Goodbye, Dragon Inn

As a former cinema employee who found solace in those lonely midnight closing shifts, watching the last stragglers slowly leave the last film and doing the final cleaning before going home at 1am, and a current cinema goer who finds solace in near empty late night screenings with the company of a few other passionate cinema goers, this movie was a revelation. I never expected to see an experience that has always felt so deeply personal to me captured so flawlessly on screen, and seeing that empty theatre shot and watching the two employees do their final duties made me feel quite emotional as it made me reflect not just on the way I used to feel cleaning those final screenings and doing the final candy bar checks, but the period of my life back then too and how far I've come. Tsai Ming-liang has such a way at inhabiting the spaces that he films, this is my second film from him after last year's Abiding Nowhere and I definitely plan on continuing to work my way through his filmography as I've been thoroughly impressed so far with the emotions that he's able to squeeze out of his lingering shots and perfectly framed scenes that I could stare at forever. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a film for anyone who appreciates the experience of going to the cinema as much as the movie they're seeing itself and the way that it hints at this once great cinema's heyday in amongst the reality of its run down, decrepit interior, standing in for Tsai Ming-liang's perspective on the dwindling appreciation of the experience of cinemagoing itself as illustrated by the film's final conversation, this was truly a delight and a one of a kind experience for me.