Tsai Ming-Liang : The River

Acclaimed Tawian-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is renowned for creating some of the most nihilistic and erotic films of the past ten years. Tsai's films often depicting the human body as a mysterious, malleable machine consuming and excreting of its own volition and bodily functions, become metaphors for loneliness, desire, decay, and escape. His obsessive and isolated characters give his films a bleak outlook, but they also embody a wry sense of absurdist humor Tsai's first feature-length film, Rebels of a Neon God, which has been called a contemporary version of Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, and relates the story of an isolated man, Lee Kang-sheng, who is obsessed with the successes of his rival. In his attempts to destroy the object of his jealousy, Kang sows the seeds of his own ruin. Like many of Tsai's films, The River uses water in all of its capacities -- cleansing, raining, nourishing, flooding -- to symbolize the lead character's emotions. To help a movie director with the shooting of her film, a young boy from Taipei, Xiao-Kang, agrees to dive into the filthy water of a river where he pretends to be a corpse being dragged along by the river's current. Soon after, the young man finds that he is tormented by violent and painful sensations in his neck, which continue as the making of the film progresses. An indifferent and melancholy world takes shape around Xiao-Kang's tortured body -- and the apartment where his parents live like two strangers is gradually flooded by the waters of a torrential rain, as mysterious Fate bears down on the family.Ming-liang, Tsai is the author of 'Tsai Ming-Liang : The River', published 2000 under ISBN 9782906571945 and ISBN 2906571946.