The River (1997) User Reviews

Bold, subdued revealing tale of a Taiwan family with dark elements, cinematically and content-wise. NFE (not for everyone)

[ruby_fff · 8/10 · 3 November 2001]

After the film, my immediate reaction was it felt like the other extreme of "American Beauty," call it "Taipei Beauty". It's about a dysfunctional family, but in a much quieter, subdued way. It's dark, rather Kafka-est, and at times reminds me of Jim Jarmusch's black and white films. This film is in color, yet the mood and tone somehow felt sparing and heartlessly detached. There's not a whole lot of dialog. Very often we have long shots/scenes - and I mean both in the sense of camera held duration and reach of distance. Director Tsai Ming-liang definitely is not shy at giving us the real-time experience: the stillness of waiting, the (long) pause of a character just standing there, sitting there motionless, alone in the dark in dim lighting, or just going through the routine of munching food. Mind you, it may seem like nothing's going on, but the underlying emotion or turmoil within the character is silently felt. He even repeats (similar) scenes - it has a French film flavor: the actions/motions the characters go through seem to come so naturally, like ordinary daily life routines.

Ambient sound effects play an effective role in "The River," and they're constantly there, aptly applied complementing the scenes instead of musical tracks. Besides the two critical boldly captured intimate scenes of the son, the other intimate scene of the father, another of the mother, are all presented in a transitional flow, unobtrusively natural way. Sensitive portrayals all round - the demonstration of utter unawareness of each other, as a family unit or floating bodies in the circle they're in, is complete. Lee Kang-sheng (apparently a regular in director Tsai's films), playing Xiao-kang the son with the murderous neck pain, was so unbelievably real - so comfortably natural in every scene and situation.

I thought of Jacques Rivette's 1990 "La Belle Noiseuse" which I recently viewed, where Emmanuelle Béart told Michel Piccoli a riddle: "What is something that travels on a hollow track, never sleeps, never goes back?" "It's a river, a stream." It squarely describes this Taipei family of three: the father, the mother, and the son, each are quite lonely by him/herself, leading a hollow existence. You might say 'fate' has a hand in the flow of events: if the son did not casually happen to meet his old girlfriend at the escalators of the mall, leading to his 'extra' actor role of a floating corpse in a movie shoot, when his body being soaked in the river wetness, followed by his riding the scooter with his neck exposed to the breezy wind, hence the chill giving rise to the agonizing neck pain unable to get rid of… As a river has converging tributaries joining its course, we see the father's simultaneous harassing frustration with the non-stop ceiling water leaks in his bedroom - quite a pouring river whenever it rains, plus his unspoken secret; we also get to see the mother's lonely occupation and preoccupation. Like any river, there are unexpected rapids, and the family of three copes. Yes, in Tsai Ming-liang's "The River," the events just happen, and there is no going back - life goes on a-flowing.

There are two other films titled "The River." Jean Renoir's 1951 "The River," a beautiful sensitive film shot in Indian, about three teenage girls growing up in Bengal; Mark Rydell's 1984 "The River" with Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek in a Hollywood 'disaster' save-the-family-farm movie. Tsai's 1997 "The River" may be hard medicine, yet beyond the bitterness, a flavorful taste shall emerge. It's more than thought provoking. To some, I agree, this tastes like a masterpiece.

Tsai Ming-liang is a mysterious director.

[Grégoire "Freak" Dubost · 7/10 · 20 February 2000]

I have seen three of his movies, and i always got out of the theatre not knowing what to think of it. It is always well films and directed, but the themes he treats are so peculiar.. Once again, the plot is here that of a strange illness, a heavy neckache, that will start everything else. It seems that the boy got it from a polluted river where he shot a scene for a film, but who knows ? it may as well have no origin. But this will lead us into the life of a family, where communication isn't the best. Uncommunicability, strange illness and behavior, leaking roofs, seem to be Ming-liang's obsessions.

The River

[MartinTeller · 8/10 · 30 December 2011]

This is the Tsai film that has gone the longest between my first and second viewings. I've lost my old review, but I think it was sometime in 2003. Although several key scenes have lingered in my memory, for some reason over the years I've downgraded it to "2nd tier Tsai". I think that's a good place for it, bearing in mind that 2nd tier Tsai is still really, really good. It builds on VIVE L'AMOUR and sets up more of his signature elements -- water, illness, isolation, urban decay. The only real problem with it is that there a few scenes that don't add anything. They're variations on ideas that have already been sufficiently expressed. However, the bulk of the film is compelling despite the typical snail's pace. Kang-sheng Lee's chronic sore neck (which I'm sure we're meant to infer is caused by submerging himself in the polluted river) is subtly horrifying, one of the most haunting images of pain I've seen. Although I think Tsai did better at expressing communication breakdown in other films, the theme is put across strongly, culminating in that deeply disturbing climax. If it doesn't all quite come together perfectly, it's nonetheless a film that resonates with me.

