Reception
The River won the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize award at the 47th Berlin International Film Festival.
Overall, it was well received by critics and has a 70% rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 10 reviews. The New York Times' A. O. Scott wrote that, "Whether or not The River is, as some critics have claimed, Mr. Tsai's masterpiece, it is an excellent introduction to his oblique narrative style, his favored themes and his careful, lyrical visual sensibility."
Critics focused on the film's themes of loneliness, alienation, and isolation, as well as the lack of dialogue and action which represented the family members' disconnect with each other. Allmovie said that: "Perhaps the most harrowing of Tsai Ming-Liang's meditations on urban isolation and communication breakdown, The River is a reliably demanding exponent of the Taiwanese filmmaker's cinema ... The movie trains the director's unblinking gaze on the breakdown of the nuclear family."
Critics also commented on the film's slow pace, calling it "punishing" and "difficult," but still praised Tsai Ming-liang's style of directing. According to Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle: "Tsai is so adept at pacing and mood, and so good at capturing a sense of yearning, that his film draws us in despite its unusually long takes and sparse cutting." A. O. Scott concluded his review with:
" worth waiting for. The pace of The River is slow, and Mr. Tsai's minimal camera movement and deliberate editing may take some getting used to, especially in an era of hectic cutting and hand-held hyperactivity. But he is one of those filmmakers whose visions, once encountered, are hard to shake, a rare director who seems, even at this late date, to be reinventing the medium and rediscovering the world."
Tsai himself said that he received a lot of criticism for The River. He said that, in addition to some people disliking it because of the incest scene, homosexuals and feminists also disliked it for other reasons. Lee Kang-sheng's father called it a "porn movie."
Read more about this topic: The River (1997 Film)
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