Flowing desire, floating souls: modern cultural landscape in Tsai Ming-Liang's Taipei trilogy.

Wu, I-Fen

Emerging in the early 1980s, Taiwanese New Cinema has developed its style as a reflection of Taiwan's history and society, representing the country's colonial past, social transformation, and contemporary cultural development. Consistently projecting history onto the screen, New Cinema creates a journey through Taiwan's past from the colonial era to the present, attempting to represent history in ways which will lead to the exploration and reconsideration of Taiwan's national and cultural identities. With the materials that sustain the national past, the New Cinema of the 1980s presents the very fabric of a national community, perpetuating the idea of the nation itself, the meaning of its culture, and the transformation of its society.

But the New Cinema of the 1990s has developed a different tendency, which is largely concerned with present-day capitalist metropolitan culture that no longer bears traces of the country's past. Even the New Cinema directors of the 1980s, such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang, who were keen to trace Taiwan's history through filmic representation, have gradually moved their concern with historical representation to the focus on urban metropolitan culture since the mid-1990s. (1) The urbanisation of Taiwan provides a dimension for filmmakers to explore modern society, and simultaneously draws a dividing line between the 1980s and 1990s New Cinema productions. Most directors of the 1990s no longer examine history with nostalgia; they seem to be more concerned with the outcome of that history, the urban environment of highly capitalist development, to show their interest in contemporary urban culture, and to turn their camera to the fast-growing Taipei. It is perhaps because the new generation directors have no t experienced the transforming era of Taiwan's society, or because the tight budget for contemporary film productions makes it financially expedient to locate narratives in and near the city, that Taipei is thereby frequently foregrounded in 1990s New Cinema to present the impulse of contemporary urban culture. (2) Viewed as a stage for the social change from the traditional to the modernised, Taipei figures in 1980s New Cinema in order to deal with the dichotomies of city/country, urban/ traditional, examining the process of historical and socio-political shifts, whereas in 1990s New Cinema, Taipei comes to be seen as an urban jungle of infinite possibilities, a stage for a reformulation of the cultural landscape and moral values, and such a portrait of Taipei often appears in Tsai Ming-Liang's films.

In contrast with his predecessors' consistent inclinations towards history, Tsai Ming-Liang does not bother trying to understand the process of modernisation and social-economic transformation; instead, he is inspired by the changes in socio-cultural patterns as a result of urbanisation, by which to explore the plenitude of modern culture. As one of the most distinctive filmmakers in contemporary Taiwan, Tsai is remarkably adept at exploring current culture, and his films consistently and obsessively deal with the urban alienation of a society in which people are emotionally blocked and seemingly afloat in a state of loss. Rebels of the Neon God/Qing Shaonian Nezha (1992), Vive, L'amour /Aiquing Wansui (1994), and The River /Heliu (1997), which are linked by a stylistic mood of isolation and thematic motifs such as the disaffected connections between people, form an interconnected trilogy that provides the explicit and detailed impulses through which to explore a contemporary society that has bulldozed its pa st and jerrybuilt its future.

Tsai's vision of contemporary culture is elaborated through his portrait of Taipei City, which comes into focus as an implicit protagonist of all his films. In other words, his metropolitan Taipei provides the setting to reflect upon the sound and look of a city and the lives of its people, projecting a cultural model embodied by western capitalist ideology that challenges traditional cultural values by tearing down and rebuilding the moral institutions and disciplines of social orders: the family, the school, and sexual relations. Tsai's foregrounding of miseen-scene of the capital Taipei as a reflection of urban sprawl is built around a rejection of traditional social values, through which the reformulation of modern cultural patterns is emphasised. Taipei becomes cinematically as well as socially the site of a new cultural generation, the locus of a defiant youth culture that rejects traditions, where the socio-cultural landscape depicted in 1980s New Cinema is, in a quite different filmic narrative, repla ced.

