Vive L'amour

Description

Stolen glances in a Taipei cafe lead a seductive real estate agent (Yang Kuei-Mei) and a handsome street vendor (Chen Chao-Jung) up to a vacant apartment she's trying to move for a heated liaison. However, the place has a hiding squatter-a suicidally depressed gay salesman (Lee Kang- sheng)-and a bizarre love triangle ensues as he opts to get involved with them, in Tsai Ming-Liang's beautifully filmed erotic effort. 118 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack: Mandarin; Subtitles: English. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Review Vive l’Amour, from 1994, is a wryly comic drama about a romantic triangle as well as the story of a luxurious and empty Taipei apartment where a suicidal salesman of cremation urns (Lee Kang-Sheng) lives as a squatter. When a real-estate agent (Yang Kuei-Mei) brings her lover (Chen Chao-Jung), a street vender, there, Tsai stages the trio’s erotic comings and goings with an incremental screwball precision, as if Jacques Tati had given free rein to his sexual fantasies. But the filmmaker grounds the irony in quietly flamboyant melodramatic moods, as in a scene where the agent waits alone in bed with an operatic pout that calls to mind grand Technicolor tearjerkers. Setting much of the taciturn, delicately choreographed action amid the city’s bustle, the director fuses a rigorously stylized vision with incisive documentary observation; Tsai is one of the great sardonic observers of urban spaces, with a keen eye for both the alien chill of gleaming towers and the poetic allure of decrepitude. --Richard Brody, The New Yorker Tsai Ming-liang's striking and beautiful second feature, a haunting look at alienation among three young individuals in Taipei--a real estate agent, a street vendor, and a gay and painfully withdrawn burial-plot salesman--won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and remains one of the key modernist works of the Taiwanese New Wave. Working principally without dialogue--with a feeling for both modern architecture and contemporary urban despair that often recalls Michaelangelo Antonioni--it gathers force slowly but builds to a powerful and devastating finale. --Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader Tsai takes what could be the ingredients for another “Maybe . . . Maybe Not” and creates a portrait of much formal beauty and austerity of human loneliness and longing so somber as to be demanding in the utmost. (Comparisons with Antonioni come to mind.) It unfolds, unaccompanied by music, as one superbly composed image of human isolation after another. Yet the often near-wordless Vive l’Amour is worth the not inconsiderable effort because it is an instance of an exceedingly bleak buildup, spiked by occasional dark humor, that actually pays off. --Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)

Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.55 x 7.53 x 5.48 inches; 3.52 ounces

Director ‏ : ‎ Ming-liang Tsai

Media Format ‏ : ‎ Subtitled, NTSC

Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 58 minutes

Release date ‏ : ‎ June 14, 2022

Actors ‏ : ‎ Chao-jung Chen, Kang-sheng Lee, Kuei-Mei Yang

Subtitles: ‏ ‎ English

Studio ‏ : ‎ Film Movement