"Goodbye, Dragon Inn"

The specifics of what happens in "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" are barely significant: What really sticks with you is the picture's aura of twilight vibrancy, and the deep pleasure Tsai takes in savoring subtle emotions that other filmmakers might not even register.

The theater in which Tsai filmed the movie -- it's called the Fu-Ho -- no longer exists. He found it while he was shooting 2001's gentle but ardent "What Time Is It There?" He was taken with it because it reminded him of the old theaters he remembered from his childhood in Malaysia -- his grandfather began taking him to the movies at the age of 3. After learning that the Fu-Ho was scheduled to be torn down, he rustled up the money to shoot "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" there.

The Fu-Ho isn't particularly lavish, but with its rows and rows of raked seats, it represents a confidence that's almost boastful. The Fu-Ho is a relic from the days when a theater had to be big to contain the masses who were eager to come out and see movies; its cavernousness is a kind of generosity, especially compared with the pinched, miniature shoe boxes that so many once-large movie theaters have been subdivided into. Our first look into the theater is startling: Beyond a drifting velvet curtain, we glimpse a sea of heads, brushed with beams of light from the projectionist's booth. It's pleasing to see such a big turnout for an old, ostensibly forgotten movie.

But that audience may be just an illusion. Before we know it, that hearty bunch has disappeared, leaving only a scattered handful of viewers, including that young Japanese tourist and a big-haired tootsie noisily eating peanuts and scattering the shells on the floor. A character in "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" remarks that the theater is said to be haunted, which leaves us to wonder: Was that earlier, packed audience we saw made up of ghosts -- ghosts from a time when people cared deeply about the pleasures that movies have to offer?

"Goodbye, Dragon Inn" hits some mournful undertones. We learn that two of the men who came out for this last Fu-Ho showing of "Dragon Inn" were stars in that very movie: They greet each other warmly in the theater lobby afterward. "No one comes to the movies anymore," says the older of the two, Miao Tien. "And no one remembers us anymore," responds Shih Chun (who was King Hu's lead acor, just as Lee Kang-Sheng is Tsai's). Their voices are redolent with a sense of loss, and earlier, Tsai's camera lingered on Shih's face as he watched the movie: It was almost expressionless except for the faint shimmer of tears welling in his eyes, tears devoid of sentiment but loaded with feeling.

"Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is openly elegiac, and yet it's far from depressing. Maybe that's because Tsai's movies are always less concerned with mourning the past than they are with connecting it to the present. The Fu-Ho shuts down once and for all: The projectionist pulls down its corrugated door with a mighty clang before taking off on his motorbike, and the ticket girl, who has been lurking in the shadows for a last glimpse of him, emerges into the rainy darkness to slowly make her way home.

But even then, Tsai gives us a twinge of hope that the two of them will see each other again. The projectionist has noticed that the ticket girl has left her rice cooker behind. He scoops it up and carries it off with him on his bike, perhaps to bring it to her.

Sometimes the end of a movie feels like, if not the end of the world, the end of a world. Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.

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