Tsai's Taipei is a world of urban malaise, in which people are cut off from each other and from their feelings, moving around drab, underlit apartments, cheap hotels, and gay saunas, looking for comforts to satisfy their loneliness and isolation. In Rebels of the Neon God, Hsiao-Kang, living with his parents in an apartment but having a strained relationship with his father, is supposed to be cramming for his university entrance exams; Ah-Tze, a young chancer, makes his living by prying open the coin-boxes of pay-phones and stealing the motherboards of video games with his friend; and Ah-Kuei, the mistress of Ah-Tze's brother, works as a receptionist at an indoor ice skating in the West End. One day, the three of them coincidentally meet when Ah-Tze gives Ah-Kuei a lift to the West End; his motorcycle blocks the way of a taxi at a set of traffic lights, and the taxi driver sounds his horn. The driver is Hsiao-Kang's father, who is taking Hsiao-Kang to a cinema for a break from his studies. Annoyed by the shar p beeping, AhTze takes out the lock of his motorcycle to break the taxi's front mirror, and then immediately speeds away before Hsiao-Kang's father can respond.

Hsiao-Kang drops out of cram school and hangs around on the streets of the West End; Ah-Tze is drawn to Ah-Kuei and sometimes visits her. Seeing Ah-Tze and Ah-Kuei together at a fun fair, Hsiao-Kang recognises him as the person who damaged his father's car; he begins to follow him. He catches a chance to wreck Ah-Tze's motorcycle by puncturing the tyres, slashing the seat and gluing the ignition while Ah-Tze is having sex with Ah-Kuei in a hotel. In the next morning, Ah-Tze is furious to discover what has happened to his motorcycle, and later, in a disastrous foray, sells the stolen video-game motherboards to the gangsters from whom he stole them. Ah-Tze and his friend are violently attacked by the gangsters, but eventually manage to jump into a taxi, the driver of which is Hsiao-Kang's father. Ah-Kuei and Ah-Tze want to leave Taipei for another place, but do not know where to go and what to do; Hsiao-Kang goes to a telephone meeting centre, and sits there feeling frustrated, with no idea how to carry on his life.

Rebels of the Neon God is constructed around a present-day youth who are lost in their sterile preoccupations, foregrounding the urban mise-en-scene of Taipei as a narrative strategy to address their feelings of inadequacy and frustration. Tsai's focus upon modem people's emotional emptiness and lack of communication is inscribed in the urban milieus, such as the flooded apartment, the murky hotel room, the noisy fun fair, and the under-construction tube stations; the city spectacle articulates the desires and emotions of modern people, which have been blocked and offered no spiritual escape routes. But this sense of emptiness seems to be pushed deeper and further in Tsai's next feature, Vive, L'amour, in which the three characters have a menage a trois when each of them fetches up in a luxury unlet flat that is up for sale.

Lin, a young unmarried estate agent, is actually the one trying to sell the flat, and she occasionally uses it to have sex. Ah-Jung, who makes his living by selling clothes, which he has bought in from abroad, on the night streets of the East District, follows Lin back to the flat one night, and begins a relationship with her. The other young man, Hsiao-Kang, who sells urn-spaces in a columbarium, finds this flat as he looks for a place to commit suicide. That evening, Ah-Jung's arrival in the flat forestalls Hsiao-Kang's suicide; the two of them make acquaintance and have no compunction about using it for a temporary shelter. Hsiao-Kang becomes conscious of the relationship between Ah-Jung and Lin, and sometimes hides himself under their bed to experience the moment of orgasm. One day, waking up from this great sexual pleasure, Lin dresses up and gets out of the flat, leaving Ah-Jung sleeping on the bed. Hsiao-Kang moves out from under the bed, noiselessly approaching Ah-Jung to kiss him, and then lies down beside him. Lin walks into a park, and sits on a bench, where she cannot help bursting into tears.

