BU-SAN (GOODBYE, DRAGON INN)

China, 2003, 85 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Ming- Liang Tsai.

Ming- Liang Tsai is a director with a minimalist style. His trademark is long takes with no camera movement. If there is any movement, it is within the frame. Some of the takes are at least a minute long, sometimes more. This makes enormous demands on the audience? Audiences who like contemplation of what they see have acclaimed him as a master. Those who become impatient when a take is long, find him very difficult to watch. This film certainly employs that long, tripod-based take style.

The theme is interesting, Saturday night at a local cinema, people watching a historical Chinese epic. The earlier session has many people. The later session has very few. Some of them watch, some of them move around. One character says, in fact, the cinema is haunted. Perhaps some of the people are ghosts. The other focus is on a limping cleaning lady whose work at the cinema we see in minute detail. Finally, the cinema closes altogether, the weather is raining, people staying inside - and the characters and director wondering about the future of cinema in China, of people coming to the cinema. To that extent, it is a nostalgic look at the cinema past with seemingly hopeless anticipation of the future. The film is beautiful to look at, excellently photographed, intriguing in many ways in its theme and its portrait of the characters who wander around the cinema. On the other hand, it is very demanding for an action-oriented audience.

1. The traditions of Chinese cinema? The action films and historical? The character studies? This kind of minimal cinema with its long contemplation of themes, characters and places? The quality of the film in this tradition?

2. Action taking place over one evening, confined to the theatre? Exteriors, the rain, the street? Interiors, the corridors, the toilets, the auditorium itself, the back stalls and balcony, the front stalls? The film seen on the screen - the action adventure, most of the dialogue coming from the screen, rather than from the characters? The overall effect of this kind of immersion in the night at the cinema?

3. Colour photography, darkness and light, shadows? Colour? The bright screen? The reflections in the rain on the street? The corridors, the garish lights in the toilet? The auditorium itself? The characters photographed within this light? Musical score - from the film on the screen? For the film the audience was watching?

4. The cinema itself, its auditorium, corridors and toilets? The woman who was limping, the meticulous cleaning of the toilets, her eating her evening meal, cooking it in the office, supervising the closing down of the theatre, walking away? The projectionist and his appearance at the end, rewinding the film, putting the rubbish out?

5. The clients at the film: the young man and his decision to go in, his restlessness, wanting a cigarette and a match, the man coming to sit next to him, the man putting his feet next to his head? His moving? Going to the toilet, the men in the toilet - for a pickup or not? The long time there? His going into the corridor, the slow approach of the other man? His warning him that there were ghosts? His return?

6. The little boy and the old man, emerging at the end of the film, the teacher and the professor and their lamenting people not going to the cinema?

7. The woman, chewing the nuts, losing her shoe, coming behind the man - and his being alarmed by it? Her disappearing?

8. Audiences? Ghosts? The ghosts of the past audiences?

9. The film's lament for the change in cinema-going in China? The possibilities for the future? The film industry?