‘The River’ Review: A Tsai Ming-liang Classic Highlights Sydney’s Taiwan Film Festival 2019

Actions speak louder than words in Tsai Ming-liang’s third of his trilogy on urban isolation and loneliness, a confrontational drama involving a father-son entanglement. THE RIVER is known to be the “bleakest” work of the master auteur, and this masterpiece is quite a highlight at the Taiwan Film Festival 2019 in Sydney, Australia.

His first film REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1992) introduced us to Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) as lead, a regular of Tsai’s films. The second film VIVE L’ AMOUR (1994) continued with Xiao-kang at the centre in a movie with practically no music, minimal dialogue and long takes with little exposition. In THE RIVER (1997), Tsai has cemented this style but also went for the audience’s jugular with a very widely-debated and divisive plot point.

The three main characters of this film are elements of a dysfunctional family in an impersonal urban dwelling: a father (Miao Tien), a mother (Lu Hsiao-ling), and their son Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), taking off from the previous two films.

The father frequents the gay sauna for anonymous sex with young men. The mother is having an affair with a porno distributor. After accidentally becoming a body extra in a film, their estranged son Xiao-kang encounters an unbearable neck problem, possibly a metaphor for his personal angsts, a constant pain that may be borne out of a psychological injury.

There are an existential longing and loneliness among the three characters, minimally communicating with each other. In one hospital scene, the mother walks past Xiao-kang in pain, barely recognising her son. This pattern of their failure to recognise him is repeated much later in the film’s shadowy ending. Tsai also continues his fascination with water leaking and flooding like in his previous films, possibly another metaphor for drowning in an ocean of a city of drifting alienating strangers. Just like in his other movies, the minimal dialogue here is less expositional and more circumstantial.

The controversial sex scene that happens near the end of the film is a well-shot mise en scène of shadow-hidden faces. As a whole, it personalises the facelessness of their environment and their relationships. It ensues into the film’s climax that is genuinely taboo and one of cinema’s most assaultive and trauma-inducing exposures.

THE RIVER is a study of human isolation and loneliness, an exploration of social angst through dislocated desires in an urban jungle of anonymity and emotionless connections. It is detached like its characters and the city of Taipei that they inhabit. It is a fitting end to Tsai’s trilogy of hopeless despair in a city that never speaks.

THE RIVER (5/5)