There is hardly any dialogue in Vive, L'amour, since the three non-connecting characters rarely meet and sometimes hide from each other, seemingly unaware of each other's existence. By cross-cutting three unrelated characters and withholding background information, Tsai leaves a lot of space for the viewer to interpret their relationships, and simply trusts his characters to move the viewer without dramatised conversation and emotional background music. On the other hand, Tsai also drops a lot of hints in the space he leaves, for example, the composition of the city spectacle and the sexual discourse, which underscore the messages to project a society embodied as much by urban alienation as by material desires, producing an existential solitude that has become a part of the urban cultural landscape. It seems that Tsai's films are all about solitude and alienation, about modern people who are unwilling to form emotional connections with friends and family. Sharing the characters, the mood, and the storyline, the last part of Tsai's trilogy, The River, elaborates the theme of emotional detachment from life even further, portraying the obscure despair of modern people, who are fervently looking for something while not knowing what that something is.

The unemployed young man, Hsiao-Kang, comes across his ex-classmate, Hsiang-Chi, who now works for a film unit shooting scenes near Tamshui River in central Taipei, which is notorious for its polluted water. On her invitation, Hsiao-Kang follows her to the film set and is cajoled by the film director to appear in her film as a corpse floating down the river. Afterwards, sent to a hotel to clean up, Hsiao-Kang has sex with Hsiang-Chi, but does not become involved with her, even though she seems to like him and wishes to carry on their relationship. Next day, Hsiao-Kang develops a pain in his neck and shoulder that affects his life to the extent of making him suicidal while in the hospital. His parents, who do not talk to each other, take it in turns to try different cures, but none of them work. Meanwhile, the father's bedroom has water pouring through the ceiling from the unoccupied apartment upstairs. Rather than trying to stop it, he deflects the water out of the window by pipes and plastic sheets.

The father takes Hsiao-Kang to try a faith cure in Taichung, while the mother stays at home and discovers the streaming water from the apartment above. While they wait for the faith-healer's further instruction, the father hangs around a gay sauna where he unwittingly coincides with Hsiao-Kang, the latter having sneaked out of their hotel to relieve his stress. The father slaps Hsiao-Kang's face with a furious cry. The next morning, the faith-healer tells them to return to Taipei to consult a doctor. Having heard that the faith-healer cannot help, Hsiao-Kang sneaks out on to the balcony, not knowing what to do.

Offering no solution to Hsiao-Kang's pain at the end of the film, Tsai opens up the possibilities in the last scene in which Hsiao-Kang walks out on to the balcony, which could be either a suggestion of a suicide attempt, or a ray of hope that he could be about to come to terms with his problems. The open ending of The River actually brings us back to the question of the urban cultural landscape of contemporary Taipei, which is addressed within the narrative and visual structure of the trilogy, and implicitly mobilised into the expression of sexual desires. It is clear that Tsai's filmic narrative in the trilogy shapes a new identity of urban culture, which embodies the shifting value system that has transformed the cultural fabric of Taiwanese society. A broader cultural discourse is provided through Tsai's foregrounding of Taipei City, which imparts a sexual connotation to modern people's relationships, and leads to an exploration of the modern cultural spectacle. Therefore, a close look at Taipei as the s ite of the breakdown of traditional social orders, and of the collapse of conservative categories of sexual identity in modern society, would serve well as a framework through which to examine Tsai's trilogy.

The emblematic significance of city spaces in Tsai's trilogy lies in its immediate ability to reflect social change, and the differences exposed by the cultural shift. Buildings, along with a few landmarks of Taipei, are among the most distinctive features in Tsai's composition of city spaces, embodying the history of the city and recording the changes in cultural patterns. In Rebels of the Neon God, Tsai's camera focuses upon the West End of Taipei, to present a city culture coherent with a defiant youth culture, which embraces sheer materialism and hedonistic desires, and turns itself against the social and moral codes to constitute a new Taiwaneseness. (3) Visually, Rebels of the Neon God creates a younger cultural generation by giving pictorial prominence to the very localist vision of the West End, marked by the continuing narrative device of situating actions at specific places belonging to the present-day youth, which defines Taipei as the embodiment of generational self-affirmation and constructs it as the site of liberation from traditional social and sexual disciplines. The new cultural generation is expressed through the cinematic representation of Taipei in progressively sensuous images, foregrounding the unattractiveness of Taipei, which shows, in fact, the director's intention to capture the external ugliness that coincides with the internal tawdriness and uncertainty of the younger generation's world.

