Vive l'amour

(AI QING WAN SUI)

Hsiao-kang, an undertaker’s assistant, steals the key of a flat for sale where he can commit suicide. But the place is occupied by two other people who have just met : Mei, a young woman from the estate agency, and Ah-jung, a street pedlar. The three lonely souls are then going to start strange to-ings and fro-ings.

Urban alienation, the difficulty of establishing true communication, are at the heart of this very beautiful, melancholy work, where three characters occupy the same flat one after the other without interacting, or hardly ever. They are together. They are alone.

With “Vive l’amour”, Tsai Ming-liang films his idea of boredom, of solitude ploughed into the cemented, urban furrows of Taipei. It is the film of all paradoxes : the population is expanding at a mad rate and lodgings are starting to be in short supply, however huge flats remain hopelessly empty; in spite of people living side by side in thousands and working together, it does not stop them suffering from acute loneliness.