Vive L’amour

Tsai Ming-liang’s strikingly beautiful second feature (1994), a haunting look at alienation among three young people in Taipeia real estate agent, a street vendor, and a gay, painfully withdrawn burial-plot salesmanwon the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and is one of the key modernist works of the Taiwanese new wave. Working principally without dialogue, with a feeling for modern architecture and contemporary urban despair that often recalls Michelangelo Antonioni, the film gathers its forces slowly, but builds to a devastating finale. In Mandarin with subtitles. 118 min. (JR)

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