Sabah Hensley
This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama
Quiet Muffin
This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
Yazmin
Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.
ebossert
I enjoy a good, slow-moving drama. Christmas In August, Chungking Express, Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, The Way Home, Springtime in a Small Town, Hana bi, Eat Drink Man Woman, Dolls, In the Mood for Love, and Spring Summer Fall Winter Spring are all enjoyable films – just to name a few. Unfortunately, there is a subset of films within the drama genre that attempt to ride the coattails of good films while providing nothing of interest themselves. These are what I call IAN films – "Incomprehensible Artistic Nonsense." Tsai Ming-liang is the king of this subgenre, and Vive L'Amour is his "masterpiece." In fact, this is the crème de la crème of crap-infested garbage under the guise of "art." People walk around in their apartments, drink water, stroll back and forth waiting for pay phones to become vacant, hang posters, staple papers together, go to the bathroom, eat, do pushups, have sex, slap at mosquitoes, etc. I'm not joking when I say that is an accurate synopsis of the entire film, which is the quintessential posterchild for pointless art-house trash. There is no plot, no storyline, no interesting or noteworthy events, no emotion, no meaningful dialogue, and most importantly – no drama.The most eventful scene has two people "banging" on a bed with a person masturbating underneath the mattress – ironic that it's also totally tasteless and gratuitous. The relationship of the characters on the bed is practically non-existent. Tsai apparently didn't feel like communicating anything to the viewer regarding these people other than the obvious fact that they like to "bang." The person under the bed is just as one-dimensional and uninteresting. He likes to drink water, makeout with melons, and stroke himself. This is Tsai's idea of "character development." A truly misguided "entertainer" indeed.Tsai's true contribution in Vive L'Amour is perhaps the most atrocious scene in art-house film history. He first shows the lead actress walk all the way from one end of a park to the other for 285 consecutive seconds, only to then show her cry hysterically – for absolutely no reason whatsoever – for another 356 consecutive seconds. The film then abruptly ends. No point. No entertainment. Just pure, concentrated torture inflicted on the viewer. In an effort to beat a dead horse. The underlying theme of loneliness is mishandled so greatly that the only true feeling of this film is that of boredom. In fact, Kiyoshi Kurosawa provides a much better exposition on loneliness in his horror film Kairo. And guess what? It's actually INTERESTING! That film moved as slow as molasses in January, but there are better ways of addressing the concept of loneliness than the utter waste known as Vive L'Amour. Kairo is a perfect example of that.Fans of cinema may thank Tsai Ming-liang for directing this film, as he has provided irrefutable evidence that art-house cinema can be just as poorly made as B-grade, made-for-television horror flicks. Art-house snobs have now officially lost their pedestal of self-righteousness. The quality level of your precious genre now overlaps films like Army of Darkness and – gasp! – Showgirls. How do you like them apples?
Howard Schumann
In Taipei, a middle-aged real estate agent, May Lin (Yang-kuei Mei), goes about her daily routine of putting up signs, inviting potential customers to an open house, then sitting and waiting for them in empty apartments as the hours drag by. Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour is an honest and beautiful film about three lonely people whose lives become inextricably bound in a chance encounter. Dialogue is minimal and no one speaks for the first twenty-five minutes, creating a pervasive tone of emotional numbness. Hsiao-kang (Kang-sheng Lee), a young gay man who sells wall space for burials, soon finds the key to an apartment being shown by May Lin and moves in, taking a bath, getting dressed, then almost matter of factly cutting his wrists with a pocket knife. When May Lin meets Ah-jung (Chao-jung Chen) a slick street vendor of women's clothes during a lunch break, they coyly size each other up, then use the apartment for casual sex. Ah-jung, unaware of Hsiao-Kang's presence, takes the key from May Lin and also moves in. The characters live an existence surrounded by silence, unwilling or unable to reach out to each other, living in the empty spaces. They spend their time aimlessly, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, and just watching the time pass without any apparent connection to the teeming city they live in. Ming-liang's camera views the characters from a distance, at times simply watching them for minutes at a time go through a period of silent suffering. One of the most heartbreaking scenes is when Hsiao-Kang hugs and kisses a watermelon as if it were the responsive companion he so desperately needs. When May Lin comes to the apartment to rest, the two clandestine guests forge an alliance to avoid being seen. In an unforgettable sequence, Hsiao-Kang hides under the bed masturbating while May and Ah-jung make love directly on top. After May leaves, the young man crawls into bed with the sleeping Ah-jung and creeps his way inch by inch toward the sleeping man in a scene of heartbreaking loneliness and conflicted emotions. The film ends in a five-minute close up of one of the characters sitting alone in a newly-opened park that made me reflect on similar periods of loneliness in my own life. It also caused me to wonder if our modern cities have become little more than sanctuaries for the walking dead where everyone is a stranger, crossing paths in silence without a hint of recognition of a common humanity.
theorbys
First, the video box is very deceptive. This film is NOT about intense, erotic encounters with some hidden gay voyeur taking it all in.Somewhere in Taipei is a nice apartment. A young gay guy, (who is lonely as hell and sells cremation urns) gets the key by bolding plucking it out of the lock while no one is looking. An attractive young female real estate agent who, while trying to sell or rent the place, also uses it, checks up on it, stops in to take a crap, or a lie down, or take a guy there for hot, but causal sex. The guy she takes up there is a well off street vendor. He gets his key by swiping it from her after the sex. It is more of a situation than a story.Vive L'Amour takes a studied, hypernaturalistic approach that is a strong style statement in itself (an effect partly due to turning up the 'natural' sounds accompanying an action a notch or two and by not using music.) And despite her good looks and movie actress head of hair, the real estate agent is presented again and again as completely nonglamourous. She is always behaving in slightly exaggerated ways that show she is just a woman like any other. This is epitomized in the crap taking scene in the apartment, but there is also the scene where she cries: beautiful women in the movies usually cry with just their eyes, but here we get rich, rolling, mucal snorts that come straight from the nose. A lot of the film is spent following her completely unromanticized daily routine trying to sell or rent properties. As counter-point, and equally deliberately, we there are little movie touches: the big hair, all the actors are attractive, little bits of romantic/comedic chatter, the comedy/buddy goings on between the guys (who of course run into each other in the apartment--more movie comedy stuff), and so on.In the end Tsai manages to masterfully blend these contradictory forces into a climax that interweaves three (one per character) magical cinematic moments: Tenderness, Innocence, and Sadness. Vive L'Amour is fine, intelligent and moving film making.
supahz
I suppose it's nice and trendy to see wonderful things in the absolute emptiness of a film like this. With the sometimes pointless excesses of many Hollywood films, we can relax and enjoy a scene devoid of explosions, foul language, and corny one-liners. Minimalism has its place, and can be very effective when employed properly. However, this film is not one of those cases.Take the long scenes with no dialogue and dreary, sparse scenery. I'm sure that they must hold some great meaning and insight, because the implied message in shrouded in bafflement. The acting is poor... bland and pedestrian... and features one of the worst crying scenes in history (at the end of the film, if you can sit through it to the end). The scenery is drab, and the ridiculously long ending sequence of the girl walking through the barren park is as pleasurable as having a tooth pulled. I would call this anticlimatic, but as the film didn't build to any sort of climax whatsoever... not even in the "erotic" scenes... it would be untrue. I'm sure that there was a script employed during the filming, but with the amount of dialogue, I think it might have been written on a cocktail napkin. Basically, this film offers nothing to interest or amaze... no great story, no stunning insights, no visual drama, no excitement. Apart from two or three amusing moments, this film is a waste of two hours. A tragically boring and dreary film.
