Good, but...

...not as impactful as his earlier films (particularly What Time & Dragon Inn). I get Tsai is trying to experiment a little more (considerably more shots - even long ones - are done w/ a short lens, hence the perspective accentuation/distortions - an interesting device, albeit somewhat overdone), and goes out of his way even more (though I thought the father-son scene in the bathhouse in The River was both smarter and more devastating) to confront the audience. This is all done beautifully in a very baroque (pace those who peg him as 'minimalist') fashion, which, at times for me, becomes much too much, self-conscious. The quiet, implosive atmosphere is gone, and things spiral out of control here.

The most beautiful scene for me was the shot of the phantomy shadow of the pseudo-pregnant girl moving in her darkened living room.

I think Tsai makes a good point about sex, beyond power, as humiliation, keeping up or dismantling appearances (and at what point does a, say Confucian, humility become complicit with gestures of humiliation?). I always find his commentaries on the hypocrisies of the Taiwanese society he lives in hilarious. While charges of misogyny are understandable, they are only so in terms of a discursive paradigm of power dynamics, and become circular in logic. I think this film is more about the APPEARANCE of power, the illusions we submit to (and the consequences of the shattering of those illusions, *IF* it's something that's even possible...the girl can't help but watch on, even identify with the 'corpse', even after her realization...).