizes he hasn't touched it, she sensibly reclaims it for herself).

Everywhere Tsai takes us, the theater is thrumming with near-silent life. A young Japanese man (Mitamura Kiyonobu) has wandered into the theater to take shelter from the pouring rain outside; he pays little attention to the movie in front of him -- he's more interested in cruising for a lover -- and yet he can't help noticing that one of the men he appraises in the audience (Shih Chun) bears a striking resemblance to one of the actors on-screen. And in another section of the theater, an old man (Miao Tien, who has appeared in several of Tsai's other pictures, including "The River," "The Hole" and "What Time Is It There?") sits with his young grandson, absorbing the picture before them as if it were sunshine.

Next Page: The ghosts of moviegoers past

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