As long as artists have existed, so have muses. Cinema has no shortage of iconic pairings but the relationship between Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng is unique in the history of the art form. The closest analogue is François Truffaut’s collaboration with Jean-Pierre Léaud in the Antoine Doinel cycle, which follows the evolution of Léaud’s eponymous character across five films and twenty years. An avowed admirer of Truffaut, Tsai has taken this model much further. Lee stars in all eleven of Tsai’s features to date, always playing a fictionalized version of himself named Hsiao-kang, as well as in a catalogue of shorts and works made outside of the cinema, ranging from telefilms to gallery pieces and a VR installation.

After scouting Lee in a video game arcade, Tsai cast him in Boys (1991), a 50-minute film that he directed for Taiwanese television. “I quickly regretted choosing him. He’s so slow, his reactions are completely different from those of regular people,” Tsai recalls in a 1997 interview with Cahiers du cinéma. But he goes on to credit the experience with teaching him a new way of working with actors. “This kid lights up the screen and I was constrained by an overly rigid method instead of adapting to his rhythm. I liked him, though, and gradually I learned to like his rhythm. That’s how I decided to cast him in Rebels of the Neon God.” Released in 1992, Rebels is Tsai’s first feature. He wrote the role of Hsiao-kang expressly for Lee and borrowed freely from the actor’s biography (even keeping his name: “Hsiao” is commonly used as a diminutive in Mandarin, so that the character’s name translates to “Little Kang”). In hindsight, it is evident that the learning process he describes in the Cahiers interview was part of a broader continuum in the evolution of his personal aesthetic, which properly began with Rebels and is still ongoing.

When Tsai made his debut, auteur cinema in Taiwan and Hong Kong, like their economies, was in full bloom. Rebels has some affinity with other landmark films of the time, such as the stylish portraits of lovelorn youth and petty criminality of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express (1994) and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). In capturing the alienation of bodies navigating an urban landscape in the midst of sweeping transformation, however, Tsai’s sensibility is closer to that of Michelangelo Antonioni. As a time capsule of Taipei during this momentous period of transition, Rebels is one of the great city films. The mise en scène alternates between dizzying vistas of the Taiwanese capital, conjuring poetry from the jungle of advertising signs and perennially congested highways, and intimate spaces rendered with a haptic attention to textures: the floral wallpaper of a dingy love hotel room, the mouldy tiles and stained porcelain of a public toilet. Alongside torrential downpours and other symbolically charged images of water, the film thus exteriorizes the feelings of characters who barely know how to express themselves, lonely and desperate souls whose lives keep crossing but forever fail to connect.

While the thematic preoccupations of Rebels have remained fundamental to Tsai’s cinema, many of its formal elements progressively disappeared. Huang Shu-Jun’s indelible theme song, for instance, a sexy and haunting synth tune that plays whenever emotions hit a peak, has no equivalent among the later films. Tsai would only use music again so conspicuously in the sensational song-and-dance numbers of The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005), both highly idiosyncratic takes on the musical. Over time, the camera grew stiller, the shots longer and the dialogues more sparse. By most standards, Rebels is a relatively quiet and contemplative film. Compared to Tsai’s latest feature, Days (2020), which contains static compositions that are held for some ten minutes and whose very few spoken words are purposely not subtitled, it seems positively hyperactive.

Tsai’s distillation of form corresponds to a search for a more unencumbered way of looking at the world and, specifically, at Lee. Many of the actors in Rebels, such as Miao Tien and Lu Yi-ching, who play Hsao-kiang’s parents, and Chen Chao-jung, who plays his rival and object of obsession, would regularly reappear in Tsai’s future work. The only constant, however, has been Lee, who moved out of this ensemble and into the spotlight. Seldom have the means of cinema been harnessed to convey desire with as much intensity, and it’s difficult to think of another filmmaker who has explored their desire as thoroughly. Regardless of the nature of Tsai and Lee’s relationship beyond the screen, their mutual oeuvre represents a lifelong love story – one that also involves the viewer who has shared in its emotions film by film. Like a Proustian dream come true, Rebels offers us the privilege of reliving the genesis of this love.