Rebels of the Neon God movie review (2015)

Tsai Ming-Liang's debut film "Rebels of the Neon God," a youth-in-revolt story that's finally being released to US theaters 23 years after its debut, is the director's most accessible film. That will seem like a funny observation once you've seen it, because Tsai's most accessible film is more unusual and uncompromising than any you're likely to see this year.

The movie starts with the offscreen sound of a tropical storm battering a city, then observes two teenage smartasses, Ah Tze (Chen Chao-jung) and Ah Bing (Jen Chang-bin), crowding into a rain-smeared phone booth and robbing the coin box with crude tools. Hardly a word passes between them. They're both smoking the whole time; the cigarettes rarely leave their lips. The next half-hour unfolds with a similar paucity of dialogue. You're just watching Ah Tze, Ah Bing and a handful of other major characters walking, riding scooters, talking, studying, stealing motherboards from video games, arguing with parents, and acting and reacting within the context of their gigantic home city, Tapei—which, despite the film's references to established deities, is obviously the "neon god" of the title.

This is one of the great modern films about big cities and the mostly unacknowledged psychic toll of living in them. Early on, a dutiful but frustrated student, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), impales a cockroach with the sharp point of a compass and pins it to his desk to watch it die slowly—an expression of astonishing frustration and anger expressed in an offhand way. A couple of scenes later, he angrily tries to kill another cockroach clinging to the outside of his bedroom window, accidentally shatters the glass, cuts himself, and has to staunch the blood, to the alarm of his parents (Lu Yi-ching and Miao Tien). There are times when every character could be an inmate in a prison movie, doing whatever he or she has to do to make the time go faster. There are many shots of people in cot-like beds, sometimes having sex or pleasuring themselves but more often smoking or sleeping or staring at the ceiling. Tsai lingers on details that express great longing, sadness and mystery, such as a when the camera tracks a series of objects floating in floodwater on an apartment floor (including a crushed soda can and a cigarette butt), or when we observe Hsiao-kang exiting a campus building amid a sea of parked scooters to discover that his has been towed, for some random reason. (In the background we hear a young woman imploring cops not to tow her scooter as they're ignoring her and hoisting it onto a tow truck.) 

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