Pluskylang Great Film overall

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Howard Schumann In Taipei, a middle-aged real estate agent, May Lin (Yang-kuei Mei), goes about her daily routine of putting up signs, inviting potential customers to an open house, then sitting and waiting for them in empty apartments as the hours drag by. Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour is an honest and beautiful film about three lonely people whose lives become inextricably bound in a chance encounter. Dialogue is minimal and no one speaks for the first twenty-five minutes, creating a pervasive tone of emotional numbness. Hsiao-kang (Kang-sheng Lee), a young gay man who sells wall space for burials, soon finds the key to an apartment being shown by May Lin and moves in, taking a bath, getting dressed, then almost matter of factly cutting his wrists with a pocket knife. When May Lin meets Ah-jung (Chao-jung Chen) a slick street vendor of women's clothes during a lunch break, they coyly size each other up, then use the apartment for casual sex. Ah-jung, unaware of Hsiao-Kang's presence, takes the key from May Lin and also moves in. The characters live an existence surrounded by silence, unwilling or unable to reach out to each other, living in the empty spaces. They spend their time aimlessly, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, and just watching the time pass without any apparent connection to the teeming city they live in. Ming-liang's camera views the characters from a distance, at times simply watching them for minutes at a time go through a period of silent suffering. One of the most heartbreaking scenes is when Hsiao-Kang hugs and kisses a watermelon as if it were the responsive companion he so desperately needs. When May Lin comes to the apartment to rest, the two clandestine guests forge an alliance to avoid being seen. In an unforgettable sequence, Hsiao-Kang hides under the bed masturbating while May and Ah-jung make love directly on top. After May leaves, the young man crawls into bed with the sleeping Ah-jung and creeps his way inch by inch toward the sleeping man in a scene of heartbreaking loneliness and conflicted emotions. The film ends in a five-minute close up of one of the characters sitting alone in a newly-opened park that made me reflect on similar periods of loneliness in my own life. It also caused me to wonder if our modern cities have become little more than sanctuaries for the walking dead where everyone is a stranger, crossing paths in silence without a hint of recognition of a common humanity.

David One of the best of Tsai Ming-liang's glacial case studies of contemporary isolation and alienation in Taipei/the world, VIVE L'AMOUR is gripping in spite of it's extreme slowness (his work shares this quality with Tarkovsky or Antonioni). Tsai's work is superficially very chilly and ultimately heartbreaking - though Tsai also (as always) manages to also sneak in a little deadpan humor, which in this case includes the rather ironic translated title. Three young, outwardly successful Taiwanese happen to cross paths - unknowingly at first - in the empty Taipei condominium one (a real estate agent) is attempting to sell. Through a bare minimum in dialogue - VIVE L'AMOUR is essentially a silent film until about 20 minutes in - Tsai charts their isolation and fumbling attempts at various kinds of human connection and finding some personal sort of peace. Tsai's scenario and characters are globalized, stripped of most marks of identity, and very much adrift, and their growth (or lack of it) is communicated through sparse forms of acting, direction and cinematography that reinvents seemingly antiquated forms of film-making (again, silent film) into a new-millennial era. In this, Tsai crafts a sort of haunted, elegaic drama that slides around the limitations of language, inhabiting a dreamlike, if also very dark, psychological territory.Typically Tsai uses no musical score, and the dialog is very sparse, with the film favoring the natural sound of whatever environment the characters find themselves in, so the many memorable scenes do tend to sneak up on you. The finale is unforgettable.

Aizyk This film is about 2 guys and a girl, whose lives primarily intersect in an apartment that the girl, who is a real estate agent, is trying to sell. She brings guy #1, a street vendor, to the apartment for a sexual encounter, and he later ends up living there without her knowledge. Unbeknownst to both of them, guy #2, a suicidally lonely gay man, has already crashed the place. Guy #1 and Guy#2 eventually bump into each other (it's a large apartment), and Guy#2, in his need for companionship, becomes attracted to Guy #1, despite the fact that Guy #1 does not possess very many redeeming qualities.I can't say that I enjoyed this film very much. The acting was good, the directing was frank. But throughout most of the film I kept asking myself where it was going. There was very little development or dialogue. However, while I didn't particularly like watching the seemingly infinite shots, at the same time I appreciated the way that they developed the mood, perspective, and bleak tone of the film. Mind you, this didn't don on me until near the end. These 3 people were each very much alone, especially the girl and the gay guy. Alone, and yet living in a large metropolis and surrounded by people. The "climax" of the film, where the girl is walking through the park, (the most barren, dead, and desolate public park I've ever seen.), made perfect sense. The surroundings were an achingly appropriate reflection of the girl's emotional state in life and the starkness of what her outlook must have been. When she sat down on the bench and started to sob, everything just clicked. I thought to myself "My god, I know exactly how she feels." That was my big revelation with this movie, when I related to her character. And because of this, the film held a special poignance to me. While I can't say that I was entertained by this film, I can say that I was impacted. It reminded me that the point of a movie can serve a more dignified purpose than just appealing to an audience as entertainment.

supahz I suppose it's nice and trendy to see wonderful things in the absolute emptiness of a film like this. With the sometimes pointless excesses of many Hollywood films, we can relax and enjoy a scene devoid of explosions, foul language, and corny one-liners. Minimalism has its place, and can be very effective when employed properly. However, this film is not one of those cases.Take the long scenes with no dialogue and dreary, sparse scenery. I'm sure that they must hold some great meaning and insight, because the implied message in shrouded in bafflement. The acting is poor... bland and pedestrian... and features one of the worst crying scenes in history (at the end of the film, if you can sit through it to the end). The scenery is drab, and the ridiculously long ending sequence of the girl walking through the barren park is as pleasurable as having a tooth pulled. I would call this anticlimatic, but as the film didn't build to any sort of climax whatsoever... not even in the "erotic" scenes... it would be untrue. I'm sure that there was a script employed during the filming, but with the amount of dialogue, I think it might have been written on a cocktail napkin. Basically, this film offers nothing to interest or amaze... no great story, no stunning insights, no visual drama, no excitement. Apart from two or three amusing moments, this film is a waste of two hours. A tragically boring and dreary film.