Review: Rebels of the Neon God (1992)
Cast: Chao-jung Chen, Chang-bin Jen, Kang-sheng Lee
Director: Ming-liang Tsai
Country: Taiwan
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: This review of Rebels of the Neon God is the first part in Lance McCallion’s Spotlight on Tsai Ming-Liang
It is only appropriate Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang should burst onto the scene with a film whose title and central image allude to Nicholas Ray’s seminal blighted-youth picture Rebel Without a Cause. Nicholas Ray himself being one of the central Hollywood figures whose work led young French film critics such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut among others to start their own theoretical and cinematic revolution as key artists of the French New Wave. And it is their work as much as Ray’s in which the young Tsai immersed himself at a Taiwanese film school. Along with the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni, the artistic preoccupations and techniques of these European masters would come to shape in varying degrees Tsai’s own filmmaking across two decades starting with 1992′s Rebels of the Neon God.
Rebels, in many ways, serves as the template for a remarkably rich and insular fictional film world the likes of which few other filmmakers have ever crafted with such devoted continuity and formal identity over the course of an entire career. Indeed as one traces the trajectory of Tsai’s authorial voice from one film to the next, a clear recycling and iterative evolution of characters, places, themes, visual motifs and actors leaps to the fore. Beyond mere signature or potentially indulgent “auteur theory” fulfillment, the through-lines here permit an unparalleled degree of aesthetic focus in his work and an ultimate short-hand with which the viewer can quickly begin to decipher the many archetypes, signifiers and recurrent visual patterns across a span of increasingly abstract narrative cinema. I might argue by the time a devoted chronologically-inclined viewer reaches Tsai’s latest film Visage, they’ll be speaking a fully-formed new language called “Tsai Ming-Liang,” a language of more unique phrases and words than are typically shared between the sullen isolated subjects of his films.
Beyond mere signature or potentially indulgent “auteur theory” fulfillment, the through-lines here permit an unparalleled degree of aesthetic focus in his work and an ultimate short-hand with which the viewer can quickly begin to decipher the many archetypes, signifiers and recurrent visual patterns across a span of increasingly abstract narrative cinema.
Tsai’s debut feature of course, being the ground floor of this blueprint, doesn’t yet benefit from a long cultivation of unique authorial design. It could be said it instead relies more on the established signatures of those previously noted film legends, and to a degree it’s true - Rebels demonstrates a certain Bressonian stillness, the gentle humanity of Truffaut, a deranged grim comedic sense likened to Fassbinder, and the detached compositional rigor of Antonioni’s existentially tormented cityscapes. The film is also in debt to national compatriot and New Taiwanese Cinema figurehead Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s landmark A City of Sadness (1989) as well as some of Edward Yang’s early work in its rough-and-tumble often spasmodic bursts of violence. Tsai seems to achieve something of a miracle in accumulating such a wealth of artistic influences within his work while shaping it all into a singular coherent voice undeniably his own.
Central to Tsai’s ongoing fictional universe is actor Lee Kang-sheng’s portrayal of Hsiao-Kang, here a confused and quiet young man living with his parents (both also recurring characters in Tsai’s future films also played by the same actors) prone to fits of temporary madness (a spastic physical convulsion which scares his mother upon hearing his parents discuss the potential of Hsiao-Kang being the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese god) or vandalism (destroying the motorcycle of the film’s other central character Ah Tze, either as an act of jealousy or an eruption of ambiguous homo-erotic tension). That homo-eroticism plays centrally to the film’s stringently observational visual examination of its youthful subjects. Tsai has a manner of capturing his actors’ bodies in obliquely sexual imagery, a gaze directed equally to male and female forms, to hetero and homo-sexual interactions, be they explicit or implied. Given the way Tsai frames the reverse shots of Ah Tze and Ah Kuei’s romantic couple as Hsiao-Kang is found frequently following and observing them from afar, it’s impossible to tell whether his own longing eye is focused on the man or the woman in the shot. Or maybe it merely marks a longing for interpersonal connection of any kind among the bustling urban sprawl of Taipei. It is that general ambiguity which makes the character’s pathology so interesting and Kang-sheng’s performance(s) so incredibly captivating as it morphs and contorts through the duration of this film and across the span of Tsai’s filmography.
Tsai has a manner of capturing his actors’ bodies in obliquely sexual imagery, a gaze directed equally to male and female forms, to hetero and homo-sexual interactions, be they explicit or implied.
There is more to Rebels than this solitary perspective though, and perhaps uniquely among Tsai’s oeuvre, the rest of the film has a comparative liveliness, its frames often packed with lights, aural cacophony, and movement. The minor-criminal exploits of Ah Tze and his friend Ah Bing as they steal coins from anonymous phone booths and the motherboards from arcade cabinets (the titular neon gods which serve as the altars and beacons of quasi-social activity in the early 1990s) leading to their inevitable downfall at the bloodied hands of angry gangsters-come-arcade-owners, stand as a definitively anachronistic series of events within Tsai’s greater narrative universe. Tsai’s first film displays through many areas a particular degree of looseness and thus filmic convention in its somewhat moderate average shot length, ample degree of camera movement, and relative “loudness” if only by comparison to later works. Overall, Rebels is a definite first step, the reaction of a unique talent to the decades of film history which precede him, as well as a daring new document of a special place and time in the world. Yet it absolutely displays the countless hallmarks which will forever serve as its author’s founding creative elements, a class of its own in dissolved urban sociography, exposed through a hyper-observational lens full of melancholy, full of humor, full of humanity. As we’ll see, Tsai will begin to iterate on this debut film via varyingly more abstract and minimal designs, and while he will repeatedly produce more complex, sensual and even awe-inspiring films, none will ever match his first in spontaneity or kineticism for better or for worse.
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