Rebels of the Neon God opens with an accident: Hsiao-Kang cuts his hand by breaking a window glass and rushes to the bathroom to clean up. Annoyed, Hsiao-Kang ignores his parents' concern over his hand, and indifferently goes back to his room. The first few scenes clearly depict the edgy relationship between the two generations, as the family live together in the small apartment but barely talk to each other. Tsai frequently emphasises the tension and alienated relationships between people through his framing of characters in apartments, showing no substantial understanding between family members, nor intimacy between friends and lovers, apparently assuming that every building in this high-capitalist development city is emotionally empty. In Tsai's world, the relationship between people is likely to be based on buying and selling, enabling people to repeatedly cross paths but come no closer together. In the early scene in which Ah-Kuei makes love with Ah-Tze's brother, neither talks to the other until the ma n's beeper sounds. The man leaves the bed and gets dressed. Before he goes, he leaves a business card on Ah-Kuei's pillow, asking her to bring friends to buy cars from him. Ah-Kuei says nothing but puts his card into her bag. Here, the link between sex and love is ironic, because it is rather more mercenary than sincere. When the man leaves his business card on the bed, it is as if sex is a part of his business, included in his customer service. This car dealer views Ah-Kuei from a commercial perspective, labelling her as merchandise and evaluating the profit that could be made through her. Tsai has us see Ah-Kuei in a consumerist relation, watching her walking along the streets of the West End, shopping in a mall in which she sees and buys an image of herself through the dressing mirror in a fashion shop. In front of the mirror, she is presented as a commodity, an object of consumerism, the consumer to be consumed; and her material desire offers it back to her for the price of the product. It seems that cons umerism has become the dynamic of a capitalist society in which everybody buys and sells, consumes and is consumed, chooses and is chosen. When Ah-Tze does not show up for their date, Ah-Kuei calls to a stranger to make another date out of spite, asking the man's name and age, and is herself asked the same questions. We see her in a consumerist situation, bargaining a relationship in a completely business-like manner, as if negotiating the price of a product.

Ah-Kuei is not the only one who knows that contemporary society is dominated by buy-and-sell relationships; the estate agent, Lin, in Vive, L'amour, knows this even better. She understands that each person is a consummate consumer, impetuously pursuing material possessions and disposing of relationships, only showing interest in what he can get from the others. She recognises the importance of buy-and-sell relationships, as a set of rules by which to survive in a capitalist society. Perhaps that is why she does not bother to talk much, except when she is trying to persuade her clients to buy the flats she recommends, when she talks with enthusiasm. Throughout the film, Lin is abnormally quiet and indifferent; far from feeling excited or disgusted about her life, she simply moves around the empty flats and apartments she sells. Lin's emotional state is as empty as those houses, which is explicitly suggested by her job as an estate agent, and by the film's mise-en-scene. Most of the scenes of Vive, L'amour are shot in the empty apartments which are for sale, where Lin is seen to eat, to talk to her clients, to take a nap, and to have sex. For Lin, all the houses are the same, and it makes no difference to her whether she goes home or not, as she only sleeps overnight there and leaves the next morning, which is likely to be the same as staying in the empty flat. On the one hand, these empty apartments are safe, like home, as they do in a sense function as her homes, but on the other hand they are as dangerous, in different ways, as her own squalid little apartment, with its dangerous faulty gas boiler, and she has to handle such uncertain problems alone. She is certainly aware of the threatening uncertainties in her empty apartments, but somehow does not give up looking for a sense of security within them, and this keeps her consciously moving around the empty apartments, trying to find a safe place to settle down. (4) The most unexpectedly emotional moment occurs at the very end of the film, when Lin goes out of t he luxury apartment and into a nearly finished, constructed park, and sits near the outdoor concert hail and starts to cry. Scarcely looking satisfied with the sexual pleasure she had had the previous night, Lin is merely depressed. Her eyes empty, her face fallen, her thoughts presumably elsewhere, she appears utterly exhausted in the beautiful early morning. In the last three shots, for nearly seven minutes, Lin is framed promenading in the park, in which there is no music, no dialogue, but only her steps to be heard. The camera captures Lin's subtle change of mood through a series of long tracking shots and then a close-up, an editing technique which makes the viewer aware of her stress and get closer to her feelings. The conclusion of Vive, L'amour runs a rather different course from most of the films, as it does not intend to intervene, to liberate Lin from her life, her series of never ending days of moving around empty apartments. By placing Lin crying in an empty park at the end of the film, which Tsa i is reluctant to give explanations of, Vive, L'amour states the dilemma that contemporary people are trapped in their lives and offered few choices by which to change them, which drives them to the edge of emotional emptiness. Perhaps the ending of Vive, L'amour ought not to be perceived as melodramatic, as it is an emotional sensibility that narrates the loneliness of present-day people, even as it leads us through the alienated modern culture towards a better under-standing of its social viabilities.

