Vive l’amour

Three lost souls form an unlikely love triangle in Tsai Ming-liang’s Venice-winning follow-up to Rebels of the Neon God, set against an urban 1990s Taipei just starting its economic growth. A teenage crematorium employee, a real-estate agent, and a street vendor/Lothario wind up sneaking in and out of the same vacant apartment, sometimes hooking up, but often misconnecting, with the apartment itself possibly their greatest object of desire. One could even see a typical yuppie romantic comedy here somewhere, but Tsai instead burrows into all the spaces edited out of such films, where uncertainty, stillness, and sadness hide. “Vive l’amour,” indeed.