Winner of the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival, Vive L’Amour (1994) focuses on three individuals connected provisionally by way of an unoccupied duplex that they each use for various trysts or as a kind of isolation cell, a retreat, or a zone of suspension. The three characters in Vive L’Amour are little more than extensions of the spaces that connect them in their disconnectedness.
Director Tsai Ming-liang was born in Malaysia of Chinese ethnic background and did not find himself in Taiwan until he was already an adult. He has often spoken in interviews of habitually feeling like an outsider, a foreigner in any community.
Tsai’s films consistently focus on urban spaces and shared living spaces. Places and spaces often figure as radically untethered non-places, and there is a presiding sense of disorientation and dislocation. Information is often strategically withheld in order to keep the viewer unbalanced and geographically confused. An inability to connect endemic to this broken-up urban landscape and its atomized denizens is exacerbated by breakdown in communication. Vive L’Amour, like subsequent Tsai films, contains long sequences of slow-burn emotional rawness in which the performers commit themselves with brave dedication. Desire is routinely suppressed, but is everywhere operative, and frequently causes spasms and various forms of acting out, leading to breathtaking feats of performance.
-Written by Jason Wierzba
Community Partner: CJSW
The University of Calgary Student Radio Society (CJSW Radio) is one of Calgary’s only independent media outlets and is Calgary’s only campus & community radio station. Based on campus at the University of Calgary located on Treaty 7 land, CJSW operates as a non-profit society with a small team of staff and a large dedicated volunteer base. They broadcast over 110 music, spoken word and multicultural programs in more than 10 languages on 90.9 FM, online at cjsw.com, and podcasted on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play.
In the spirit of respect, reciprocity and truth, we honour and acknowledge that this screening takes place on Moh’kinsstis and the traditional Treaty 7 territory, as well as the oral practices of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. We acknowledge that this territory is home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Métis homeland. Finally, we acknowledge all Nations, Indigenous and non, who live, work and play, as well as help steward this land, honour and celebrate this territory.