Compared with Rebels of the Neon God, the presentation of Taipei in Vive, L'amour is different, not foregrounding high-rise, cheap, monotonous apartments built in the late seventies as a demonstration of the government's modernisation of living conditions, nor high-obsolescence streets where every corner looks like a construction site. On the contrary, the image of Taipei is bright and clean, which is completely different from that in Rebels of the Neon God, where it is wet and dark. On the other hand, Tsai's Taipei in Vive, L'amour is abstract and fragmented, and the regional colour is not as strong as that in Rebels of the Neon God, in which a typical West End culture is recognised. As Tsai has said in an interview, the focus of this film is on Taipei's citizens, so he blurs the lines between the West End and the East District, avoiding specifying any particular area of Taipei. (5) It is interesting that Tsai makes the explicit connection between urban people and occupational options, supplying us with ano ther framework for understanding the floating minds of modern people. But there are multiple levels of irony here. For example, Lin is an estate agent, and moves around the empty houses to promote them to her clients. Her wanderings from one empty flat to another, however, also represent her fight with her insecurity and loneliness, and her attempts to settle down emotionally. Ah-Jung sells clothes in the night streets, which is an unstable occupation, driving him to drift from one place to another. (6) Hsiao-Kang sells urns spaces, which is even more ironic as his job is house hunting for the dead, though he cannot find himself a place to settle down and has to barge into an empty flat to commit suicide. As Tsai himself reveals in an interview, his characters' occupations in Vive, L'amour show the emotional status of the Taipei citizen as being isolated and obscurely dissatisfied, which points to the alienation between people. (7) This alienation enhances the ironic gross on accounts of commercial relationsh ips between people and thereby undercuts the possibility of an intimate relationship in Tsai's transient, comfortless Taipei. This buy-and-sell relationship distances people from emotional communication of any kind, viewing erotic contact as a business; for example, the mother's lover in The River, a pornography merchant, pirates other people's sexuality to make money but himself has scant interest in making love to his partner. (8) As the film critic Philip Kemp points out, the scenes in saunas in The River "offer a rather less erotic excitement than the average supermarket, (in which) the men who cruise these murky passageways treat their fellow-customers much like products on a shelf, or dishes in an automat--opening cubicle doors, glancing in at the contents, then closing them again without a word." (9) The visual potency of such a scene, which goes beyond its narrative purpose, is held in a long shot as the camera tracks forwards in the dim corridors, as if keen to violate the privacy behind each door. S hot with a haunting suggestiveness, the characters' desire for erotic contact to compensate for emotional emptiness is like shopping in a supermarket, by which Tsai suggests that contemporary people are emotionally pierced by consumerism, and physically paralysed by their consuming desires, leading to their collapse in emotional connections.