An undiscovered masterpiece

[Duree · 10/10 · 8 November 1999]

There is a great deal about this movie which is going to bother audiences with short attention spans. The director Tsai Ming-Liang has a trademark style that is not to everyone's taste: long, static scenes; no background music; and dark, unsentimental realism. All of these elements are present here as they were in his much better-known film "Vive l'Amour."

As fine as that film was, this one is even finer, and much more harrowing. An aimless young man runs into an old fling who happens to be working on a film set. He goes one day to watch the filming and the director, who is trying to film a scene of a corpse floating down a river, is having trouble with the dummy they're using to play the corpse. The director talks the young man into playing the corpse. He hesitates, as the river is clearly polluted to ridiculously toxic levels, but the desperate director is persuasive enough to convince him that everything is going to be all right as long as he takes a shower afterward.

In the days and weeks that follow, the young man develops a tic that steadily develops into severe spasms and partial paralysis in his neck and shoulder. Director Tsai presumes the audience is intelligent enough to see the connection between the polluted river and the sudden neurological catastrophe, and never makes the cause of the illness explicit.

The young man's life steadily unravels. He goes to Western-style doctors; he goes to Traditional Chinese Medicine practictioners who violently massage him, poke him with needles, force him to consume revolting medicinal broths, and perform various rituals to scare off the evil spirits. Nothing works, many of the healers are quacks, and the hopelessness of his situation settles upon the viewer like a radioactive cloud.

The rest of his family is only slightly better off. His father is a closeted gay who relentlessly cruises and constantly gets rebuffed. His mother, for obvious reasons, is sexually frustrated. They barely know how to communicate with one another and the son's worsening condition merely exacerbates the fissures that already existed in the family. One top of that, their house is leaking water and the ceiling is on the verge of collapse.

There are horror films which frighten us with supernatural forces and crazed psychos, frighten us with things that hardly exist or which most people never encounter, and then there those movies which present the far more terrifying horror of real calamaties that befall real people every day: chronic illness, environmental catastrophe, familial dissolution, hopelessness, depression. Such films are tremendously unpopular for one very simple reason: they tell the truth, a truth which practically everybody would much rather pretend doesn't exist. Even when such disasters are presented to us in film and literature, there is often a tendency to try to soften the blow by sugar-coating it with some kind of hope, redemption, turn-around, religious awakening, catharsis, etc. This film does no such thing: it tells a believable story and follows it through to its logical "conclusion"--the realization that there are some things from which one will never recover, that there are some cases in life where there is no hope. There are very few people who can stomach such a bitter truth, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Only a very brave and talented artist can present a story like this without descending into sentimentality on the one hand, or schadenfreude on the other. Tsai forces us to observe carefully, and observation is the first step on the road to compassion and understanding. He sees the pathos of the situation but also its black irony and humor. What's more, in this little story about a handful of ruined lives, he has found a parable that applies to the larger world, one which forever seems to teeter on the brink of destruction, most of the time at its own hands.

Disturbing depiction of emotional disconnect

[howard.schumann · 14 October 2002]

In The River (1997) by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), meets a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) on an escalator in a downtown Taipei mall. The woman introduces him to a film director (Ann Hui) who recruits him to play a corpse floating down a polluted river. Shortly afterward, Xiao-kang mysteriously experiences severe neck pain. Although he receives medical, chiropractic, and acupuncture treatment, his condition worsens and he spends most of the film groaning in pain and holding his neck. As in Todd Haynes' Safe (1995), another film about illness that worsens despite treatment, it remains uncertain whether the cause is physical or psychological.

There have been many films about the failure of modern society to provide a coherent set of values for people, particularly Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, and Michael Haneke's Code Unknown, but none convey the feeling of emotional deadness and isolation more effectively than The River. It is so alienating in its lethargic pace that it makes Andrei Tarkovsky look like Michael Bay. With no close-ups, no soundtrack other than environmental noises, minimal dialogue and plot, and long takes that focus on objects for minutes at a time, the film challenges us to stay tuned in.

