Post Description

The River (1997) PAL DVD9 Custom

Hsiao-kang accompanies a young woman to the set of a movie on which she is working, where he volunteers to float lifelessly in the Tanshui river, imitating a corpse. The remainder of the film concerns his and his family's attempts to cure him of a mysterious neck pain that becomes progressively debilitating in the weeks that follow his swim. As in The Hole (1997), in which Taipei is plagued by a millennial health epidemic, here Tsai explores the emotional and psychological resonances of an inexplicable pain that carries both symbolic and corporal weight. Lee's neck condition acts, first, as a metonymic manifestation of other ails, chief among them the collapse of the family, which in many of Tsai's films stands in as a microcosm of contemporary society. The River dissects the traditional nuclear family with brutal frankness, culminating in a complex and difficult, but undeniably brilliant scene that shocks viewers into confronting the consequences of dishonest living, failed communication, and psychic alienation.

 Thanks...........: gluegun@ADC

 Genre............: Postmodern drama
 Distributor......: Films Sans Frontieres
 Year.............: 1997
 Country..........: Taiwan
 Director.........: Tsai Ming-liang

 Source...........: DVD9
 DVD Format.......: PAL
 DVD Size.........: DVD9
 Programs Used....: various

 Video Bitrate....: 7.83 Mb/sec

 Screen Format....: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85:1
 Audio Language...: Mandarin
 Audio Format.....: DD 2.0
 Subtitles........: French, English (custom)

 Menu.............: [X] Untouched, intact.
 Video............: [X] Untouched, intact.
 DVD Extras.......: [X] Untouched, intact.

gluegun's comments:
The bonuses are written and only in french :
-A Bio-Filmography of Lee Kang-sheng
-Remarks of Tsai Ming-Liang about the film
-Critics of the film

Big thanks to Gombolizer for uploading the French DVD and to Mastameta for kind assistance with technical issues. I left all the extras (unsubbed) on the disk only adding English subs from the R1 Wellspring release. This is probably my favorite Tsai film.