Madame Butterfly

Tsaï Ming-Liang retains very little of the opera by Puccini: just the setting, which isn’t so exotic for him, even if we do go from Japan to Singapore, and the destiny of a woman left by her lover. Enough said: the narrative should be content with that and the film go along with it. Going nowhere? Here’s our Madame Butterfly in a bus station in Kuala Lumpur, without enough money to pay for her ticket. This offers Tsaï the opportunity to take a tangent, which he enjoys, into the middle of a dense crowd amidst the stalls selling fruit and things for the journey. We feel that the shots are stolen moments and the extras on this hectic diversion infect the images with their own real excitement. Next, a bus which she is trying to climb onto, this time it is the driver who refuses to let her on board. In Tsaï’s cinema, plot rarely dictates the order of events. He choses an actor, or an actress – Pearly Chua in this instance, an old accomplice – and dives into the set which has been left intact. All the players are at liberty to let themselves be carried away and to carry each other away. The actress gets lost in the crowd but she is also the hub of the pain which serves to concentrate the crowd. Indeed, her suffering reaches an almost comic climax when she finds a hair on her tongue, the only memento she has left in her mouth by her missing lover. This perfectly illustrates the arc that sweeps from the throng finishing in a minute, unique brushstroke. (Jean-Pierre Rehm).