Tsai Ming-liang
11 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
influenced Rebels of the Neon God (1994)
Themes Visuals
These are elements that transcend time and geography as evidenced by the magnificently titled “Rebels of the Neon God.” Made in Taiwan in 1992 but just now being released in the U.S. its themes harken back to 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause” while also feeling completely contemporary.
Tsai was still young enough that he felt compelled to slap a poster of James Dean circa “Rebel Without a Cause” in major parts of his frames, to show where his allegiances lie.
Moreover, the reference to Rebel Without a Cause is clear: Tsai's rebels have no cause for a much different reason than the titular figure of the Nicholas Ray classic.
The movie includes a direct homage to 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause,” but in spirit it’s closer to the debuts of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-wai, who also blended crime drama with love story and city symphony.
As the title suggests, Rebels of the Neon God could have been merely an updated version of Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause, set in another time and place.
If anything, Rebels of the Neon God owes itself more to American film noir (with nods to Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and Chabrol's This Man Must Die).
Breathless (1960)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
influenced Rebels of the Neon God (1994)
Themes Visuals
However, on another level, the entirety of Tsai's debut feature unfolds like a rebuttal to Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless , seeking to interrogate questions of pop-cultural influence not as a matter of homage or allusion-based deconstruction, but as a damning treatise on the nature of product placement, globalization, and the often innocuous ends of cinematic play.
Like Godard’s “Breathless” and Wong’s “As Tears Go By,” “Rebels” cunningly synthesizes both B-movie and art film.
Tsai attaches these affirmations most evidently to Hsiao-Kang, who sits around his parents' flat, pointing and toying with his newly acquired pellet gun in a manner that deliberately recalls Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver .
Lee and Dean's encounter here, like Lee's tender engagement in What Time Is It There?—through the conduit of a TV screen, with Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows—belies Tsai's ambitions as an international chronicler of the downcast, arranging secret commiseration between the beautiful mopers—hard-pressed to make basic human connections—across cities, continents, and decades.
In its somewhat Melvillean views of Taipei after dark, neon-lit as the title suggests, and its story of outsider youth zipping around on motorbikes between crime sprees and bursts of sex, Rebels offers a funky nightscape of a film that, very roughly speaking, is to early Nineties Taipei what Jean-Jacques Beineix’s more comic-strip-styled Diva was to Paris a decade earlier.
It also makes Taipei, for all the alienation depicted, look like fun, much more of a playground than the paranoid space of Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers, made six years earlier.
Is it an inability to jibe with this new maturity—I have been a son, after all, while I have not been a father—or the old story of the auteurist enthusiast thrown the moment that their favorite varies from an accustomed formula, which I can well remember coloring the receptions of such films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001), Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), and Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud (2005)?
Touki Bouki (1973)
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
influenced Rebels of the Neon God (1994)
Visuals
There's nothing romantic here about violence, nor is there an affected visual style; to this end, Tsai takes instruction from a film like Touki Bouki for its engagement with dominant, fashionable film styles, but for the purpose of renouncing it.
The other follows two petty thieves and the girl they both desire ( Wang Yu -wen, who later starred as one of the daughters in Ang Lee ’s “Eat Drink Man Woman”).
Like Godard’s “Breathless” and Wong’s “As Tears Go By,” “Rebels” cunningly synthesizes both B-movie and art film.