Desire and water are twin motifs in Tsai's films. The image of water has strong symbolic meanings in all Tsai's works, signifying emotional pain, sexual desire, or psychological fear. In The River, Hsiao-Kang develops an unbearable pain the day after he floats in the river, and none of the traditional or western medical treatments work on him. Hsiao-Kang's pain, which confines him for most of the movie to a neck-support, is possibly to be seen as his emotional denial of life, as he is extremely detached from his parents and unsure about his own sexuality. The opening scene of The River hovers around the landmark of central Taipei, where, on the way to the underground, Hsiao-Kang meets his ex-classmate, Hsiang-Chi. Though having sexual relations with her in a hotel, Hsiao-Kang has scant interest in keeping in touch with her, shown by Hsiang-Chi's immediate disappearance from the film. Yet Tsai does not limit Hsiao-Kang's sexuality to the single explanation suggested by his encounter with Hsiang-Chi, but rather holds it until the very end of the film. Hsiao-Kang seems to be emotionally detached from everything and everybody, particularly from his father, to whom he does not talk. Living with his parents in a small apartment, Hsiao-Kang rarely communicates with them, and the three family members are barely seen together in the same shot. As the film critic Tony Rayns comments, it is about half an hour into the film before the audience realise that they are a family, living essentially independent lives in the same apartment. (10) Perhaps it is the detached relationship between Hsiao-Kang's parents, which causes the apathetic atmosphere of his family, that prevents him from getting closer to Hsiang-Chi, as his parents' marriage reminds him how a relationship would possibly develop. It is perhaps surprising that Tsai has Hsiao-Kang find his father in the gay saunas and have sexual contact with him. However, Hsiao-Kang's sexual experience with his father in The River is aligned with the imaging of a new moral order, wh ich is a metaphoric expression rather than a sensual gratification. The surface impression of a sexual relationship between father and son is probably striking and incongruous; however, their transgression of moral boundaries is constructed to be a narrative strategy to represent a break with previous Taiwanese cultural modalities. This sequence ends up with the father's furious slap on Hsiao-Kang's face, which is, subtly but strongly, much more an act of catharsis for the father's embarrassment than his anger. But even so, Tsai does not go for a cliched final ending -- Hsiao-Kang's pain is not released by his sexual satisfaction in the saunas, or by his father's blow, or even by his mother's stemming the flow of water from upstairs. (11) It might suggest a mood of utter despair, yet Tsai simply ends the film with no resolution of Hsiao-Kang's pain. There seems little doubt that Tsai's aim in making The River is to go as deeply as possible into the minds of the characters without abandoning his stylish deadpa n black humour. The River is thus slyly humorous but not too pessimistic, amusing but not superficial.

Water is a recurrent image in Tsai's films, insidiously represented as an unpredictable and disruptive force to influence the characters' lives. In The River, the father has to confront the water pouring through his bedroom ceiling. Instead of sending for a plumber, the father manages to deflect the water out to the drains. Estranged from his wife and distant from his son, he is emotionally amputated and looking for comforts by visiting gay saunas in search of illicit sex. It is thus tempting to read the pouring of the water as a parallel to the emotional loneliness that he refuses to admit but diverts into a loveless sex in gay saunas. (12) As we watch the father's response to the downpour of water, we see how reluctant he is to come to terms with his emotional emptiness, which does not help to release him from the constraints of suppression of body and mind.

Tsai seems to hint that modern people are afraid to confront their emotional problems, and sexual pleasure becomes the escape route out of their emotional desert. This sexual implication is noted in Rebels of the Neon God, in which a high-rise apartment is constantly flooded, serving to define the film's centre of gravity as the struggle of individuals to achieve their desires. When Ah-Tze notices that the water springs out from the drain in the kitchen, Ah-Kuei is with his brother in his room. Ignoring the flooding, Ah-Tze returns to his room where he hears Ah-Kuei having sex with his brother, and then he himself has an orgasm. Tsai mentions that he has always thought of water as a symbol of sexual desire, and this idea connects to the final sequence of The River, when the mother fights to staunch the streaming water. (13) Flirting with her boyfriend while he is sleeping, she is harshly and impatiently rejected. Stressed, she goes home, and sits in the dining room eating and drinking water, unaware that the flooding is spreading. Throughout the film, she is seen to eat and drink water, or watch pornographic films in her room, which explicitly serves as a sexual implication to note that she is emotionally isolated and tries to numb her sense of loneliness by sensual stimulation. The film's final confrontation between the mother and the flood also underscores the persistent bonding of sexual desire and emotional emptiness throughout Tsai's works, as they each recognise water as a sensitive correlative to emotion, as well as a force of desire. When the mother finally turns off the tap water in the unoccupied apartment, standing in the flooded kitchen in which everything is floating, she despairs, possibly because this reminds her of her emotional state, which is floating on sensual desires and offering no emotional access.

