Next up on the S&S list, still at #108, is this Taiwanese movie about a movie theater.

So I try to go in blind when I watch movies, knowing nothing at all about them. Most of the time this works well, but sometimes it leads me to spending half the movie trying to figure out what kind of movie I’m watching. This one, it turns out, is a nearly plotless portrait of a particular place — an old, gigantic movie theater, now almost deserted as it shows old movies to an audience of like a dozen people, some of whom are members of the local gay community looking for an assignation. If I’d known that going in, I probably would have been able to relax into it a bit more, rather than watching these people and trying to figure out what’s going to happen and to whom. (Because in fact: Nothing is going to happen to anyone.)

As a vibes movie, this really is quite good. The conceit of it is that it starts as a movie is beginning in the theater (King Hu’s Dragon Inn, a 1967 wuxia, a fact which I only know from watching an interview with director Tsai Ming-Liang), and then it kind of follows various people in the theatre over the course of the movie, and then shuts down the theatre after it’s over.

There’s a projectionist. There’s the box office ticket lady who is also the janitor and who takes us on a tour around the innards of the theatre. There’s a guy in the audience who’s trying to find a hook-up (this isn’t obvious at first, leading me to be very confused about why he was staring so intently at another patron), a couple who is eating food very loudly, a little kid, and a couple of older guys.

There’s almost no dialogue; the first spoken line comes 45 minutes into the movie, and the longest speech is like four lines, where the two old guys meet in the lobby after the movie and talk about how nobody goes to the movies anymore and everything has been forgotten. It was so on the nose that I suspected they must be old movie stars, and indeed they’re two of the leads in Dragon Inn — so this movie had their characters watching a movie with the younger versions of themselves in it.

And… that’s it. We get some small portrait of these characters, but in a big way, the theatre itself is the focus of the film. In an interview, the director talks about how these theatres were ubiquitous and popular when he was a kid, but then they all died out (this is a 2003 movie, so we’re talking around the turn of the century), and he wanted to memorialize them before they were completely gone — the place this was shot in was closing down, and he took out a lease on it in order to shoot the movie there, so this run-down, decrepit theater is about as authentic as it gets.

It’s a slow movie — he apparently wrote the screenplay intending for it to be a mid-length movie that would be packaged with another mid-length movie, but then all his shots were so long that it ended up being feature-length (barely, it’s under 90 minutes) — and even if it were faster-paced, it’s still the case that nothing really happens. It wouldn’t work at all, except that the theater really is a fascinating setting, and seeing people go about their various businesses in this decaying (but lushly shot) building while a grand epic movie plays in the background is enough interest to keep things going. But I’m glad it’s short, because the spell would wear thin if it were too much longer.