Critics reviews

Coming at the cusp of the much-fabled "death of cinema" and folding sheafs of time and legend into an autoerotic ouroboros of cinema spectatorship, perhaps it mirrored the emotional life of many critics, even those that weren't hunting for gay couplings in the bathroom as one central character does here. (Maybe they should try?) What that reception hid, however, is just how punk it is, and just how deep that eroticism goes.

The allure of cinema and nostalgia for a vanished era of movie-going suffuse one of Mr. Tsai's greatest films, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn".

A scene in which two aged patrons are revealed to be two of the martial-arts stars has the intimate grandeur of a grizzled Wild West fadeout.

Along with contemporaries like Bela Tarr, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Gus Van Sant, Tsai makes profound use not only of silence, but also slowness and extreme long takes, reinventing the concept of Bazinian realism with topical potency. It is cinema that, when experienced in the proper setting, engulfs completely, proving that there are tricks other than cgi and accelerated montage that filmmakers can use to dazzle modern audiences.

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 2003 masterpiece manages to be many things at once: a Taiwanese Last Picture Show, a failed heterosexual love story, a gay cruising saga, a melancholy tone poem, a mordant comedy, a creepy ghost tale.

Watching [the ticket seller] move in such protracted intervals, you realize she's much younger than her dowdy disposition makes you think she is. (Anybody who's seen Tsai's ''What Time Is It There?" knows Chen is a minx.) You also realize the limp is a thing of beauty. The camera loves her body's fluid stride and the way it transforms an ordinary long shot into something that steals your breath and breaks your heart.

The screening of Hu's film becomes the pretext for Tsai to explore a number of mysteries — a process to which he brings humor, tenderness... and a creative intelligence without equal in contemporary filmmaking... Before the end of the film, in a stunning turn-around, Tsai casts us, the viewers, in the roles of the ghosts who haunt the theater. It's a gesture of hope to have made Goodbye Dragon Inn, which defines film as the double reign of cyclical time and the imaginary space of desire.

It's hard not to think of Mr. Tsai's masterwork in valedictory terms, or to feel that the cinema could come to a marvelous end right here. This is a movie about movie going - the greatest I know - inextricably tied up with death and reincarnation.

While Tsai's long, static takes are basic Lumière, his narrative evokes the lost world of silent cinema. A prolonged gag is derived from a spectator's efforts to retrieve her fallen shoe. A wordless scene in the men's toilet is a small masterpiece of comic timing. The action is a dance of simple activities...

In a roundabout way, Tsai's unique, rigid brand of formalism...leads effectively to an uncommonly intimate level of audience empathy. With Goodbye, Dragon Inn, yet another masterpiece, Tsai has made his most starkly minimal film to date, and, in some ways, his most sublime.

Goodbye Dragon Inn represents the apex of Tsai's work so far, though it's difficult to conceive that Tsai could take his remarkable aesthetic any further. For he has finally, fully achieved the mystical stasis towards which all his films have been working. The emotional affect is no longer thematic, but experiential. No longer simply the medium for the materialization of emotion, film—this film, any film—is the resulting object of that materialization as well.

Like Tati, Tsai isn't interested in form for its own sake. He realizes that art is simply another way of reconfiguring sight. Goodbye Dragon Inn is perhaps his most radical restatement of that idea. For all the sadness and delicacy of his movies, there is something of a rebuke to them. They represent gentle scoldings of the modern sensibility; they remind us of our unparalleled capacity for complacency and myopia.