A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of "Incest," and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema: Tsai Ming-liang’s The River

A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of "Incest," and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema: Tsai Ming-liang's The River

Once in a while, the encounter with a particular scene in a film is so challenging that it preempts one's relation to the entire film. I would like to write about one such scene in this essay. It is from Taiwan director Tsai Ming-liang's (Cai Mingliang) Heliu/The River (1997), a film in which a father and a son, not recognizing each other in the dark, engage in sex in a gay men's bathhouse (what in Taiwan is known as a san wennuan). Like much of Tsai's work, this scene is without musical accompaniment: the simple movements and gestures, the shadows cast by the dim light on the characters' flesh, and the occasional sounds they make constitute the totality of the diegesis of this astonishing event.

Literature and Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science