Watches
May 29, 2021
This was a really poor effort by Tsai. Madame Butterfly is a short film from around the time Tsai's feature films started to slip, as he seemed more and more interested in documentary film making and even art installations. It's not that I hate slow cinema by default, but there has to be more than a camera trailing someone for 30 minutes across two locations.
There isn't much in the way of a plot here. A woman finds herself stranded at a bus station and can't afford a ticket to get to her partner. She calls the guy, but he isn't very willing to come and pick her up. And so she walks around, hoping to find a solution to her problem.
The camera work is extremely plain, the performances weren't very convincing and the plot is virtually nonexistent. It's probably supposed to come off very lifelike and natural, but this simply didn't work for me, hence it became an extreme drag. Much like Tsai's other films from the past decade or so.