Watch The River For Free

Brilliant and touching

An absolute waste of money

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Not to let anyone walk into this unawares: a voice from the audience understandably commented the somewhat contrived, but cinematographically superbly rendered catharsis of this movie, when son and father make out in the dark room of a smudgy sauna club, thus: `O Lord, will you not spare me anything today?'`He Liu' is a disturbing tale of urban disruption, solitude and rot, not told but evolved in a series of carefully composed real-time-scenes circling about a family afflicted by a sudden and scary medical condition befalling the Son after he took a plunge in polluted river: Their harrowing quest for a cure just serves to depict the utter hopelessness of traditional (Chinese and universal) values in modern society. The disruption of the individual has gone to a degree that it takes the audience about 45 minutes to even get the fact it is watching the plight of familially related protagonists. We watch people engaged in homosexual intercourse without feeling they're gay: In their context, homosexuality is a token of disorientation as much as the porn-watching of the mother whose lover is as little interested in her physically as her husband: Satisfaction is beyond reach for every inhabitant of this chill world - a place not geographically limited to Taipeh but given as a state of present time urban society. This, of course, is the gist of about 95% of all the movies with a message. What Ming-liang Tsai manages is a bit more special: Underneath the phenomena of isolation there runs a counterpoint of unexpected solidarity - father and mother, still without ever talking to each other again, are immediately available in a matter of course way as soon as their son's condition deteriorates: `family' is still an extant institution, a should-be, could-be, would-be harbor not yet ready for the ice storm that has seized the world. Redeveloping many of the same elements, this movie compares favorably with Ang Lees more expansive and considerably less focused `Yin shi nan nu' (Eat Drink Man Woman) from 1994 and is somewhat echoed in his more accomplished `Ice Storm' from 1997, the same year when `He Liu' was made.

Tsai Ming-Liang offers viewers in "The River" an honest chance to take it or leave it right from the first sequence. If you make it through and enjoy (or rather, are puzzled by) this first sequence - a film shooting in a river, depicted in a long, almost real-time pace - you will for sure be caught in his stream, because what follows is simply great, original, surprising, offbeat, funny, alarming and often mind-boggling. Tsai is a Taiwan filmmaker whose cinematic grammar apparently owes a lot to Westerners - especially to Europeans. You can spot Truffaut in his love for his characters, in the way he always casts his favorite actor Lee kang-Sheng much in the way Truffaut did with Jean-Pierre Léaud, and in the mysterious and surprising ways love expresses itself in his films. You can feel the influence of Antonioni in the long sequences without dialogue or music, in the urban chaos leading to lack of communication between the characters, in the forces of nature (the heavy constant rain, the omnipresence of water in this case) responding to "civilization's" abuse - the echologic chaos. You can feel a touch of the Godard of "Le Mépris" in the total lack of communication between very close people (the couple in Godard, the family here) and the kind of non-conform sexuality of the Pasolini of "Teorema" (sexual repression and catharsis among the family members, in both cases). But Tsai has got something all his own. I've seen now all his feature films and it's very impressive to see how he has developed a language of his own, through his imagery, his pace, his actors' performances, his conflicts, his endings. He is sure to always include unforgettable sequences (here, for sure, the sequence in the sauna between father and son) that will haunt you, delight you, disgust you, move you and stay with you long after you've left the theatre. That's a rare accomplishment in any visual arts these days. For me, "The River" is surely Tsai's masterpiece to date, a film that flows slowly, harmoniously, hauntingly, effortlessly to its destination, catches you in its stream, and leads you to a free-meaning ending - which, in this case, is something warmly welcome.

I have seen three of his movies, and i always got out of the theatre not knowing what to think of it. It is always well films and directed, but the themes he treats are so peculiar.. Once again, the plot is here that of a strange illness, a heavy neckache, that will start everything else. It seems that the boy got it from a polluted river where he shot a scene for a film, but who knows ? it may as well have no origin. But this will lead us into the life of a family, where communication isn't the best. Uncommunicability, strange illness and behavior, leaking roofs, seem to be Ming-liang's obsessions.

While most of Chinese/Taiwanese film directors spend their effort on the past legend,Tsai focuses on the present city life scene.It's always an unhappy challenge to deal with Reality and it needs a lots of guts.And Tsai does it faithfully. The father and son's love/hate complex is not a surprise in the asian society.This is more than a homosexual movie. While Lee An is trying too hard for the happy ending, Tsai is more interested in individual identity that has long been a fatal conflict in most asian families.