Tsai Ming-Liang’s beautiful, frail, contemplative cinema is back. Kang (his usual actor Kang-sheng Lee) is a man that lives alone in his house and starts to feel a mysterious pain. Non lives in Bangkok in a small apartment. When the two men meet, sharing their loneliness, the Taiwanese director’s art slowly explodes, in an almost endless number of meanings. Rizi was in competition in the last Berlin Film Festival.
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There are two things always present in Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema. The first is the expression of friendship towards his actor Kang-sheng Lee. The second is the thorough capacity for observing and listening to reality, which makes each new film a refinement of the last one. The two elements are present in Rizi, a film that seems to have been made against solitude, of both the director’s and its characters. Kang is tormented by a back pain, something that Liang’s cinema has been documenting throughout several films. Anong Houngheuangsy is a masseur who lives in his Bangkok apartment where he prepares his own meals. Intentionally not subtitled by the director, this is a film of communion that is not achieved through words. Instead, by the encounter of bodies, a simple music box or by the inhabiting of the urban space in which intimacy is a nuance within a busy sonorous landscape. It’s in the duration of the shots that the decisive mutations of reality are played. (Carlos Natálio)
There are two things always present in Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema. The first is the expression of friendship towards his actor Kang-sheng Lee. The second is the thorough capacity for observing and listening to reality, which makes each new film a refinement of the last one. The two elements are present in Rizi, a film that seems to have been made against solitude, of both the director’s and its characters. Kang is tormented by a back pain, something that Liang’s cinema has been documenting throughout several films. Anong Houngheuangsy is a masseur who lives in his Bangkok apartment where he prepares his own meals. Intentionally not subtitled by the director, this is a film of communion that is not achieved through words. Instead, by the encounter of bodies, a simple music box or by the inhabiting of the urban space in which intimacy is a nuance within a busy sonorous landscape. It’s in the duration of the shots that the decisive mutations of reality are played. (Carlos Natálio)
