Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 10: Wed May 26

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai, 2003): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

 

This film, which is also being shown on June 2nd (details here), will be introduced tonight by director Peter Strickland.

Chicago Reader review:
For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 2003 masterpiece manages to be many things at once: a Taiwanese Last Picture Show, a failed heterosexual love story, a gay cruising saga, a melancholy tone poem, a mordant comedy, a creepy ghost tale. A cavernous Taipei movie palace on its last legs is (improbably) showing King Hu's groundbreaking 1966 hit Dragon Inn
 to a sparse audience (which includes a couple of that film's stars) while a rainstorm rages outside. As the martial-arts classic unfolds on the screen, so do various elliptical intrigues in the theater—the limping cashier, for instance, pines after the projectionist, even though she never sees him. Tsai has a flair for skewed compositions and imparts commanding presence to seemingly empty pockets of space and time.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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