Over several nights as it is somehow engrossing and often toes the line of being too much. Written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. This was his debut feature after a career in TV.
Taipei, Taiwan, feeling like the late 1980s. The traditional society that was breaking down in That Day on the Beach (1983) has broken down. The rain provides cover for the bad boys on motorcycles (dominant Chen Chao-jung, adjunct Jen Chang-bin) who are cracking everything coin operated (phones, vending machines) to pay for the night's entertainment at the video game parlour and endless cigarettes. Soon enough anithero Kang-sheng Lee has quit his crammer and burnt his bridges with his middle class parents, taxi driving Miao Tien and expositor-of-tradition Yi-ching Lu. There's a vibe that things are going to go all Taxi Driver but Lee is mostly mute. Along the way we learn that roller-rink attendant Wang Yu-wen is the only available girl in the whole city; in fact things are so bad for her that she keeps buying the boys dinner. I guess nobody gets what they want.
Pen-Jung Liao's realist cinematography is very effective. The morning-after early on is captured with some great tracking shots on the city streets as the boys go their separate ways. The flooded apartment is quite something. I don't think there's that much neon; the glare of the CRTs dominate in the arcade and the love hotels. Far less is made of the flouros at the restaurant than Christopher Doyle managed to in Chungking Express. The score by Shu-Jun Huang is often insistent.
#58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films, on par with The Way of the Dragon. A. O. Scott in 2015 upon its U.S. release. Richard Brody, also in 2015. The phone dating is so weird.
