The River

It's fitting that cinema's most eloquent poet of loneliness should also be its most reticent. Few words are spoken in the films of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, yet they speak volumes about alienation, isolation and the desperate, rarely successful search for intimacy in contemporary Taipei. This 1997 film — the closest Tsai has come so far to a masterpiece — could be considered the third part of a quartet that includes REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1992), VIVE L'AMOUR (1994) and THE HOLE (1998); each stars Lee Kang-sheng as a young man named Xiao-kang, and all feature lonely people linked — and divided — by their sterile living spaces. Also typic...