Relationships in The River are cold and impersonal, and Xiao-kang's family is about as profoundly isolated as can be imagined. All we see in the beginning are three individuals going their separate ways, performing most of life's routine chores exclusively by themselves. It is well into the film until we even know they are a family unit. They never speak to each other, sleep or eat together. The father (Miao Tien) is a retired, dumpy-looking man who frequents the Gay saunas. Xiao-kang's mother (Lu Hsiao-ling) is an elevator operator who watches pornographic videos that she obtains from her secret lover, a seller of such material. Xiao himself has a brief affair with the young woman he met at the beginning of the film.

There is no emotion in the film. Only the brief, anonymous sexual encounters provide any form of intensity. All of these scenes, however, are shot almost entirely in the dark with only little snippets of light showing parts of trembling bodies. This technique creates a sensual but rather unnerving and distancing experience. Water is a prevalent thread throughout the film -- in the polluted river, the leaking ceiling of the father's bedroom which ultimately floods the apartment; rain showers, bathing showers and baths at the sauna. It plays a central symbolic role, perhaps as a metaphor for the flow of life. As Jonathan Rosenbaum concludes: "Sex and plumbing, seduction and infection, a river and a spray of steam and a torrent of rain are all part of the same inexorable flow."

The River says a great deal about people thrown together in big cities, living in close proximity, and yet emotionally and psychologically distant. They live an existence surrounded by silence, unwilling or unable to reach out to each other, handling problems with inaction and patchwork solutions. I found The River to be a very unsettling experience, unpleasant to watch but very powerful in its dark message. In a shocking scene towards the end of the film, father and son meet in a sauna at a gay bathhouse but fail to recognize each other. In this tender but disturbing depiction of emotional disconnect, the film is succinctly summarized.

Nothing less than 10/10

[kaustavthegodfather · 7/10 · 12 March 2013]

The River was Tsai's third feature film after Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L'Amour. While both films feature many of Tsai's trademarks— including his frequent collaborator Kang-sheng Lee who always plays a character named Hsiao-kang (whether it's the same character is debatable) The River definitely feels the most indicative of the direction that Tsai would go with his next several features, eventually culminating in his masterpiece Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Here Hsiao kang is a young man who lives with his father and mother but almost never communicates with them. One day Hsiao-Kang is asked by a film director to play a floating corpse in a nearby river and, though reluctant, he agrees. Thenceforth he finds himself plagued by a bad neck ("Postmodernity is a Pain in the Neck" as one IMDb review wittily spoke). Though he goes everywhere and tries everything to get relief (hospital, acupuncture, spiritual healer, chiropractor); nothing helps, and his life begins to become unbearable. His parents have problems of their own: his father frequently, but secretly, goes to the local gay bathhouses while his mother is starved for sexual attention. The River contains many of the director's trademarks alluded to above, but it's less rigorously formal than the films that followed. Here, Tsai's camera is still mostly tied to its characters, panning, tilting, moving, tracking to follow them. His long take aesthetic isn't as extreme here either, and while scenes still usually play out in single takes, the scenes aren't quite as elongated. These qualities give The River a looser aesthetic and greater dynamics. Tsai makes excellent, and often quite disturbing, use of juxtaposing short scenes of movement with long scenes of stillness. That stillness is especially potent inside the bathhouses, which are swimming in darkness with just a small light illuminating the bodies of the figures inside. Tsai stays with these sexual encounters for an uncomfortable amount of time, never blinking in order to catch every undulation, every hand movement, every orgasmic exultation. This motif culminates in the film's most devastating scene where father and son accidentally meet in the same bathhouse. The River also marks Tsai's first extended use of his continual visual motif of water, and it's never been more apropos than here. Most crucial is the scene where Hsiao-kang agrees to play a dead body in the local river, but not before stating, "that river's filthy." In his later film, The Wayward Cloud, Tsai used water as a symbol for something organically essential to life. The water shortage in that film, combined with the substitution of watermelon juice, seemed to suggest the substitution of pornography for real human connection. Here, the pollution of water carries the disease that will afflict Hsiao-kang throughout the film. That disease seems to be the erosion of human connection and communication. The fact that Hsiao-kang plays a corpse, floating aimlessly in a polluted river, surrounded by a film crew seems to suggest a multiplicity of artificial layers surrounding individuals, infecting their humanity to its very core. It's telling that Tsai returns to the (rather humorous) image of the leaking roof inside the family's home, tracking their efforts to keep water out by any means necessary. Water is also intricately connected to the film's obsession with sex and bodily fluids considering that the father goes to the bath houses to court his homosexual liaisons. Early in the film a sex scene between Hsiao-kang and an old girlfriend is preceded by her insistence that he turn off the lights and close the windows so she can pee. This early scene itself is connected to the film's opening scene, which features an up-and-down escalator where Hsiao-kang and this girl first pass each other. The encounter is indicative of the film's concern with the autonomous movement and separation of individuals, and is especially funny when Hsiao-kang turns around and tries to go down the up-escalator but finds himself unable to make any progress. Tsai's wickedly biting and absurd humor is pervasive in the film though many seem to miss it, perhaps because of a natural tendency to take such obvious art-films so seriously. One perfect example finds Hsiao-kang's mother giving him an "electric massager" to help ease his neck pain. The next scene finds her alone in her room, watching a porno film and visibly lamenting the lack of her "massager." All of the "healing" scenes take on a kind of satirical quality with Tsai mocking the scam artists who are obviously powerless to help Hsiao-Kang. Another funny scene finds the father riding with Hsiao-Kang, holding his head upright so he can drive his motorbike. If anything saves Tsai from the accusation of artsy-fartsy pretentiousness, it's his sense of humor that suggests he probably doesn't take himself as seriously as his fans do. While The River isn't as "silent" a film as Goodbye, Dragon Inn where Tsai managed to reduce the film's dialogue down to less than 10 lines, it's certainly pointing in that direction. Most of the film's best scenes play without any dialogue, and what dialogue exists seems utterly banal and almost inconsequential. Tsai is already forging his unique visual style, but he hasn't yet achieved that pristine sense of metaphysical mystery that will pervade What Time is it There?, or that sense of architectural abstraction that will pervade Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The River still feels rough and a bit juvenile. Its frames are opaque and muddy, almost echoing the idea of the dirty river itself. But if this isn't Tsai at his most pure or most profound, it's probably Tsai at his most depressively powerful. This is a film that will probably leave you feeling as unclean as that titular river, and it's guaranteed to be a film that will grime and gunk up your subconscious. A perfect 100/100 if not more. Rarely Have I seen a Tsai film (and not to forget Jia ZhangKe too) reveling in mediocrity.

