In a midst of heavy downpour, a tourist seeks shelter in a rundown movie theater screening the wuxia classic, Dragon Inn. The movie theater acts as a shelter, literally shielding people from the heavy rain, but also metaphorically providing an alternative to reality. There are few patrons left in the decrepit theater, most attendee are preoccupied with things outside of what is transpiring on the screen, some are snacking, while others are wandering around anywhere—bathrooms, backrooms—but the actual screening room. Two elderly men are the exception, Jun Shi and Miao Tien, who were also main actors in the original Dragon Inn, watch their younger selves onscreen. The film preserves their youthfulness and what comes with it, a more glamorous age. The same can’t be said about the theater itself, its grand size and array of red seating, are now echos of a bygone age. They are reminders of something grand, rather than the grand thing itself.
The pouring rain envelops the theater, there’s only a handful of outdoor scenes that show the downpour, but we’re constantly reminded of it. We see the walls lined with water damage, and the ceilings constantly dripping. The leaks are everywhere.
The structures that provide cover can only temporarily shield the inevitable. The institutions of grandness can only slow an inevitable decay. And while there is a nostalgia for what once was, there’s also something interesting and new appearing. The drips and leaks erode existing walls, to create something new. Who occupies these spaces? In the film, its the few loners that maintain what exists, the random tourist that stumbles upon the ruins, and then there’s these men that wander the backrooms and loiter in the bathrooms. The film eludes to how places like the theater have transformed and morphed into spaces for the marginalized to mingle. Tsai had said, “After declining popularity but before closing down [the Fu-Ho—the real-life theater] was said to have a few people of the gay community patronize the place… I’m very moved by this. Though it has declined and lost its glitter and you have forgotten about the theater, it still continues a long journey and still welcomes the outsiders of society.”
The theater, the structure, has been repurposed to something useful for a new group of people. Like the water of the rain, the sheen and polish of the theatrical will be washed away and hopefully give way for the practical and useful. And so the constant drips transform from annoyance into opportunity, not unlike the hole in Tsai Ming Liang’s The Hole, disruption becomes a window for a better alternative, mourn not the crumbling of walls, when we can look forward to something open.
When a large whale dies, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and create a whale fall, a temporary ecosystem in the deep sea, where nutrients are hard to come by. A host of organisms crowd the carcass, a rare moment of flourish. Similarly, with the theater, decay can be reframed as new growth, destruction into something generative, leaks as overdue erosion of institution, and the birth of something new.