Complete first draft written for The Film Stage.
While far better known by its English title, the appropriately elegiac Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece bears a far different title in Mandarin (rendered here in pinyin): Bú sàn, which roughly translates to “never leaving,” or, if one prefers the Sartre connotation, “no exit.” It forms the root of two distinctly contradictory Chinese idioms, which perfectly encapsulate the lamentation and beauty of Tsai’s film: Tiān xià méi yǒu bù sàn de yán xí, which is the infamous “all good things must come to an end,” and Bù jiàn bù sàn, which basically means “even if we don’t see each other, don’t give up and leave,” or “I’m not leaving until I see you.”
From its title on down, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the greatest films in the history of cinema and which received a long-awaited restoration last year, construes itself not as the simple paen to a dying artform that it is often perceived as, but as a constellation of complex, aching desires, both wholly in keeping with Tsai’s oeuvre and standing starkly apart from it. Of course, the timing seems too on the nose, given that theaters across America remain shuttered and spectatorship in its ideal form has temporarily ceased to be. But Goodbye is, above all, a resolutely present-minded film, less concerned with the future of theatergoing than with the material longing and mystery that its inhabitants experience.
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 suggested to be 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 a single day and in one setting. 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, and who here plays the projectionist, unseen until the final ten minutes of the film. 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 loosely gathered in the dark backrooms of the 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 subject of all of Tsai’s other films, it is surely vital that Goodbye, Dragon Inn operates without a personified center. Instead, all the erotic fixations and intense longing are transferred to totemic figures and objects: a smoldering cigarette, a makeshift hallway of cardboard boxes, and above all the space of the theater, and by extension the masterwork unspooling on its screen. Dragon Inn, and King Hu’s direction, is masterful on the precise opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from Tsai’s famously static, long-take 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 that Tsai’s film invites, these are both films and filmmakers intensely interested in a Chinese identity and sense of place. Hu’s picture provides the necessary counterbalance for Goodbye’s near-wordlessness — the film contains just eleven lines of dialogue across two scenes, the first coming 44 minutes in — offering a realm where its characters can express anything, move in whatever manner they choose.
Tsai’s characters have no such recourse: the ticket taker is forced to walk with a pronounced limp, and the tourist is limited by his total unfamiliarity with the building. Instead, they project their desires and greatest wishes onto both the screen and the people around them. The ticket taker’s encounter with the film, where she sees the showcase fight scene of Lingfeng Shangguan and the projected beam forms a speckled light pattern upon her face, is understandably the most famous, but even more central to Tsai’s project is the scene early on where the tourist sees Shih Chun in the audience and sits next to him. It is unclear what his intentions are as he leans in — perhaps it is to ask for a light, perhaps to inquire about his acting, perhaps for carnal reasons, or maybe it is all of the above — but what is unmistakable is the look of pure longing on his face, and the disappointment with which he gets up and leaves the auditorium as Shih stays fixated upon the screen, watching his past life live the heroics he can no longer experience.
Tsai’s filmography is one of the most concrete and teleological ever created, yet his individual films rarely resolve themselves in so neat a fashion, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the pinnacle of this inclination. Yes, the theater is closed and its residents scattered into the rainy Taipei night, but Tsai affords his characters the barest hint of a connection, which in this context registers as the most magnanimous of gestures. And then there is the Yao Lee song “Can’t Let Go,” dubbed “an oldie from the ‘60s” by Tsai (the same decade in which Dragon Inn was released), which lingers long after the final image of the theater fades away. Both wistful and accepting, bitter and sweet, it, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn refuse to side with one feeling over the other, and instead to embrace the irresolution, the mixed emotions that resonate no matter the end result. It is all in the passing of years, the endless possibilities: though we may have lost the space that connected us, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to find each other, in another place, at another time.