Watch it and enjoy it-it's great!

[fabreu · 10/10 · 11 March 2002]

Tsai Ming-Liang offers viewers in "The River" an honest chance to take it or leave it right from the first sequence. If you make it through and enjoy (or rather, are puzzled by) this first sequence - a film shooting in a river, depicted in a long, almost real-time pace - you will for sure be caught in his stream, because what follows is simply great, original, surprising, offbeat, funny, alarming and often mind-boggling.

Tsai is a Taiwan filmmaker whose cinematic grammar apparently owes a lot to Westerners - especially to Europeans. You can spot Truffaut in his love for his characters, in the way he always casts his favorite actor Lee kang-Sheng much in the way Truffaut did with Jean-Pierre Léaud, and in the mysterious and surprising ways love expresses itself in his films.

You can feel the influence of Antonioni in the long sequences without dialogue or music, in the urban chaos leading to lack of communication between the characters, in the forces of nature (the heavy constant rain, the omnipresence of water in this case) responding to "civilization's" abuse - the echologic chaos.

You can feel a touch of the Godard of "Le Mépris" in the total lack of communication between very close people (the couple in Godard, the family here) and the kind of non-conform sexuality of the Pasolini of "Teorema" (sexual repression and catharsis among the family members, in both cases).

But Tsai has got something all his own. I've seen now all his feature films and it's very impressive to see how he has developed a language of his own, through his imagery, his pace, his actors' performances, his conflicts, his endings. He is sure to always include unforgettable sequences (here, for sure, the sequence in the sauna between father and son) that will haunt you, delight you, disgust you, move you and stay with you long after you've left the theatre. That's a rare accomplishment in any visual arts these days.

For me, "The River" is surely Tsai's masterpiece to date, a film that flows slowly, harmoniously, hauntingly, effortlessly to its destination, catches you in its stream, and leads you to a free-meaning ending - which, in this case, is something warmly welcome.

the most polished film I have ever seen

[prothumia · 9/10 · 22 September 2004]

Every second of this film is calculated. Whether it is a shadow crossing a bed or the obstructed view out a doorway. It is an excellent story about taboo and how defilement can exist in many ways. The audience watches as a white-clad, pristine, Taiwanese youth is marred by his immediate environment, a close friend, and then his own family. The director illustrates Tai Pei as a filthy industrial cesspool by concentrating the film's landscape in the inner city.

Besides the subject matter, the director uses agonizing long shots to make the audience uncomfortable. There is no soothing music, only the roar of cars and other urban noise. It left me breathless. The best film I have seen to date.

