The Movie You Need to Watch During Quarantine is a Taiwanese Film from 1994
Tsai Ming-Liang’s 1994 film Vive L’Amour is an incredible film to watch if, like me, you’re an urbanite in a hyper-capitalist world (my current job is literally in sales) who is currently working from home, pining for things you used to hate (like commuting, street noise, and crowded places). Vive L’Amour uses slow cinema (think along the lines of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jean Dielman, though this isn’t quite that extreme) to paint a detailed landscape of Taipei in the earl/mid-nineties, and the urban unease of the young men and women who live there.
In a way, these qualities make Vive L’Amour like a postmodern, East Asian Edward Hopper painting. Its minimalist interiors and rare dialogue render its tone sterile, but this sterility is also hauntingly familiar. The Taipei apartment that our three main characters all , for the most part unwittingly, share looks like something out of a hotel or a catalogue. We know that May Lin (Kuei-Mei Yang) is a real estate agent attempting to sell the property, and that’s all this place is: a commodity. Not home or hearth, but something to be sold and purchased. This is why May Lin’s decision to bring her impromptu lover, Ah-Jung (Chao-Jung Chen), to the apartment is immediately so interesting: It ties sex up with commercialism.
The apartment’s lack of personal touches screams at us in every scene. The bed has no sheets, there are no photos on the walls — these extremes stand in sharp opposition to Ming-Liang’s Taipei, which he depicts as crowded, loud, and colorful. It doesn’t take long to uncover that this dichotomy is also indicative of our urbanite main characters’ emotional states: They seem prosperous and put-together on the outside, but on the inside they are lonely, tired, and bare.
Urban exhaustion manifests itself in May Lin’s behavior: She gets home and traipses through the dark apartment without turning the light on, and when she goes home with Ah-Jung, they undress in a systematic, unsentimental way. Even their foreplay — even the sex itself — is sterile and mechanical, as though they’re following an instruction manual rather than acting on feeling. Everything is manufactured. Even when May Lin moans we get the sense, somehow, that she knows she’s being watched. She fucks like a porn star who, though she doesn’t let on, is constantly cognizant of the camera poised just beyond her line of sight.
The film’s scenes are reduced to three motifs: Work, sex, and death. We watch extended sequences of May Lin at work, her and Ah-Jung having sex, and Hsiao-Kang (played by Kang-Sheng Lee) masturbating at the apartment. We see Ah-Jung and Hsiao-Kang at a columbarium and hear them talk about visiting a mausoleum. Death is commodified, sexualized, and obsessed over. Juxtaposed with the alternating clutter and emptiness of our characters’ lives, we’re prompted with questions not so much about the meaning of life, but more so about the meaning in how we live life. Are we just repeating the same cycle day after day? Are we just waiting to die?
As I said, this is an interesting movie to watch while quarantining. We all (myself included) have spent the better part of the last ten months yearning for the outside world and for life to return to normal. And although these feelings are completely valid and I will be getting vaccinated and returning to the world as soon as possible, I also think we’ve been romanticizing daily life, to a certain extent. Especially those of us who live in cities.
It’s easy for us to sit on our couches and think of all the parties, the bars, the concerts, the workout classes, and the faraway lands we’ll be visiting when this is over. But how many times, during pre-pandemic life, did we really savor our experiences? How many times did we actually deviate from our routines?
There are always practical concerns: We cannot go to the new art exhibit because we have to get home and make dinner, or we can’t go to the show because we have work in the morning, or we don’t take the long way home because we want to change from business clothes into sweatpants as soon as possible. All valid concerns, yes, but these are the things that keep us trapped in the urban monotony portrayed so spectacularly in Vive L’Amour. The real world can be a beautiful thing, but too often we let it oppress us. We let it steal our agency until we find ourselves sobbing in solitude, like May Lin, or living vicariously through others, like Hsiao-Kang.
Many reviewers have found the most heartbreaking part of this film to be May Lin’s breakdown, but I was more affected by the scene in which Hsiao-Kang waits for May Lin to fall asleep and then lies beside her, his arm longingly outstretched. His voyeurism is disturbing, to be sure, but it represents a soul-scarring loneliness in which society’s anonymity renders all experiences shared, and therefore meaningless. Our characters — like us — just mask their loneliness by clinging to strangers in the same way some people cling to drugs or alcohol.
So you should watch this movie while you’re quarantining. It will make you rethink how you conceive of the world outside, and remember that just because you’re alone inside the four walls of your bedroom, doesn’t mean you’re any lonelier than you were last March in a crowd of people.
