Goodbye, Dragon Inn [Blu-ray] [2020]

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Interestingly, it’s also nigh-on impossible to watch the sequence in which the woman starts uncontrollably coughing in this busy bus terminal in the current climate without seeing it as an albeit unintended trigger moment for a story about how easily Covid-19 can spread in a public place from a single carrier.

Then there’s the editing, which doesn’t so much break with convention as completely disregard it and make up rules of its own. As movie houses close and corporations dominate, the art form is at risk of changing beyond recognition.And when I do connect with such a film on any level, I know it’s going to be a tough sell to what a sizeable portion of even our readership. On November 6, 2020, Weerasethakul tweeted, "THE best film of the last 125 years: Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

A 4K restoration was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Second Run on November 23, 2020, and digitally by Metrograph on December 18, 2020. If you watched it and felt nothing but exasperation, as some definitely have, then you’re probably thinking that this would be a good thing.Tsai clearly had no interest in telling a story per se, but instead focusses on characters and moments that open small windows into lives whose back stories we are then invited to expand upon ourselves.

In the only fast cut sequence in the film, the cashier is momentarily mesmerised by the fighting skills of the on-screen movie’s female action star Shangguan Lingfeng, the rapid back-and-forth cutting between the two hinting at the cashier’s dreams for life that fate has denied her. Presented here in a new digital restoration, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is more ravishing and hypnotic than ever.Similarly featured is the handicapped box office cashier (Chen Hsiang-Chyi), who is first seen as her other duties cause her to just miss the arrival of the Japanese tourist and is then observed at length tucking into a sizeable steamed rice bun, a piece of which she decides to give to the projectionist (Tsai regular Lee Kang-Sheng). All of them could seat hundreds of patrons, maybe a thousand even, and I never once saw them close to filled. If it seems as though I’m dancing around not just my own opinion of the film but what happens within it, you can put this down to the fact that Goodbye, Dragon Inn is not an easy film to start making even close to definitive statements about. The King is now a megachurch, the Coliseum is a Banana Republic, and the UA is dust, with the marquee sign marking its grave.

We only watch a single task being performed in real time during the course of the entire first third of this film, but it not only makes compellingly clear – in a way that no short montage could – how crucial the role of fresh water is to the couple’s existence, but vividly illustrates the hard work and dedication that is required to keep the crops that are their life and livelihood watered. But then it would no longer be Sátántangó, just as doing likewise to Goodbye, Dragon Inn would effectively rob the film of its identity. Goodbye, Dragon Inn ( Chinese: 不散) is a 2003 Taiwanese comedy-drama slow cinema film written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang about a movie theater about to close down and its final screening of the 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn. Why, I wondered on occasion, is this image being held on for this length, past when it has not only done its job but underscored it multiple times?This is signalled early on when the audience at a screening of the 1967 King Hu martial arts classic Dragon Inn is observed through fluttering curtains from the rear of the cinema, presumably by one of the cinema’s employees, and the shot continues far beyond the point where it has seemingly served its narrative purpose.