Where should one begin to understand Tsai Ming-liang? From the beginning.The News Lens
Date: 2019/10/01
By: Brandon Kemp

For many directors, there seems to be something intensely personal about their first films. Malaysian-born filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s (蔡明亮) Taipei trilogy feels like that. In those films, he explores youthful anomie, unspoken longings, and familial dysfunction in ‘90s Taipei. By his admission, much of his inspiration comes from his own experiences.

Knowing where to begin with any director can be a challenge, particularly with one as deliberately paced as Tsai. For him, though, it really is best to begin at the beginning. To do so is to watch Tsai struggling to find a cinematic language, just as his recurring cast of characters struggle to find their place in a fast-changing world. No one can maintain that level of vulnerability, personally or artistically, over a lifetime. But that’s why it’s beautiful when one dares. By shedding many of the conventions of New Wave predecessors like Edward Yang (楊德昌) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), Tsai freed himself to depict love and loneliness for a new generation and cement his place among the great auteurs of the century.

Tsai’s first feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), tells the story of a restless youth called Hsiao-kang (played by perennial friend and muse Lee Kang-sheng (李康生), who stars in all of Tsai’s subsequent works). At the film’s opening, Hsiao-kang is unable to focus on his studies, instead impaling a nearby cockroach with his compass. His superstitious mother is convinced her son is the reincarnation of the mischievous god Nezha, who in Chinese mythology detests his father and ultimately returns his flesh and bones to his parents, due to Hsiao-kang’s strained relationship with his father.

When an older punk gets in a row with his cab-driver father by lopping off his mirror before speeding off, Hsiao-kang decides to follow this stranger who has just emasculated the family patriarch. The nature of this fascination is never spelled out, but there are hints: After failing to befriend the older teen in their lone interaction, Hsiao-kang vandalizes his idol’s motorcycle at one point with the word “AIDS,” a projection, perhaps, of his own buried feelings.    [FULL  STORY]