I don't get it

[Tahwan · 4/10 · 19 November 2011]

I saw the rating here, so I watched the movie. Well, I don't understand the rating. I read some reviews here, I still don't understand.

Of course, some scenes are very well shot, acting is good and so on. But a story with no development, (almost) no dialogues, no surprises just can't be a good story. And movie without a (good) story can't be a good movie.

To watch a boring life on screen is even more boring than living a boring life.

So it's just boring and weird... despite the interesting idea, good acting and directing. Which is sad, since the movie had huge potential!

But I can imagine there are quite some people out, who like this movie... But you need a really special taste.

Neck pain, linked to family strife... genius

[jvanhuys1988 · 9/10 · 5 February 2017]

By a large margin, my favourite film of all time. First of all. It is comparable to Tsai's debut film, Rebels of a Neon God, in how it tackles the ironic theme of alienation in a mega-cities. The tension created by knowing that the boy has healthy sexual encounters with pretty girls, followed by what happens later, is almost unbearable to watch.

The link between his family strife and abuse and his neck pain is one of the most powerful metaphors ever seen in cinema. Tsai Ming-Liang has created an entirely new language of film-making here. Gone are the traditional 3act/ 5 act structure. His tragic fall from normality to submissive, silenced victim is unparalleled in modern cinema. There is only one Tsai Ming-Liang and there is only one 'The River'. Bravo!

Now my neck hurts.

[chrishend · 3/10 · 15 August 2003]

Oh, the horror of it all. The ennui. The angst. The isolation.

Must drink ... double shot ... of ... espresso ...



Interesting themes, but a borderline unwatchable movie. This thing makes an Antonioni film look like "Indiana Jones". The use of real-time filming (or whatever technique the film school flunkies are calling it) is interesting in spurts, but it was just plain cruel and unusual punishment here. I get the feeling that the individuals who loved this movie are the same ones who would declare a two hour movie of someone peeing pure genius. Thankfully ming-liang had the decency to keep his pure peeing scene to only 4 minutes. I was rivetted wondering how the sound of it would change as we proceeded from the second, to the third, to the fourth minute. Enthralling filmaking.



If you enjoy watching paint dry I give this movie my highest recommendation. If you expect even a hint of entertainment value in your films I give it a 3/10.

Postmodernity is a pain in the neck

[nunculus · 26 September 1999]

Xiao-kang (Kang-sheng Lee) is a teenage rube who gets hornswoggled into doing the dead man's float in a polluted river so a no-budget filmmaker can get her shot. The next day, a pain in his neck appears, and his father (Tien Miao) has every solution for it except the obvious one--a doctor. The curious web that connects Xiao-kang, whose pain grows from the noisome to the suicide-inducing, his dad, a divorcee with a penchant for male hustlers, and the kid's proper, upscale girlfriend (Shiang-chyi Chen), couldn't be guessed at by any movie you've ever seen or any novel you've ever read. And if the words "David Cronenberg" popped into your mind when Xiao-kang's neck started metastasizing, you're wrong again.

The writer-director Tsai Ming-liang has two primary interests in THE RIVER: water and alienated architecture. If you wanted to be really crude about it, you could say that on today's world-cinema landscape Wong Kar-Wai is a new Godard, and Tsai Ming-liang is a new Antonioni. He knows how to make a colloquy of old Taiwanese men at McDonald's look like Heywood Floyd's walk through the space station in 2001; and for a better picture of bottom-drawer loneliness you'd have to go back to Travis Bickle. But he has two secondary interests, too--bodies (Dad's pot-bellied but still lithe one, the son's with his ever-tilting neck) and organic human processes (peeing, washing, masturbating, frying stuff in a wok). The emphasis on forlorn public spaces justified the movie's presence in an absurdly titled recent L.A. retrospective called "Ultra Modern Loneliness," but if you think Ming-liang is an alienated King of Pain, you're still wide of the mark. He uses these quintessentially bodily moments to make hyperpoetic still lifes that evoke the paintings of Eric Fischl. Every scene is like a metaphor that doesn't point at anything but itself.

If you had to characterize Tsai Ming-liang's voice here, it would be like the sound of passing traffic heard from an apartment window. He so withdraws from the indicating and commentary that passes as ninety-nine percent of world moviemaking that the audience gets freaky nervous. But as much as any director that's emerged since David Lynch, he's a true-blue original--he don't owe nothing to nobody. Perhaps the most gorgeous aspect of THE RIVER is Ming-liang's focus on the cinematic potential of human touch, which fascinates him even more profoundly than it did Cassavetes or Pialat. The way a human touch can shade from pain-giving to pleasure, or vice versa, leads to the shattering climax of THE RIVER's seeming non-story--a narrative arc as unfettered, as personal and intuitive, as any in contemporary movies.

