It’s a testament to the audacity and divisiveness of director Tsai Ming-liang that the feature debut from the painterly master of Taiwan’s post-New Wave era, Rebels of the Neon God, should get its first limited release in the States 22 years after it was made. Hitting US shores in the wake of his lauded 2013 feature Stray Dogs, Tsai’s first film provides a striking glimpse back into the rambunctious, uncertain first steps of a filmmaker who would grow into one of the most demanding formalists in world cinema. Yet for all the stylistic flourishes that seem so unlike the mature Tsai, many more aspects show his innate grasp on a unique aesthetic approach to filmmaking and storytelling.
Fittingly, Rebels of the Neon God with the sound of pouring rain. Water is central to Tsai’s films, representing life, death, despair, stagnation, hope, and just about anything else you can ascribe to it. Rain pounds a phone booth as two hellion teenage brothers vandalize and pillage. And later, back at their family’s apartment, water oozes up from a clogged kitchen drain to flood the abode. Ah-tze (Chen Chao-jung), the eldest brother, even exhibits the usual reaction to ruinous water in Tsai’s movies: he first attempts to unclog a fully stopped kitchen drain to clear the place—and when that fails, he simply makes peace with this new state of life, and promptly splashes off to his room to lie down.
If Ah-tze’s listlessness tends toward a stasis common to Tsai’s characters, Rebels nonetheless bustles with an energy foreign to Tsai’s subsequent filmography. Handheld cameras jog down aisles of arcade machines, and the camera pans around city streets after scooters and cabs. The film’s subject, that of the restless anomie of youth, leaves the director open to numerous clichés, something he would largely leave behind as he became more abstract. By the same token, this is, hands down, a definitive mall film of the ‘90s—an eerily perfect portrait of ignored store windows and arcades amped up with flashing lights and ringing sounds in an attempt to distract kids from how boring the games quickly become. To watch this movie is to come to terms with the horrible truth that malls around the world are all like this—capitalist mirages that give poor slackers a place to congregate while mocking them for their material lack.
Besides, this is no ordinary portrait of dull youth. There are scenes of Ah-tze masturbating to the sound of his brother Ah-ping (Jen Chang-bin) having sex with his girlfriend Ah-kuei (Wang Yu-wen), and of the brothers engaging in an incestuous triangle with the young woman. The trio’s antics are all over the map, but it’s clear that even their most animated moments bring limited joy, even if only Ah-kuei voices this concern aloud. Ah-tze can only loll around in a daze, taking no pleasure from his life of tawdry fashion and uninhibited behavior but equally afraid to leave that lifestyle.
As with Antonioni, Tsai contrasts the overwhelming speed of modern consumerism with a reactionary wave of human primitivism as people regress in their ability to cope. The sexual urges of the brothers override socialization in favor of gratification, and violence sweeps through the film infrequently but with great force. While the boys raise hell around town, a dropout, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s constant collaborator), shows signs of muted rage, impaling roaches on compasses like a vicious god. Indeed, his superstitious mother likens him to an ancient, rebellious deity. Although where the old god Nezha defied his parents, Hsiao-kang seeks revenge on Ah-tze and company after the older boy smashes his father’s cab mirror with a bike lock out of spite. Hsiao-kang drifts at the periphery of the film like a stalking jungle cat, yet just as Ah-tze fixates on Ah-Kuei as an escape that he does not take, so too does Hsiao-kang seem to gravitate toward the boy with an intent that could be as much jealousy, even longing, as filial defensiveness and resentment. Tsai would later map out these unreadable emotional dynamics through punishing close-ups, but if the then 35-year-old was not exactly young at the time, Rebels of the Neon God still brims with the panache of someone still figuring himself out—not yet the man who could etch entire personal and social histories on a person’s unmoving face.
