E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ghosts in the machine Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Goodbye Dragon Inn Directed and written by Tsai Ming-liang. With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Mitamura Kiyonobu, Miao Tien, Shih Chun, Yang Kuei-mei, and Chen Chao-jung. A Wellspring release (81 minutes). At the Brattle Theatre October 29 through November 4.

It’s been said that every great film has as its subject film itself. With Goodbye Dragon Inn, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has made his great film about film. The setting is a rundown movie palace during its last night of operation. The movie being shown is the 1966 martial-arts classic Dragon Gate Inn by King Hu. 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, melancholy, and a creative intelligence without equal in contemporary filmmaking.

One of these mysteries: what happened to the audience? We first see inside the movie theater through the gap between two curtains; the theater looks full. (How carefully, by the way, Tsai stages our entrance into this space — admitting us by degrees, emphasizing through his doorways and other internal frames the visual metaphor of the gate, an echo of Hu’s film.) But a few shots later, the house has become empty except for the small handful of devotees who will figure in the vignettes that constitute Tsai’s film. Converging at odd angles on the magic space of Tsai’s dynamic, diagonalized frames, these characters remain unaware of the compositional lines of flight but aware of each other, even as they try to appear that they are not.

Another mystery: why have they come? A question that the dialogue of Hu’s film puts in its own way: "You come to this wilderness for what purpose?" It becomes clear that most of the spectators are here in search of love, sex, or at any rate some heightened form of contact, however ephemeral or displaced. One of the two main protagonists in this quest is a latecomer (Mitamura Kiyonobu) who has his eye on another man in the audience. The other is the ticket seller (Chen Shiang-chyi, the female lead in Tsai’s previous film, What Time Is It There?), who, limping badly, spends much of the night looking for the projectionist (Tsai’s regular star, Lee Kang-sheng), with whom she wants to share her steamed bun.

Tsai rephotographs the beginning and end titles of Hu’s film, but of what comes in between he gives us only glimpses — a jumble of disassembled scenes viewed from all directions, at varying distances. (The complex interplay of camera angles by which he animates the space of the theater recalls Jonathan Rosenbaum’s description of Jacques Tati’s Playtime as a film that demands to be seen not only many times but from different places in the theater.) Discontinuities radiate through the theater as if generated by the film projection: spectators vanish and reappear; the ticket seller gazes through a partly opened door into a room that she will not enter for another five minutes of screen time.

The impossibility of grasping the narrative continuity of Dragon Gate Inn makes this last projection of the film into an endless event. By lingering on individual moments of this event, Tsai emphasizes its timelessness, paying homage to a kind of cinema (and a way of experiencing cinema) that he catches in the act of disappearing. And just as he renders Dragon Gate Inn unrecoverable and timeless, so he renders the space of the theater mysterious. Hobbling through the corridors and staircases that surround the auditorium, the ticket seller comes to resemble the explorer of a world of irrational dimensions and fantastic geography.

Goodbye Dragon Inn is a ghost story, as one of its characters (Chen Chao-jung) indicates when he pauses during an elaborate cigarette routine to remark: "Do you know this theater is haunted?" The spectators are the ghosts, made so by their desire — for the cinema, for each other, for a kind of activity that has slipped out of time. "No one comes to the movies anymore," concludes a gentleman (Shih Chun) who has come to attend the final unspooling of a film in which he starred almost 40 years before, meeting there one of his co-stars (Miao Tien, who has appeared in most of Tsai’s films). 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.