Using the composer’s most famous opera as its kicking-off point, the film is set primarily in a busy metropolitan bus station and focuses on a woman who is trying to get home but doesn’t quite have enough money for a ticket. stereo soundtrack that I’m assuming is the truest to how the film originally played is partnered with a DTS-HD 5.

Both are in fine shape with a strong dynamic range and excellent clarity, but the DTS surround track most definitely has the edge, having a fuller and more expansive feel that really showcases the film’s layered sound design and making inclusive use of the full sound stage. The movies that played there live on in DVDs and shoebox megaplexes, but their days of playing in grand auditoria to great audiences are largely gone.By the time he elects to move seats it occurred to me that I’d been watching this unfold in a single shot in real time, and that this was why it felt so familiar to me. A meager audience, the remaining few staff, and perhaps even a ghost or two, watch King Hu’s wuxia classic Dragon Inn—each haunted by memories and desires evoked by cinema itself.

Conducted in Taipei City in 2020, this hugely informative and engaging interview with director Tsai Ming-Liang is a first-rate companion to the film itself. I’ve no doubt that an argument has been made that if that film was re-edited to bring the shot length down to a functional norm then it would probably run for only a couple of hours. Tsai talks about the genesis of the project, the real-life cinema that both inspired the film and became the location in which it was shot, his childhood of cinema-going and first exposure to the films of King Hu, the film’s cinematography and sound design, the Japanese fan of his work who ended up playing the young tourist in this film, how he revised Chen Hsiang-Chyi’s interpretation of her role at the cashier, and a good deal more. It's as if the theater knows it's done for, resigned to its fate, not yet ready to die, too tired to fight.There is, it turns out, a logical explanation for this (though not for how close the tourist gets to the man, which seems to be played more for comic effect) that is revealed only in the film’s touching final scenes. I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of times I’ve fought to tolerate such a disturbance, and when my disapproving glares failed to have even the smallest impact I would often move seats to avoid a potentially unpleasant confrontation. I have a feeling that the most commonly used phrase in my reviews of films that do not conform to the mainstream norm is “it won’t work for everyone.