Pilgrimages
are supposed to be slow and arduous. That also seems to be the case for
experimental cinema. Xuanzang, the iconic monk protagonist of Wu Cheng’en’s
classic Ming-Era novel led quite the adventurous life, but Tsai Ming-liang
slows it down dramatically for his avant-garde contemporary riff, Journey to the West (trailer here), which screens
during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.
Tsai
regular Lee Kang-sheng returns as ambling focal character from the director’s
recent short, The Walker, but given
the loaded title, we can also think of him as the second coming of fictional Xuanzang
(or the historical Xuanzang on whom he was based). There will be no Monkey
Kings for him to battle, but Denis Lavant will literally follow in his
footsteps through the streets of Marseilles.
Tsai’s
sense of composition is often slyly witty and cinematographer Antoine Heberle
gives each frame the luster of Renaissance Old Masters, but there is no denying
its static nature. This Journey is
best considered in the tradition of film installations, such as Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (soon to grace the San
Francisco International Film Festival).
However, the British filmmaker’s ode to Chinese goddesses is considerably more
cinematic thanks to the spectacle of Maggie Cheung hovering above the Shanghai
skyline in the guise of the goddess Mazu and Zhao Tao’s eerie recreation of scenes
from tragic actress Ruan Lingyu’s definitive film, The Goddess.
Let’s
be honest, extreme close-ups of Zhao and Cheung make much more sense than Lavant’s
haggard countenance. Lee’s physical discipline is commendable and his featured calligraphy
is quite elegant. It also just nice to see he and Tsai still share their close
collaborative bond, but that is something one can glean from the festival
write-up.
