Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Eel’ Review: Sensually Saturated Mood Piece Slithers Its Way Under Your Skin
Let’s get this out the way: Nobody titles their film “Eel” if they don’t want critics to reach for the adjective “slippery,” and Chu Chun-Teng’s woozily gorgeous first feature invites it from the off. Its story, slender but charged, is in a constant state of retreat, repeatedly darting into psychological and existential alleys just out of view. Its images, too, are often as elusive as they are beautiful, symbolically layered but accommodating of uncertain, Rorschach-style intuition. The chase is the thrill in “Eel,” an open-ended love story in which an atmosphere of suspended summertime yearning is sometimes cut through with gestures of brazen, unambiguous, horny human need — like a head-clearing pang, or pain, amid lapping waves of more inchoate feeling.
Arguably the most esoteric selection in the inaugural, debut-focused Perspectives competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, “Eel” also announces one of its most emphatically confident directorial voices — a sensory maximalism indebted to Tsai Ming-liang’s visceral surrealism and Wong Kar-wai’s iridescent cinema of desire, but derivative of neither. Chu’s film feels driven, too, by a specific youthful unrest emblematic of a wider generational crisis in modern Taiwan: Politics may not surface directly in this banquet of ear- and eye-candy, but the filmmaker’s heady, dreamy vision isn’t wholly estranged from the here and now. Further festival showcases surely await; adventurous distributors too.
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Much of the film is shot on Shezi Island, actually a peninsula off the northwest edge of Taipei, bracketed by two rivers. Its marshy rural landscape suggests a place far more distant from the city, while in “Eel” it is quite literally a world apart — a sort of permeable no-man’s-land between life and death, past and present, real and unreal. Liang (rising Taiwanese star Devin Pan, recently seen in the Cannes premiere “Locust”) is a native of the island, recently returned from an attempt to escape, and seemingly stranded in its liminal temporal mist.
Living on a ramshackle riverfront house all but sinking into the blue, Liang lives a mostly solitary existence, keeping a joyless job at a waste-management center with only one other visible employee, Hao (Chin Yu-pan). Other than Hao and Liang’s ailing grandmother (Bella Chen), the island seems all but deserted: a reserve of ghosts, perhaps, their timelines crossed and blurred. When a young woman (Misi Ke) literally drifts into view, borne by the water in a suitably floaty scarlet gown, Liang follows her with the starved fascination of the last man on earth. The feeling, it seems, isn’t entirely mutual, but she alternately humors his interest and coolly recedes from him — an evasive object of desire, as hard to grasp as a certain other creature of the river.
As the initial flirtation evolves into a more sustained sexual relationship — light on words but heavy on sadomasochistic physicality, fearlessly enacted by the two stars — “Eel” develops tangible human stakes to anchor its rootless melancholy, even as the characters’ history and emotional dependencies seem to shift from scene to scene, as if embodying multiple romances across the ages. Liang’s vast, all-consuming solitude pierces through each of these phases, as does his unfulfilled yen for presence and purpose: Though this particular island time slips and stretches and swerves back and forth, no clear future ever materializes for him. Like his late father’s homing pigeons who keep returning to their shabby rooftop coop — a holding-pattern image that echoes the ennui of Terry Malloy on a very different waterfront — he’s imprisoned by the limits of his knowledge, the petrified loop of his experience.
As prisons go, however, it’s a luscious one. Gifted cinematographer Nguyễn Vinh Phúc (“Cu Li Never Cries,” “Taste”) shoots land, water and rope-burnt flesh alike with the same air of immodest saturation, the camera movements languid and sultry, each color sweat-soaked to its most febrile, practically fragrant hue. This is richly fertile, tactile filmmaking, at some points almost taunting its characters with sensual gratification they can’t quite reach, at others giving due fervency to their own wildest urges. Red and blue and hot all over, “Eel” demands, like many a great, swarming desire, to be felt rather than analyzed, indulged rather than questioned, as it pulses and ripples through the system.
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