Rebels of the Neon God

Amazon.com

The first feature film from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, Rebels of the Neon God has more conventional "action" than most of this director's films, yet still features his unique cinematic style. A pair of petty hoodlums rob payphones and play video games at an arcade; one of them flirts with a girl who works at a roller rink. While taking her home on his motorcycle, the hoodlum smashes the side mirror of a taxi--which may be what inspires the taxi driver's son, a student who has just quit school, to follow the hoodlum around in pursuit of revenge. Rebels of the Neon God is told through a series of beautifully composed tableaux; the camera rarely moves, and most scenes are a single sustained shot. Yet the movie's measured pace and subdued but compelling visuals become strangely mesmerizing, as in the director's other films (Vive L'Amour, The Hole). --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews:

Taipei teen angst ==> reviewer anomie.......2004-06-14

"Rebels of the Neon God" may be a tonic antidote to the portrayal of glittering high-rise Taipei in "Yi-Yi", but it's still a far cry from the underbelly films of Wong Kar-Wai or Scorsese. Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Goodbye, South, Goodbye" (the obvious comparison), it explores not the banality of evil, but the banality of naughtiness. At least the cinematography adapts better to the small screen than "South", and the video transfer is better than the copy of "South" I viewed. (To get production issues out of the way, the subtitles are hilariously out of synch with the dialog, sometimes to the point of impenetrability, and probably not a very close translation; at least they were visible.) (Oh yes, the theme music sounded like something from a circus; eventually I started to giggle each time it started up.)

"Neon Gods" involves two clusters of people. One, a couple of teenaged petty thieves (Tse and Ping)living in an apartment with a perpetually regurgitating floor drain, and the girl (Kuei) they are currently trying to make time with. The other, a disaffected student (Hsiao Kang) studying for exams and his taxi-driver father and religious nut mother.

We follow Tse and Ping as they sleep, break into phone and vending machine coin boxes (which they carefully replace), contemplate their flooded floor, and eventually steal some circuit boards after breaking into a video game parlor. They pursue and compete for a young woman they meet renting skates at a roller rink, and get drunk a lot, passing out in hotels.

Hsiao Kang is frustrated in his studies, and has some anger issues -- he smashes a bug on a window so violently he breaks the glass and goes through the rest of the film with a bandaged hand. His father, in the only role with some verve, seems headed for an early heart attack or stroke, shouting at his family and other drivers, including Ah Tse on a motorcycle. The mother retreats into religion, believing Hsiao to be the incarnation of a god.

Tse, honked at, surreptitiously smashes the taxi's side mirror. Hsiao, who had been riding with his father, later sees him, and follows Tse, Ping and Kuei, eventually extracting some petty revenge. Tse and Ping, meanwhile, get in trouble with some slightly badder boys through a magnificent demonstration of sheer stupidity; Ping gets beaten, and Tse and Kuei want to go away, but can't imagine where.

I almost got a flicker of caring about the characters at the very end ... but it soon faded.

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