maxovista

I gave it one star more than the minimum because at least Carolyn Hennesy seemed to enjoy playing Mother Superior. But it's abysmally bad. The writers didn't know or seem to care what they were doing. They continually made decisions that insulted the intelligence of the audience. These nuns would never be able to overpower a bunch of grown-ass women so easily - their methods would have worked on children or very young teen girls, not women. That is the first mistake and it's downhill from there. The flashbacks stall any momentum. The climax is unsatisfying. The villainous nuns are all paper-thin as characters and we never see a motivation for them to do what they did (all of which was insanely risky and illegal) beyond "money." Compare this to a top-shelf horror/thriller like Get Out and you'll see just how badly it fails. Time is precious and no one deserves to suffer through this movie.

I've seen a lot of movies and this might very well be my favourite ... it just gets me, probably because of how much I identify with Hsiao-kang and May Lin. It was my first taste of "slow cinema" and of minimalist film, and I loved it. I've seen it many times now. It's meditative and sad and funny. Nobody does loneliness and anomie like Tsai Ming-liang.

But please be aware of what you're getting into before you watch this film and leave a 1-star review. Slow cinema is not for everyone. For some people, watching this movie will be like picking up difficult poetry when all they've ever read up until that point was popular fiction. Vive L'Amour is not the most inaccessible work from Tsai Ming-liang, but it is not accessible to the average person who expects a certain level of pacing and noise and motion from a film (there is barely a line of dialogue in the film's first 20 minutes). Ideally, audiences should dabble in more accessible art house films before coming to slow cinema. Or they should check out Tsai's Rebels of the Neon God before this.