carrying on a desultory affair with a porno vendor
His proclivity for dramatising urban peregrinations have led many to compare Tsai, particularly early in his career, to Antonioni, though Tsai is individuated by, if nothing else, his sense of humour, a characteristic Antonioni can't be said to have had in overabundance
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[...] The nagging pressure of sex separates the ageing Fu-Ho from the idealised cinema of a child's memory, a popular cinema seen at its prelapsarian pinnacle. The movie is only an afterthought for most of the contemporary theatregoers, pushed and pulled about by carnal need. [...]
The fanfare that opens Goodbye, Dragon Inn is followed by a comedown crash. The prologue gives us a vision of the Fu-Ho in its heyday, but immediately afterwards we encounter a Fu-Ho that’s anything but Grand. It’s just another underpopulated declining urban theatre on the eve of a ‘Temporary Closi…
[...] these yearnings exist within a larger yearning. Their unquenched desire echoes Tsai's own desire for the popular cinema of his youth - and not just the movies, but everything that goes along with them: the big neighborhood cinemas, the communal culture of family moviegoing, the family itself,…
