Tsai Ming-liang | 良夜不能留 (Liang ye bu neng liu) (The Night) / 2021

why must our bliss end so soon?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tsai Ming-liang (director) 良夜不能留 (Liang ye bu neng liu) (The Night) / 2021 [19 minutes]

 

In 2019 the great Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang was invited, in the great time of protest, to visit Hong Kong, supposedly to perform some older Chinese songs. During the day the city, percolating with civil unrest was consumed by large protests.

     By night, however, things began to calm down, people quickly shopping, catching a bite to eat, returning home. Out of this fermentation of energy, with the gradual peacefulness of the night, the noted director created his 19-minute documentary fiction accompanied by only the noise of the street, the whiz of autos passing, occasional fragments of human voice, and the grumbles of busses and trucks.

 

    In only about a dozen or fewer shots, Tsai focuses on scenes in which nothing much seems to be happening except for people walking in both directions by a bus stop, a taxi queue, past a small stand-up fast-food shop, and under a causeway. But in each of the long focuses our eyes are attracted to incidents and movements to which we would otherwise be blind . In the first long view of the bus stop we mostly observe two women waiting for a taxi which never seems to arrive, and when one finally does, as the women explain where they desire to go, it speeds away without permitting them entry. Couples walk by hand in hand, other young men weave in and out the bus stop’s several entries. It is also strange that no bus ever arrives.

     In another view, we watch a young man who obviously works as the counter waiter or cook consuming his soup by the open door. But our eye also wonders to an upstairs room in the building nearly, where a man seems to be moving objects either from the center room to the window or vice versa.

    For a while the camera pauses in from of another taxi queue with dozens of people waiting in line, who wait patiently without a single taxi arriving to give hope to those who wait at line’s end. A few leave, but most of them remain.

    In the causeway scene we observe what in other scenes appear to be somnolent strollers now rushing on their way, perhaps because of the later hour or the fears of the increasingly emptying streets.

    In another scene we observe taxis speeding past by twos and threes. Now that there is hardly anyone left to use them, their proliferation is ironic.

      In yet another view the red sign of an Outback Steakhouse peaking over the pedestrian bridge catches our attention. As commentator Sean Gilman writes in his In Review Online piece, “Tsai cuts to a new angle, and we can see the steakhouse better, an American chain selling a fantasy of Australian fast casual dining to the people of Hong Kong.”

    The final last scene is obviously filmed so late into the night that even the wide, snaking, fluorescent lit pedestrian overpass is empty, its glass walls mottled with posters that authorities have apparently attempted to scrape away, leaving only ugly remnants of images and words. We can see the now empty street below only vaguely as through a glass darkly. It is finally in this vision of urban blight that Tsai plays the traditional song Mandarin, “The Beautiful Night is Slipping Away,” a poetic rendering of the fact that the quiet and peace of the all-embracing darkness is about to pass away in the early rays of daylight.

     Here, of course, the is no beautiful night, only the blare of the bright florescence, hardly any way to even know if dawn is soon to break. This is an ugly and empty world, unlike the passionate love-making we presume lies beneath the urgent lyrics of the lovely song.

 

                                 Why must our bliss end so soon?

                                 Why must we part when we’ve just begun.

   

     The tender lyrics render the scenes we have just witnessed rather comical.

      

     Yet it is clear that Tsai is attempting no clear social or political commentary in this, but simply recording the fact that obviously there are different notions of the night and what it means for each of us. And there is true beauty even in his shots of this urban no-man’s land inhabited nonetheless, if only for moments, by thousands of individuals coming and going to their homes and or locations of entertainment where they will pleasurably spend the night.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).