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Following the suicide of their mother, two exceptionally close sisters
(played by Im Soo-jung and Moon Geun-young) have to contend with a moody
stepmom (Yeom Jeong-a) and an ineffectual father. It’s deliberately left
unclear if the strange things that turn up in the family’s dark labyrinth of a
house, such as intestines in the bed and fridge, are real or imagined by the
girls, who are just back from a hospital stay presumably for mental problems.

The siblings pull you over to their side largely because Im and Moon are
likable young actresses who don’t overemote or make their characters seem
crazy. By contrast, Yeom’s stepmother dearest is a loose cannon from the get-
go.

Kim, an up-and-coming filmmaker in his native Korea, freely cuts from the
past to the present and back again, confident in the audience’s ability to
sort things out. He creates stunning images ripe with meaning — for
instance a doctor in a white coat washing his hands in a white basin intimates
layers of guilt beyond scrubbing up. Splashes of red appear throughout, often
turning into a trail of blood. In one inspired moment, the red morphs into a
symbol for a first-aid kit, something that every member of the family could
use. This tale of two sisters is so bloody good that an American remake
already is in the works.

– Advisory: This film contains violent scenes and lots of blood. – Ruthe Stein

Drama-comedy. Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang. (In Mandarin with English
subtitles. Not rated. 81 minutes. At the Roxie.).

Tsai Ming-Liang’s films move glacially in a global-warming world —
seems as if everything has to be hot, edgy and fast-cutting, while Tsai’s
works invite us to take the time to contemplate the issues of the day, which
most often involve loneliness and disconnection in an increasingly complex and
impersonal world.

In “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” opening today at the Roxie, he has created
another idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is both funny and moody. On a lonely,
rainy night, an old, run-down theater in Taipei is about to close for good.
The movie shown on that last day is King Hu’s 1960s martial arts masterpiece
“Dragon Gate Inn.”

Tsai’s film mourns the passing of an era of not only movies and movie
stars but also moviegoing. With gargantuan and characterless multiplex
theaters swallowing up the business of single-screen neighborhood theaters all
over the world, including San Francisco, and the success of the DVD format, we
just don’t experience movies in the same way.

I quote from James Naremore’s film-noir book “More Than Night,” in which
the film professor and author recalls first becoming enamored of the movies
during the 1950s, when “most neighborhoods had second-run or rerelease
theaters where the films changed every few days. At such places, moviegoing
involved a feeling of circularity and flow; one often entered in the middle of
a feature and then stayed to see the short subjects, previews, and the opening
one had missed. … It was not unusual to watch the show in a nonlinear or
flashback style.” “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” shows what happens when that flow
stops. As it begins, a nearly full house is enjoying the early evening show;
soon, the film focuses on the late-night showing, the last in the theater’s
history. There are only a few people there. Most of them are alone. They
change seats, leave the theater for various reasons, and return.

What follows is a series of set pieces, most of them both humorous and
also a little bit sad. The decrepit theater has leaks; the ticket taker is a
shy woman with a clubfoot; a young man can’t seem to sit down without another
patron sitting right next to him in this almost-empty theater.

The young man takes frequent breaks — perhaps this is a film he has
seen many times before — and explores the cavernous theater, the storage
areas filled with boxes and old posters. He encounters a man smoking a
cigarette, who says he is Japanese and that the theater is haunted, then
leaves. Strange.

One shot early on hints at what Tsai is getting at — an old man,
sitting next to his young grandchild. You get the feeling the old man has been
watching movies all his life, and is passing on his love of movies to the boy,
who presumably will go on watching movies the rest of his life (and perhaps
“Dragon Gate Inn” will always have a special meaning to him even decades later.
May the circle be unbroken).

Tsai is considered a groundbreaking genius in some critical circles and
an overrated bore in others (grist for the latter’s mill: a five-minute shot
of an empty theater). Certainly he is one this generation’s most original
voices, who raises interesting questions about why lonely people often lead
the same kind of lives independent of one another in a technologically
advanced but increasingly disconnected world. Now he seems to be expanding
these themes to include movies — an art form that can certainly bind
disparate groups or individuals together to “create” a common culture.

In Tsai’s previous film, “What Time Is It There?,” about a man in Taipei
and a woman in Paris who barely know each other but seem to have the same
experiences at the same time, the man watches one of his favorite movies,
Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.” At the same time, the woman meets a man
at a cemetery; it is Jean-Pierre Leaud, now in his 50s, who played the boy in
the movie.

In “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” the two old men in the theater turn out to be
two of the stars of “Dragon Gate Inn,” Shih Chun and Miao Tien (who has been
in several of Tsai’s films). When they speak at the end of the movie, there is
a resigned acceptance that life, and the movies, will go on without them.

Tsai’s films are quirky and strange, but ultimately they are universal
and touching.

Note: The sound designer is rarely a person you read about in a movie
review, but “Goodbye Dragon Inn” benefits enormously from the work of Tang
Hsiang-Chu. “Dragon Gate Inn” is shown only in a few scenes, but the movie’s
wall-to-wall background soundtrack is superbly integrated into the “real-life”
scenes, effectively operating as the film’s musical score. In a way, it
underlines how “cinematic” a movie can sound.- G. Allen Johnson