A fake corpse floats on the murky waters of the Tamsui River in Taipei. It’s an extra, an inert body for a film being shot, one by Ann Hui. That body belongs to Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng, the fetish actor, the alter ego, the martyr-body of Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema), who will soon after develop a piercing and inexplicable pain in his neck, a kind of perpetual crick that will force him into an unnatural posture, his head bent to the side like a broken flower. In this genesis, which fuses fiction with a production anecdote (it seems Lee truly fell ill after that scene), lies the entire interpretive key to The Weeping Meadow: a cinema where physical malaise is the somatization of a spiritual agony, where the body becomes a geographical map of an inner desolation that has contaminated every crevice of existence.

Hsiao-kang’s pain is the malady of our entire late-capitalist urban civilization. His rigid neck, which prevents a frontal, direct gaze, is the perfect metaphor for the collapse of communication. He can no longer look his father, his mother, or the world straight in the eye. His is a lateral, distorted, suffering vision—the only one possible in a family that is an archipelago of solitudes floating in the same claustrophobic apartment. Tsai Ming-liang orchestrates a symphony of silence, where dialogues are sparse, almost superfluous, replaced by a grammar of missed gestures, averted gazes, of bodies that brush past one another without ever truly touching. The family apartment is not a nest, but a tripartite isolation cell. The father (Tien Miao) seeks scraps of human contact in the damp darkness of gay saunas, in a desperate cruising that is more a search for warmth than for pleasure. The mother (Lu Yi-ching) maintains an apathetic and mechanical relationship with a seller of pornographic videotapes, consuming sex the way one might consume a pre-cooked meal. Hsiao-kang, a prisoner of his aching body, wanders the city like a ghost, in a limbo of pain and unexpressed desire.

If Ozu’s cinema chronicled the slow, dignified dissolution of the traditional Japanese family through precise rituals and spatial geometries, Tsai shows its terminal implosion in a Taiwanese context of full-blown, chaotic modernization. Here, architecture is no longer a reassuring order, but a prison of concrete and humidity. Water, an obsessive and polysemous element throughout Tsai’s filmography, reaches its symbolic apex in The Weeping Meadow. It is not the purifying water of tradition or the romantic element of nature. It is a stagnant, polluted, invasive water. It is the water of the river where corpses float, the water that rains incessantly from the apartment ceiling, collected in buckets with a dripping that becomes the soundtrack to their existence. It is the murky water of the saunas, the theatre of anonymous and fleeting encounters. Tsai’s water is the amniotic fluid of a sick world, a constant seepage that erodes the foundations of relationships and identities, just as it does the building’s walls.

Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema is the direct heir to the most radical modernity, the kind that runs from Antonioni to Chantal Akerman. There is Antonioni’s incommunicability, but stripped of any residual bourgeois charm and plunged into a grittier, almost documentary-like daily life. There is the dilated time, the "duration" of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, where waiting and the repetition of empty gestures reveal the underlying horror. And yet, there is something uniquely his, a sort of black humor, almost Chaplinesque or Keatonian, that surfaces in the absurdity of the situations. The series of attempts to cure Hsiao-kang’s neck—acupuncturists, masseurs, even an exorcist—becomes a comic and tragic Stations of the Cross that exposes the impotence of science, tradition, and faith in the face of an ailment that is not of the body, but of the soul.

The film is a ruthless essay on the metropolitan anonymity of Taipei at the turn of the millennium, a city that has sacrificed its soul on the altar of a progress that has left its inhabitants spiritually indigent. In this desert of connection, sex becomes the last, desperate form of communication, a primordial language practiced in darkness for fear of the light, for fear of the other’s face. The sauna sequence, a labyrinth of steam and shadows, is the film’s tragic culmination and one of the most devastating moments in contemporary cinema. In that darkness, where bodies are mere silhouettes and desire is blind, father and son meet without recognizing one another. It is an unintentional incest, an Oedipus Rex consummated not in a mythological kingdom but in the damp, infernal belly of the metropolis. The act is interrupted by the sudden switching on of a light, and the horror of the revelation needs no words. It is a short circuit that detonates the already fragile family equilibrium, a point of no return that lays bare the abyss separating them.

The very notion of a single source is, in the context of this film, an act of sublime perfidy. Throughout the film, the characters search for the source of their malaise—the source of the neck pain, the source of the water leak, the source of their unhappiness. But the search is in vain. There is no single source, no one cause to be rooted out. The malady is systemic, environmental; it is the air they breathe and the water they drink. The river that flows through this world is that of modern life, polluted at its very source. There is no catharsis, no healing. The final image, with the father carrying his son on his back through the nocturnal city in a final, clumsy attempt at a cure, is a postmodern and secular Pietà. A gesture of care that comes too late, an unbearable weight for them both. It is not an image of hope, but the acknowledgement of a shared failure. Tsai Ming-liang offers no answers and no consolation. He forces us to watch, with his long takes and inflexible gaze, the slow shipwreck of his characters, which is ultimately our own. It is a monumental and uncompromising work, a masterpiece that does not simply diagnose the sickness of our time, but injects it under our skin, leaving us with a discomfort that is the highest form of artistic lucidity.