A World not ready for the presence

[tiborhuber · 9/10 · 8 May 2002]

Not to let anyone walk into this unawares: a voice from the audience understandably commented the somewhat contrived, but cinematographically superbly rendered catharsis of this movie, when son and father make out in the dark room of a smudgy sauna club, thus: `O Lord, will you not spare me anything today?'

`He Liu' is a disturbing tale of urban disruption, solitude and rot, not told but evolved in a series of carefully composed real-time-scenes circling about a family afflicted by a sudden and scary medical condition befalling the Son after he took a plunge in polluted river: Their harrowing quest for a cure just serves to depict the utter hopelessness of traditional (Chinese and universal) values in modern society. The disruption of the individual has gone to a degree that it takes the audience about 45 minutes to even get the fact it is watching the plight of familially related protagonists. We watch people engaged in homosexual intercourse without feeling they're gay: In their context, homosexuality is a token of disorientation as much as the porn-watching of the mother whose lover is as little interested in her physically as her husband: Satisfaction is beyond reach for every inhabitant of this chill world - a place not geographically limited to Taipeh but given as a state of present time urban society.

This, of course, is the gist of about 95% of all the movies with a message. What Ming-liang Tsai manages is a bit more special: Underneath the phenomena of isolation there runs a counterpoint of unexpected solidarity - father and mother, still without ever talking to each other again, are immediately available in a matter of course way as soon as their son's condition deteriorates: `family' is still an extant institution, a should-be, could-be, would-be harbor not yet ready for the ice storm that has seized the world.

Redeveloping many of the same elements, this movie compares favorably with Ang Lees more expansive and considerably less focused `Yin shi nan nu' (Eat Drink Man Woman) from 1994 and is somewhat echoed in his more accomplished `Ice Storm' from 1997, the same year when `He Liu' was made.

More than a homosexual movie,and great.

[xuck · 10/10 · 14 November 1998]

While most of Chinese/Taiwanese film directors spend their effort on the past legend,Tsai focuses on the present city life scene.It's always an unhappy challenge to deal with Reality and it needs a lots of guts.And Tsai does it faithfully. The father and son's love/hate complex is not a surprise in the asian society.This is more than a homosexual movie. While Lee An is trying too hard for the happy ending, Tsai is more interested in individual identity that has long been a fatal conflict in most asian families.

Insanely boring and pointless...

[paul_haakonsen · 2/10 · 27 February 2022]

I had the opportunity to sit down here in 2022 and watch the 1997 Taiwanese romantic drama "The River" (aka "He Liu"). Sure, I had never heard about the movie prior to watching it, but I figured that it being an Asian movie that I hadn't already seen and with a rating of 7,2 on IMDb, then writers Ming-Liang Tsai, Yi-Chun Tsai and Pi-Ying Yang had something great in store for me.

But talk about a swing and a miss. Running at 1 hour and 55 minutes, there was virtually nothing happening throughout the course of the entire movie. So it was just insanely boring to sit through this ordeal of a movie. It was not entertaining or enjoyable, and I wonder how come the movie have managed to score such a high rating. Perhaps, I am just not cultured enough to appreciate the avantgarde cinema.

The storyline was boring and pointless, as were the characters and the dialogue. Everything felt so mind-numbingly slow and pointless. But yet, I managed to sit through 1 hour and 35 minutes of the ordeal. Then I was good and ready to claw my eyes out, and it was obvious that the movie would not pick up pace or become interesting. So why continue on?

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in "The River", but I am sure that the actors and actresses put on fair enough performances, given the rubbish material they had to work with.

"The River" is definitely not a movie with a wide appeal, as it is somewhat of an acquired taste and preference. The movie fell short of providing me with entertainment.

My rating of "The River" lands on a two out of ten stars.

sex, water and videotapes?

[ThurstonHunger · 1/10 · 22 November 2009]

I may have to turn in my cool kids club card, but this film failed miserably for me. A wordless film should never be assumed to be a thoughtless one, and to call this thoughtless is indeed too harsh. But not well thought out, I think that is fair.

Other reviewers are finding more in this film than I truly believe exists. Water and secrets. The need for touch among the disconnected. Can I applaud the reviewers, and yet decry the film itself? Whereas it might have made a mysterious and intriguing short, stretching it to feature length made for a belabored exercise. And as for expressive acting, I just didn't see that. It was as convincing as the motorcycle accident. Or as the meeting between the main character and his apparent former flame on the escalator.

