Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho cinema is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dreams (though they’re beginning to fray), the Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn (playing one month prior, Feb. 2!), playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room, but as we watch the enveloping film deep into a pandemic, the sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance. Yet Goodbye, Dragon Inn, by the internationally acclaimed Tsai Ming-liang, is much more multifaceted than a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia.

(Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2003, 82 min, in Mandarin & Taiwanese with English subtitles)
Synopsis and images courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

“The best film of the last 125 years.” – Apichatpong Weerasethakul