Vive l'Amour

Description

This mesmerizing film focuses on a bizarre love triangle between two young people who meet in a vacant apartment and a gay man who hides in the same apartment spying on the couple.

Customer Reviews:

Touching and original, if not for all tastes..........2006-09-22

One of the best of Tsai Ming-liang's glacial case studies of contemporary isolation and alienation in Taipei/the world, VIVE L'AMOUR is gripping in spite of it's extreme minimalism (his work shares this quality with Tarkovsky or Antonioni). Tsai's work is superficially very chilly and ultimately heartbreaking - though Tsai also (as always) manages to also sneak in a little deadpan humor, which in this case includes the rather ironic translated title.

Three young, outwardly successful Taiwanese happen to cross paths - unknowingly at first - in the empty Taipei condominium one (a real estate agent) is attempting to sell. Through a bare minimum in dialogue - VIVE L'AMOUR is essentially a silent film until about 20-30 minutes in - Tsai charts their isolation and fumbling attempts at various kinds of human connection and finding some personal sort of peace. Tsai's scenario and characters are globalized, stripped of most marks of identity, and very much adrift, and their growth (or lack of it) is communicated through sparse forms of acting, direction and cinematography that reinvents seemingly antiquated forms of film-making (again, silent film) into a new-millennial era. In this, Tsai crafts a sort of haunted, elegaic drama that slides around the limitations of language, inhabiting a dreamlike, if also very dark, psychological territory.

Typically Tsai uses no musical score, and the dialog is very sparse, with the film favoring the natural sound of whatever environment the characters find themselves in, so the many memorable scenes do tend to sneak up on you. The finale is unforgettable.

-David Alston

Penetrating character study.......2005-06-17

This three-person character study--a straight man, a straight woman, and a gay man--has for its title a bitterly ironic homage to love, using a phrase in French (that most romantic of languages) to convey a story, if it could be called that, which focuses sharply on two of its three characters, using the third as a foil for the other two.

The popular translation of the title is "Here's to love", or "Long live love"; it's a phrase that's used as much (if not more) in American circles as in French. But this is really a drama with sadness and loneliness as its two companion muses or driving forces. The gay man makes a semi-real attempt to kill himself; the woman, in one scene, cries alone, long and hard. They do these things because, it is clear, they cannot really express what love is, they cannot feel what love is, they cannot really connect to another person to give and receive love.

The third person, the straight man, blithely carried on his trade as an illegal street vendor, engaging in liaisons with the woman in the same unrented space in which the gay man himself hangs out. In one powerful scene, the two straights make love on a bed, directly underneath which the gay man engages in autoerotic behavior. It is clear that the gay man wants the straight man as much as the woman does.

The irony of the film transcends the title as well. The woman is a real estate agent, but has trouble finding paying customers; thus, her space is not valued. The gay man sells "columbaria" which are urns to house the ashes of the cremated dead; thus he is, in effect, a real estate agent for the dead while the straight woman is a real estate agent for the living. The gay man has no shortage of paying customers; the straight woman can't find one. Space reserved for the dead is more valuable than that for the living.

Tsai Ming-liang, the director, has to be counted as one of the most interesting contemporary working directors. Having now seen The Hole, Vive L'Amour, and Goodbye Dragon Inn, I can say without any doubt that he is a truly unique filmmaker, one to definitely keep an eye on.

Highly recommended. I will definitely see Tsai's other film The River as soon as I can.

I Will Watch This One Many More Times.......2005-03-21

I've watched Vive L'amour three times now, and like it more each time. The film's slow pace is especially effective at drawing us into sympathy and compassion for these characters, making the ending so devastating. The use of visual space to suggest isolation, loneliness, and the difficulty of connecting with others is powerful too (it reminds me of Todd Haynes' excellent SAFE in this way, and in others). Even though modern/postmodern life mostly offers a dehumanizing set of changes, there is hope in the filmmakers' use of cinematic magic to encourage affection and compassion for these three lonely people. Not a happy-go-lucky viewing experience, but one that effectively challenges the shiny lies of modernization.

A voyeurs delight..........2004-09-10

This movie intrigued me when I saw part of it on a few years ago. I recently purchased it and timed the film at 23 minutes before any character dialogue begins. It is a film about the feeling of isolation in a changing world. The people are making their way in life without a feeling of community, family, and direction. You see and feel their sense of despair and yearning to connect with someone even if it is under peculiar circumstances. I give it three stars only because it lacked some elements that would have made me feel something for the characters. I realize the director probably did that purposefully to drive home the point of being disconnected from community in a large city. It was like a voyeuristic look into the lives of people who are on the edge emotionally.

An overrated piece of garbage.......2002-09-14

"Blow Up" had good photography, if not much more. This movie has nothing.

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