Apart from water, which is a significant motif running through Tsai's trilogy, homosexuality is another crucial theme inscribed in the films to affirm the changes in urban cultural patterns. Taipei comes to be seen as a place of infinite possibilities, and of liberation from the oppression of social and moral disciplines, a stage for a potential reformulation of the cultural landscape, sexual identity, and moral values. Taipei is constituted to introduce an urban landscape where individual desires freely circulate, switching sexual identity without the heavy baggage of morality. The framing of the personal desires makes Tsai's collective protagonist the embodiment of a social narrative whose grand theme is the shift from the phallocentric social order to egocentric sexual liberation. In Rebels of the Neon God, Hsiao-Kang bumps into Ah-Tze, who he starts shadowing, utterly unaware that he possibly has a crush on him. In the film, Tsai hints at the homosexual predilection of Hsiao-Kang but does not manage to l et his sexual attraction towards Ah-Tze grow; however, this kind of obscure relationship between two men is more developed in Vive, L'amour, in which Hsiao-Kang cooks and washes clothes for Ah-Jung. His essentially feminine characteristics are registered as a resistance to patriarchal constructions of sexual identity, and transcend its repressive categories. In one scene, Hsiao-Kang steals into Ah-Jung's room, where he opens Ah-Jung's suitcases and takes out the women's clothes that Ah-Jung bought abroad, standing in front of the mirror to try them on. Hsiao-Kang looks extremely excited when he puts on these garments one by one; he seems to identify with women by his fetish of dressing like them, and seems satisfied with this identity. A more ostentatious reference to Hsiao-Kang's ambivalent identity is presented when he gets out from under the bed, gazes at the object of his sexual desire, Ah-Jung, who is sleeping, and moves close to him. Suddenly, he kisses Ah-Jung. Tsai keeps the camera fixed on the two me n for a little longer, a sentimental move that allows Hsiao-Kang's secret adoration to float queasily before us, while Ah-Jung is sleeping but could wake up at any moment. At one point, Hsiao-Kang's kiss is a confirmation of his sexuality, which is reflective of the contemporary cultural impulse, symbolising that sexual deviation has been recognised as a part of modern culture.

Tsai's refraining of traditional morality and patriarchal society is also expressed in his portrayal of women. In Vive, L'amour, the estate agent, Lin, is a typical modern woman who is financially and emotionally independent, and capable of handling difficult situations, for example, fixing her falling gas boiler. It is not surprising to see the image of independent women in Tsai's films, as it has been well pictured in the New Cinema of the 1980s, for instance, Edward Yang's Taipei Story/Qingmei zhuma (1985), in which the female protagonist represents a positive image of professional women. What is extraordinary is that Tsai reverses the traditional sex roles, privileging female desire and power, to challenge the patriarchal structure of sexual pleasure and power. When Lin is aware of Ah-Jung's interest in her, she does not show her feelings, but keeps walking slowly and lets Ah-Jung follow her. It looks as though Lin is consciously seducing Ah-Jung, as she does not try to stop him following her, or attempt to get rid of him. She walks in front of him, dominating the situation. Even when they have sex, she is the one who dominates the relationship and does not allow him to kiss her. While Ah-Jung still remains in the throes of the previous night, Lin apathetically gets out of the bed and leaves. In these episodes, Tsai's camera prowls watchfully, keeping a certain distance so as not to interfere with Lin's dominance over Ah-Jung, which positively avows the change of gender boundaries.

