The river and maman...(11/11)

A dummy was floating on an abandoned river which crosses a city of alienation. This is the prelude of the hole at the inner heart of our urban world...the river was a work of Tsai Ming Liang in 1997, and it was an attempt to capture the isolated beings in the city without love and relationship. The symbolic elements of Tsai's cinematique world such as the never-ending downpours, the leaking holes, the long-lasting motions and speechless conversation were all found in the river. It was not just a reflection about the strangers, the aliens, the unknown or the solitude. People think the story is about relationship - a relationship about people next to the others, a relationship about the family, and a family about the neighbourhood. More than those silent and reflective moments in the film, it was a touching, yet a tragic moment when the father met the son at the sauna at the end of the film. Speechless and cruel, the father and the son were outrageously pessimistic about the day to follow. I see this as an inheritance of a race and continuity, a Darwin-evolution of the emotionless sense. What is it called love? For me, the idea of the river draws a close cohesiveness to Louise Bourgeois's work of 'Maman', an erecting mega-spider on the ground of the river bank. The spider may not be able to float on the river, but it probably originates from the same source of the river. Raindrop is a symbolic communicating tool between human and the sky, the chance, the fate, the next moment of unknown pleasure and the hope that people need a lot. When the raindrop falls on both the downward spiralling river as well as the joints of the legs of Maman, it erodes the unforgiving past and misery. Maman exists with its eight legs connecting itself to the terrain of the habitat. The father and the son walk by some days sooner or later. It provides a shelter to the generations perhaps. Between the river and Maman, there is an enlarging spider web spreading invisibly to embrace the disjointing relationship that we lose orbit in the modern world. 'Amor martis', demonstrated in our life is sometimes the speechless sorrow we can only have before turning the colour of the sky. The ground seems to have broken down, falling downward can be anyone who look for an exit to rejoin the estuary ecstasy.