Toss in bad dubbing (not the dialog, just general foley sound) and a love for shots that goes on 10X too long. Talking about the old man urinating, the yellow towel after the lover spurns the wife, and really any scene in the dark. Ugh...

Don't get me wrong, I love films about alienation, but if every character is as rooted as the mannequin floating in the river, there is no connection from the start.

At times I thought of the Japanese film, Tetsuo : The Iron Man, I'd say see that film instead. It has alienation and infection and yet action and expression.

1/10 Thurston Hunger

A Film of Shocking Power

[scr1ve · 11 May 2000]

Although the first thing that strikes you about 'The River' is its measured pace and relaxed narrative style, you will soon feel yourself giving up the rein to this film that demands respect.

It is a film that documents social decline in the modern world, a kind of alienation and dysfunction that has become a staple of arthouse cinema, and yet treats it with such originality and audacity that it seems brand new all over again. It is the kind of film I like: the kind of film that uses 'dead time', the type pioneered by Antonioni, that establishes the film within a natural context and long takes that never disrupt the time-truth of the images, resulting in film that hardly ever manipulates or patronizes the audience. It relies instead on the understanding that the audience will accept (or possibly relish in) the films distinctly alternative themes and form. Indeed, the film has its flaws, as all films must, but I feel that it is the measured pace that will test most- don't let it! After-all, it is only 114 minutes long.

A film laced with a quite understatement that explodes towards the end in a finale that is, in my viewing experience, un-equaled in its shocking power. Recommended.

A masterpiece

[xmxjjy · 8/10 · 18 January 2023]

This movie called The River seems to be underrated. The pace of the whole film is very slow, which may make some people feel unacceptable, but for me on just right, because such a pace, this over and over again on the fixed shots of ordinary life scenes, which allows people to chew slowly emotional cohesion, and finally converge into a river, slowly and at the same time profoundly flow into the heart of the viewer.

We can see the son's struggle for neck pain, we can see the old man's thirst for sex, and when he touches someone's head, he is ruthlessly rejected, so he and his grandson end up together in this place of venting their desires.

There is also the wife's desire, which is obviously suppressed. We fell into contemplation with the heavy rainstorm outside the window. The pouring rain seemed to be a mockery of this unbearable family, a mockery of this uncontrollable world. We had no control over the rainstorm that penetrated the house, and we had no control over our sexual orientation or our husband's love for us. We can't control everything, and in the end we can only give in to our hearts and desires, just like grandfather and grandson making love together, unethically approved yet our own choice.

The river is more suggestive of the true face of this society, which is a pool of stagnant water. The pain that cannot be removed, the desire that has nowhere to rest, the suppressed feelings that can not be exploded, can only suffer in silence. At the end of the day, the old man who lusted after the flesh of young men met his own relatives and declared his principles with a slap of anger, but could not change any status quo. Later shots, we see life seems to be back on track, yes, that is like the elephant inside the room, existing, but not allowed to mention. At the end, Kang stands under the wind, under the early morning sun, and I thought he would jump off the building, but did not. The movie ended, without a soundtrack, depressing, but worth remembering.

A wretched film.

[mongoose176 · 1/10 · 16 February 2006]

I don't want to put too much thought into this review, lest I return to the agonizing state of disrepair I was in upon leaving this "film." I will be brief: This IS the worst film I have ever seen. Were I not in a class, I would have walked out or turned it off. I NEVER do that and I seldom even consider it. Can I file a grievance against my professor?

To those who think it's "realistic": What planet do you live on? I have never seen "real" people speak and do so little. Ozu is realistic. Rossellini is realistic. They are engaging in part because they understand that real does not mean boring.

Also, in spite of the two hour running time, and the wealth of meaning that has been projected onto this film by reviewers, NOTHING happens. If nothing happens, then there can be no meaning other than "nothing happens," in which case the next logical thought would be "life is pointless." If this is the case, put down the camera and kill yourself.

Anything this film tries to say about modern life, family, or existential ennui could have been said in a few moments of engaging film. Instead the filmmaker is content to force you to watch as he leaves the camera running.

Honestly, this film offers nothing. The characters are flat. They may as well have been called man, boy and woman. They are two-dimensional. To those who like this movie, what do you know about these people? How can we understand their actions if we know virtually nothing about them? Maybe they're supposed to be universal, but I doubt it. Were this the case, then every father is at least somewhat homosexual, every mother is unfaithful and suffocating and every child is a helpless moron. The performances (as well as the film itself) made me think to myself, "I think these people think they are making a great movie." If the themes that previous reviewers have attributed to this movie appeal to you, then try some of the following movies and filmmakers. You might find that you don't have to suffer through ridiculously long takes, flat acting, and unnecessary boredom.

