UK Premiere

Short Synopsis:

A stunningly enigmatic, lyrical love story that recalls Tarkovsky in its imagery.

Review:

Joshua Tong’s Twilight Dancing is a beautifully enigmatic drama told in grainy, desaturated cinematography. The opening, an homage to Jean Luc Godard’s Le Weekend, sees a long tracking shot of a road strewn with crashed cars. Through this strange landscape, symbolising the human condition perhaps, Yangbing Hao drives a large red van, picking up hitchhikers. It is here that he meets Meimei, a deaf girl who, like a character from a Huruki Murakami novel, has always suffered from inexplicable pains, until she enters the sanctum of Hao’s travelling home. They fall for one another, but their relationship is resisted by Meimei’s guardian, Uncle Da, who runs an auto repair shop and who also seems to be in love with her.

Like many recent Asian films, amongst them Last Life in the Universe and most of Kim Ki-duk’s works, the film tells its story visually with no dialogue. Indeed Tong inserts an intertitle that rejects language insisting: ‘Only when language is disposed, the truth gets revealed’. Utilising symbolism and elliptical editing, the film’s meaning, however, lies tantalisingly out of reach, and like Lou Ye’s masterpiece Suzhou River it encourages multiple readings. A deeply philosophical work, it’s hard not to be impressed by the barrage of potent, ethereal images the film presents.


DB