In "Vive L' Amour," a nervous real estate agent, her hip street-vendor boyfriend and a homeless gay kid find sanctuary along with sexual shenanigans in an empty, high-end Taipei, Taiwan apartment. The story begins as May, an eager-to-please and flirty young realtor, tries to sell an expensive downtown condo that she uses for lunchtime flings with her humpy boyfriend. Meanwhile, a shy, homeless gay kid sneaks into the posh digs, hiding under the bed as the couple make out.
Throughout the story we witness the characters confronting their own vulnerabilities in an impersonal society where everyone is a stranger. The two young men meet accidentally in the huge flat. They bond around shared meals and cigarettes. The gay boy lies under the bed as May and the vendor make out. When the girl leaves, the boy climbs into the bed, observing the sleeping, partially nude man. He moves close enough to kiss him on the lips before leaving the flat.
Writer-director Tsai Ming-liang makes humorous allusions to the late arrival of the sexual revolution in traditional Chinese society. He shows the fallout when restless 20somethings stumble across more freedom than life has prepared them for. The film ends on a long sequence where May loudly weeps while sitting in a park a few chairs away from an elderly man reading his paper.
This little gem's appeal flows from its maker's life story. Tsai was born an outsider in 1957 Malaysia. The future star director graduated from the Drama and Cinema Dept. of the Chinese Cultural University of Taiwan, and worked as a theatrical producer and TV director. "Vive L'Amour," his second feature, won Best Picture at the 1994 Venice Film Festival. His idiosyncratic body of work has attracted a global audience still growing in his seventh decade. His cinematic style gives his work the contemporary feel of a recent film school graduate: long, fixed shots, characters who have big problems communicating their feelings. For subtitle-challenged filmgoers, he gets extra points for using hardly any dialogue and very little music, except for a handful of 1930s Mandarin pop songs.
Water is a frequent element in his films, with floods, leaks, and large gusts of wind turning up in most. His characters, when they're not talking, are experimenting with their sexuality or their bodies. He cites Fran�ois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959) as his favorite film. In an interview on IMDB, the director describes meeting Kang-sheng Lee, his on-screen alter ego who plays the gay boy, at a videogame arcade.
"When I found Lee Kang-sheng on the street, I invited him to be in my films. His perfect embodiment of an anti-actor has had a profound impact on my work. One day, to my shock, I realized I never wanted to move my camera away from his face, and it was then that I found the true reason for making films.
"I feel like a citizen of the world, yet there's no single place I can put my roots down and call home. I've never stayed in one place for long. Almost every time I rent a place, I have some sort of water leakage or flooding."
Widescreen, in Mandarin with English subtitles. DVD features: production credits, cast & crew filmographies. 118 mins. (Strand Releasing/Fox Lorber)