Lee Kang-sheng, Jane Liao
Director: Lee Kang-sheng
The film opens with a masturbating truck driver and a live fish artfully skewered for a gourmet meal. That sums up the ensuing 99 minutes of Taiwanese arthouse fare as the viewer gets jerked around by an empty but beautifully crafted tableaux laden with sex but delivering the erotic punch of a cold fish gasping for its last breath.
Director-writer-star Lee Kang-sheng, who came to prominence as muse to Tsai Ming-liang (who serves as Help Me Eros' executive producer and production designer) learned well from his teacher, but the Tsai style that was once so fresh and daring is long past its due date.
The plot contains elements that are not without possibility but require far more wit and perceptiveness to keep the viewer's attention. The scenario, on the surface, might seem like a guy's idea of heaven with protagonist Ah Jie (played by Lee) coasting through life high on pot and engaging in empty but inventive sex with a string of betel nut-selling beauties. And taken individually, the scenes are campy fun, and bursting with phallic overtones, from a lovelorn fat woman bathing with eels to the attempted pawning of a weirdly shaped lighting fixture. The staging is frequently creative and expertly shot with the neon gleam that is Tsai's trademark. There's even a hint of psychological nuance relating to Ah Jie's mistaken-identity fantasies about the Fellini-esque woman who counsels him on a suicide prevention hotline.
Alas, it's a case of the whole amounting to less than a fraction of its parts. Any potential for grabbing the audience's attention is snuffed out by a self-indulgence so unrelenting that Help Me Eros comes across as a pretentious inside joke.