Taxi Driver, The Mosquito Coast, anything by Michaelangelo Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman, The Ice Storm, Talk Radio, Ohayo!, Videodrome, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some others. You could also read books by Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.

It's "conceptual."

[Latheman-9 · 3/10 · 21 April 2003]

There are many who say Marcel Duchamp was the greatest influence in 20th century art, but for better or worse is hotly debated. One can put a commode on a dais in an art gallery and there will be those wearing berets and smoking French cigarettes who will examine it closely as they discuss in hushed and reverent tones the significance of the fact that anyone seated on it would be facing north, or whatever point of the compass a user would happen to be facing. Then there would be others, among whom I would be one, who would look at it and say, "OK. It's a toilet. So what?"

Whether you considers Ming-liang Tsai's "The River" a work of cinematic genius exploring the soulessness of modern existence in an urban landscape (see most of the previous comments), or an uncommonly tedious exercise in pointing out the obvious by a self-indulgent director (yes, that's my opinion) is obviously a matter of taste. Personally, I don't need to pay money and walk into a theater to sit through two hours of some Asiatic form of Dogme 95 film-making to know that spiritual ennui is the price extracted for living in today's industrialized world. I can get on the subway where I live and see it all around me, also in real time, and with much better lighting.

With very little dialogue, "The River" relies almost exclusively on cinematic technique, often involving images in reflective surfaces to indicate (insert metaphorical reference of your choice here). The film does have the virtue of being made up of extremely well-composed shots, and if viewed strictly from a photographic standpoint, it does have some artistic merit. But on the whole, I find little to recommend this film. There are far better movies out there to be seen. Rating: 3/10.

A dark philosophical meditation on environmental disaster

[jharford-1 · 8 August 2001]

The action of this film is so slow that I couldn't help being disturbed by the popcorn muncher behind me two rows back. It was such an existential experience, I found myself reasoning the sounds behind me were no less banal than the ones on the screen and it would do no good to complain.

This is a film that the missing time between scenes plays as much a part of the film as what is on the screen.

Like a meditative fragment from the presocratic philosophers "the River" is an assemblage of 24 sequential still images replayed to create the illusion of motion and Tsai takes each long, drawn out sequential scene and removes so much in between to maintain fluidity the audience is forced to fill in the gaps to complete the story.

Like Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" disease is a metaphor creeping its way into the lives of a pool of people. But Tsai, has removed the beautiful image, and the mysticism. He hammers a cold story directly into the psyche. Emphasizing fleeting connections between the disconnected, "the River" is more than the filthy river that may or may not be the source of the main characters problem but a degraded class of people without hope of understanding what's happening to them.

Be prepared for a devastating and harsh illustration of gender confusion and environmental disaster.

worst movie I've ever seen

[erlam · 1/10 · 2 November 2003]

Oh! I can't believe you people out there actually gave this movie any value. I am simply not that kind of person who can dig deep thoughts out of a bunch of crap, who can stare a guy in this movie peeing for 5 minutes without being p***ed off. I watch movie for fun and didn't enjoy at all watching unchanged scenes, empty stairs, stonefaced actors eating, s****ing and sleeping for 115 minutes. Not to mention when the son coincidentally had sex with his dad, i was just completely freaked out. You can name this movie realism or what. But to me that's hardly the reality and completely unacceptable and pervert. I strongly recommend you not to waste the 115 minutes, even though it probably won't be 115 because you will fast forward most of the movie just like me.

if it were American u would have hated it too

[leo_bartels · 1/10 · 8 July 2006]

I will never understand why people think crappy foreign films like this one are so great. Seriously if this were an American film nobody would watch it but for some reason unbenonst to me it has a very high rating. Now don't get me wrong I do really like foreign flicks but they have to be good to get me to like them.

The acting was not bad at all the script was flat but not unrealistic the plot? not to exiting (and I love slow drab films) basically I think the director did not shine in this one and as great as his other films are supoed to be I hear this is his big classic. I doubt I will watch another of his.

It should be 1 but I am nice

[ozpol2001 · 2/10 · 17 December 2001]

It was experience to stay until end of it. My friends left me before half of it, but I decided to see the end.

It is very bad, slow movie. The description about some high values of it are misleading. It is movie about "everyday" people with sick son in sick family.