A Home For No One: Vive L’Amour - Ai Animes 🤖

We open with a shot of an apartment door, its key hanging expectantly in profile, forgotten by an inattentive real estate agent. An unintended invitation, a false offer of cohabitation – but in such a world as this, we take whatever intimacy we can get. A man briefly cradles, inspects the keychain, before loping down the hall at the call of another speaker. Neither are in focus; only the key is truly present. The man returns, his eye wandering back to the key, tempted time and again. He claims it, and the title drops: Vive L’Amour. Is the implication that this act, this thievery in service of curiosity or hoped-for connection, is the essence of love itself? Where does love reside?

So begins Tsai Ming-liang’s second feature, following the brilliantly isolating Rebels of the Neon God. Ming-liang’s works are often described as “Slow Cinema,” which in practice means he presents lives as they are experienced – aimless and abstracted, filled with yearning and disappointment, lacking the propulsive narrative thrusts and clean, dramatic conclusions of proper stories. Our lives are not proper stories. We live in moments and memories, in feelings guarded until they fade away, in bus stop waits and bolts of misery. We are the rain reflecting the city through the glass, not the glass nor the city itself.

As with Rebels, Vive L’Amour is a story of three such lonely individuals, each of them yearning for connection in a world that seems incapable of offering it. The young man who steals the key is Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), an ossuary salesman who begins living in a vacant room of the empty apartment. His sense of dissatisfaction at his empty life leads him to eventually attempt suicide, an effort only halted when he hears others through the wall – the preoccupied real estate agent May Lin (Yang Kue-mei) and street vendor Ah-jung (Chen Chao-chung), mirthlessly mating on an unsheeted mattress. As time passes, the three continue to flitter in and out of their unknowingly shared apartment, stalking each other’s shadows without ever truly coexisting.

The apartment itself is perhaps Vive L’Amour’s central character. Ming-liang exploits its angles to create both barriers and intimacy, presenting his characters as physically proximate but never quite touching. Like the yellowing halls outside, there are no marks of individual humanity within it; the walls are barren and white, the beds are barren mattresses. It is a space to inhabit, but not “their” space – May Lin’s purse brims with apartment keys, but none of them can bring her home. Perhaps there is no meaningful difference between May Lin’s apartments and Hsiao-kang’s ossuaries; each are just boxes for bones, anonymous resting places in a world with too many anonymous people.

If there is love to be found in this apartment, it is only through the charged emptiness of a vacancy demanding fulfillment. Our strangers lie and sulk on their mattresses, waiting for something to happen. Stuck between tedious apartment-showing duties, May Lin gently strokes the fabric beside her – a gesture repeated by the others, each seeking a place for their tenderness to rest. Is this the essence of love’s persistence – this sense of quiet longing, in spite of it all? For even in this loneliness there is love – and indeed, the lover she took before is closer than she’d expect, hiding beneath that same very mattress. As they steal habitation, they circle intimacy, but never close the gap.

Symbols of painful self-awareness and missed connections permeate the feature. Our leads are frequently caught in reflection. Hsiao-kang staring at himself in a convenience store mirror, as if struggling to recall someone he used to know; May Lin applying and reapplying her lipstick, hoping one more application might spark the union she seeks. Phones are false idols – Hsiao-kang seeks but cannot find a ringing phone at his office, May Lin makes fruitless call after call to arrange apartment visits, and Ah-jung actually embraces the empty static of a disconnected pay phone, pantomiming a connection as he stares at May Lin through the glass.

The phone’s broken promise serves as a microcosm of a greater truth: the singular loneliness of isolation within a clamorous, sprawling metropolis. Bereft of even the comforting refrain of Rebels’ repeating soundtrack, the lives of our stars seem sapped of volume altogether, while the contrasting bustle of the city emphasizes that they are not just alone, but uniquely alone within a world that makes connection look easy. Lingering in cafes or arcades, they are surrounded by the proud evidence of others’ successful cohabitation, their easy jokes and bickering and carefree collaboration in social amusements. Are we uniquely broken, or is there a loneliness inside of them as well? Their spaces are either too large and empty or too cramped and crowded; while others open doors with confidence, our leads can only stare through them. Little wonder they covet their apartment keys, a sort of stolen intimacy, a false invitation into the lives of others.

They circle and weave, connecting briefly, dispersing into space. All throughout, that title hangs overhead, like a question both actors and audience are desperate to answer. Why “Vive L’Amour?” Where is love found within this feature, or within our own lives? That look of honest yearning towards a sleeping companion, a gentle kiss offered in silence – is this the essence of love? The long walk past a barren field, carved blank for a future project, a field laid fallow – is it love that brings these future seeds to the surface? The mere fact that we still cry so unabashedly, that we still reach out, that we still feel pain in light of the world’s disappointments – is that love persevering? So long as this world can still hurt us, might we still find love within its bounds?

The film offers no answers; only that final stamp of intent, Ming-liang’s signature scrawled across this tapestry of longing. But the mattresses remain, and the empty halls, and the uproar of the city in the distance. Perhaps the next apartment will have a key in its door. Perhaps someone waits on the other side.

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