Tsai Ming-Liang – Lonely Invaders
The sweating body, the sleeping body, the suffering body, the body contorted in pain, the body undone by pleasure; the thrill of watching someone unaware of your presence; contemplating your own body in the mirror, or someone else’s. All of these are part of the sensory cinema of Malaysian filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, a maker of worlds in which the viewer is invited to physically experience, in real time, this shared intimacy. Adam Cook calls it shared temporality – whether we’re speaking of the ten-minute sequence in Vive l’amour (1994), in which the protagonist finally allows herself to cry, releasing all the accumulated tension, or the seemingly endless moments of suffering endured by non-professional actor Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s eternal muse, in various forms (the neck pain that plagued the actor in real life and was carried into Tsai’s cinema across two films, The River and Days – 1997 and 2020 respectively – in a remarkable temporal echo).
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