As reflections and expressions of the contemporary culture, Tsai's films illuminate the increasing tendency of Taiwan's cultural development towards the pattern of western capitalist culture, indicating the breakdown of traditional social orders and values. Offering a portrait of modern people's applicability to the life of urbanised Taipei, Tsai's trilogy displays a vision of contemporary culture that captures the flow of urbanism, and the interplay between individual and society, which have charted new and exciting paths for Taiwanese flimmaking, symbolising the transformation of New Cinema in the 1990s. Tsai's Taipei trilogy not only presents a new visual rhetoric with the monitor-like long takes and non-linear narrative structures, but also makes Taipei a site in which the notion of modern Taiwanese cultural landscape and the ramifications of urbanisation could be addressed and debated. Tsai Ming-Liang is a filmmaker who deserves the closest attention.

(1.) The insistent nostalgia charactering Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films seems to be disappearing in his recent ones. After Good Men, Good Women (1994), Hou no longer looked for the lost moments of Taiwan's historical plenitude, but sought to figure out a meaningful way to deal with contemporary life, which is obviously seen in Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) and Millennium Mambo (2001 ). Although he dealt with modern society in Daughter of the Nile (1987), we do not know if he attempted to find out the meaning of modern people's lives when he shot this film, as the film's producer insisted that Hou had to use the cast and story attractive to young audiences. Edward Yang has already started to explore the terrain of urban culture in his Terrorizer (1986), yet his early films, such as That Day, On the Beach (1982), and Taipei Story (1985), are concerned with Taiwan's socio-economic restructuring from an industrialised to a capitalist society. His sharp observation on the apparent cultural incompatibility between tradit ion and modernisation, the past and the present, has been completely replaced by his exploration of the bourgeoisie in an ultra-urban society in which people are trapped in a cage of materialism, unable to find room for a plausible, personal intimacy. This has been a consistent theme in his later films, A confucian Confusion (1994), Mahjong(1 996), and Yiyi (2000).

(2.) According to the Taiwanese film critic, Wang Wei, there is a subtle reason for the use of Taipei as the shooting locale in the 1990s New Cinema. Long dominated by Hollywood and Hong Kong films in the box offices, Taiwan's film industry has declined at home as in the rest of the world. This results in emerging problems like the shortage of professional workers, and the lack of confidence in production investment. Big budget productions in the 1990s like Good Men, Good Women, and The Hills of No Return which each cost 30-50 million Taiwanese Dollars (about [pounds and sterling]0.6-1 million) are rarely seen. Wang Wei, "Taipei Transformation: Taiwanese Cinema from the 80s to the 90s", Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (1995), 63.

(3.) The West End of Taipei was a centre of popular culture, but has been superseded by the East District since the 1980s. As the construction of the underground has finished in the late 1990s, the convenience of public transportation has brought the young people back to the West End. The Taipei City government also reorganised this area, regularly holding small-scale film festivals and performances. The movie street is the most well-known spot in the West End.

(4.) Hsieh Zen-Ch'ang. "Vive, L'amour. Interview with Tsai Ming-Liang," Film Appreciation, no. 71, Sep/Oct (Taipei: National Taiwan Film Institute, 1994), 46.

(5.) According to Tsai, Taipei City is the implicit protagonist of his first film, Rebels of the Neon God, in which the heavy traffic, the over crowded West End, and the humid rainy summer, set out his impression of Taipei. See: Hsieh, 47. Although Tsai did not intend to present a specific area of Taipei in Vive, L'amour, as he told Hsieh in his interview, the film is marked by its general focus on East District, which is distinguished for its night streets and luxury residences.

(6.) The police irregularly check business licences in the night streets and night markets. Those who do not obtain a licence from the government and get caught by the police, have to pay a fine. So when they hear the police coming, they quickly pack and run away.

(7.) Hsieh, 46.

(8.) Philip Kemp, "Bodily Fluids: Tsai Ming-Liang's The River," Sight and Sound, vol. 8, no. 4 (1998), 34.

(9.) Kemp, 34.

(10.) Tony Rayns, "Confrontation: Interview with Tsai Ming-Liang," Sight and Sound, vol. 7, no. 3 (1997), 15.

(11.) Kemp, 34.

(12.) Kemp, 34.

(13.) Rayns, 18.

I-Fen Wu just received her Ph.D. in Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interest is mainly in Asian/European cinema.