听 Taiwanese writer-director Tsai Ming-Ling's bitter-sweet Goodbye Dragon Inn isn't easy to categorise: an exercise in cinematic minimalism, it's a ghost story, a deadpan comedy, and a lament for an earlier era of film-going. The setting is the run-down Fu-Ho cinema in Taipei, where, on the very last night of business the 60s martial arts picture Dragon Inn is being screened. Only a handful of spectators have turned up, and most of them seem more interested in smoking, eating, and cruising than in the film itself.
Shooting in his typically lengthy static takes, Ming-Ling makes the Fu-Ho theatre arguably the most important character in Goodbye Dragon Inn. This building is a cavernous affair and it's clearly seen far better days - buckets are now used to collect the rain leaking through the roof. There only appear to be two members of staff: a lame female cashier, who hobbles up and down the grimy corridors diligently carrying out her duties, occassionally gazing raptly at the big screen, and an elusive projectiontist (Ming-Ling regular Lee Kang-Sheng), who seems to make a point of avoiding any contact with his devoted colleague.
"URBAN SOLITUDE AND EMOTIONAL DISCONNECTION"
Leavened with a number of droll sight gags, notably one involving the comings-and-goings in a gents toilet, Goodbye Dragon Inn is very much in keeping with Ming-Ling's previous rain-soaked explorations of urban solitude and emotional disconnection such as The River and What Time Is It There. He's an austere director who keeps dialogue and music to a minimum, and it's some 45 minutes here before any words are exchanged - "Do you know this place is haunted?", a young gay Japanese man (Kiyorobu Mitamura) is told. Certainly there is something phantom-like about the way people seem to materialise in the dark of the auditorioum and ghost past one another in the adjoining rooms and passages. And the mood of longing and loss is encapsulated in the the 60s song 'Can't Let Go', which plays over Goodbye Dragon Inn's final wistful scene.
In Taiwanese with English subtitles.
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