Goodbye, Dragon Inn Incomplete Draft

Incomplete draft written for The Film Stage.

The timing seems almost too on the nose, to release a restoration of one of the definitive films about the decline of cinema and moviegoing at a moment when theaters across America remain shuttered and spectatorship in its ideal form has temporarily ceased to be. But to dwell on such ideas does a disservice to the film in question: Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), one of the very greatest films in the history of cinema, which received a long-awaited restoration last year. Far from a simple paen to a dying artform, it is freighted with complexities, perspectives, and histories that I can only begin to unpack here. There is no better place to start than with Tsai — quite literally within the film, as the back of his head appears in the final shot of the opening credits of Dragon Inn, alongside prominent Taiwanese film critic Alphonse Leigh — and the place Goodbye holds in his filmography. It is probably fair to say that Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, with the possible exception of Rebels of the Neon God, the best-known film Tsai has made, and notably it is his own personal favorite; Tsai went as far as to place it on his own Sight & Sound ballot in 2012. I happen to agree with this, yet when the film is examined beyond the basest elements of aesthetic style — Tsai’s penchant for long, static shots is in full effect here — Goodbye stands out as a wholly atypical entry within his body of work. A brief description is in order: Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes place over the final night of operation at the Fuhe Grand Theater in the Yonghe District of Taipei — the actual theater closed before filming began — which is showing King Hu’s landmark 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn as its last picture show, and follows a few workers and spectators as they experience both the film and the space of the theater, which is possibly haunted and/or a hotbed of gay cruising. This sense of compression is notable in and of itself: the shortest of Tsai’s theatrical features at just 82 minutes, it is also the only one of his films to take place in both one day and in one setting; the rest sprawl out over indefinite timespans and across numerous locations, sometimes moving outside the environs of one particular city or even a stable timeframe; even 1998’s The Hole, which revolves around the interactions between upstairs/downstairs neighbors in an apartment complex, has a few trips to the grocery markets. But what is even more striking is Tsai’s choice of central subjects: one is the theater’s ticket taker, played by Tsai regular Chen Shiang-chyi — wearing a brace on her right leg and who possesses a seemingly unrequited love for the projectionist — and the other is a Japanese tourist played by Mitamura Kiyonobu. The name missing from this list is Lee Kang-sheng, the leading man in every other one of Tsai’s features and the subject of, to put it frankly, his erotic fixations — Tsai is openly gay, and Lee is straight, though the two have lived together for a number of years now — and who here plays the projectionist, unseen until the final ten minutes of the film. Kiyonobu, on the other hand, is the only lead actor in a Tsai film to not become a regular (assuming that, as hinted by the director, that Days’s Anong Houngheuangsy will become one of his regular actors going forward), and who only appeared in one film after. In addition, though these characters are the primary foci, the key character in a scene shifts with more fluidity than any of his other films: Lee himself takes the center stage in his few scenes, along with some of the more memorable, possibly spectral denizens of the theater: a woman eating a mountain of melon seeds (Yang Kuei-mei, another Tsai regular), groups of men standing in the bathroom and the dark backrooms of the back theater, including frequent Tsai actor Chen Chao-jung, and most significantly of all Miao Tien (who played Lee’s father in many Tsai films) and Shih Chun, two of the main actors in Dragon Inn. If Lee is the fixed center of all of Tsai’s other films, it is surely significant that Goodbye, Dragon Inn operates without a personified center. The closest thing the film has to a center is thus the space itself, and by extension the masterpiece unspooling on its screen. Dragon Inn, and King Hu’s direction, is masterful on the precise opposite end of the spectrum from Tsai’s aesthetic style: quick cuts, rapid tracking shots, elaborate fight choreography. But they each share a particular relationship to Taipei; for all of the universal applications of cinema’s decline, these are both films and filmmakers intensely interested in a Chinese identity and sense of place. Dragon Inn was Hu’s first film made in Taiwan, as he sought to establish his own production methods apart from the Shaw Brothers, and became a blockbuster hit, inaugurating the flowering of his almost spiritual approach to the wuxia, drawing from the rhythmic movements of his actors and the grand landscapes of nature surrounding them to suggest a transcendental potential within the historical Chinese epochs and intrigues that formed the backbones of his narratives. Tsai, by contrast, is one of the great documentarians of the evolution of a city, with the majority of his films taking place within a slowly developing Taipei. His filmography is perhaps the most narratively cohesive of any non-franchise filmmaker, with each feature conceivably forming another chapter in the life of Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) as he grows up and grows old. Lee is the linchpin for Tsai’s oeuvre, and no other actor has been so intently, even fetishistically filmed by a single director over such an extended period, as Tsai maps his own longing and loneliness onto that of Kang’s. Without Kang as the central presence, Tsai seems to invest that same tortured eroticism into every facet of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as every single character seems to evince multiple strands of desire, each of which are embodied much more than spoken: the film contains just eleven lines of dialogue across two scenes, the first coming 44 minutes into the film. But