Goodbye Dragon Inn (Bu Jian Bu San)

File Under: Synopsis & Review

Tsai Ming-liang directs this story about the death of cinema. Slow-paced and lushly filmed, the story follows the inhabitants of a movie theatre on the last night before the closure of a Taipei movie theatre.

As a young man sits in the theatre he notices that two older men sitting in the audience are the same men who are on the screen in Dragon Gate Inn. Two co-workers try to make a connection, a young loud chomping girl taunts a man as she watches the movie. Moments like these are layered as past, present, and future interact in this romantic eulogy for a dying era.

Sometimes Roger Garcia just gets it so right. Come prepared for the pace of slow mourning.