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‘Eel’ Review: Sensually Saturated Mood Piece Slithers Its Way Under Your Skin
Chu Chun-Teng's debut 'Eel' won't satisfy viewers after straightforward narrative, but vivid human stakes emerge from its fevered, erotic images.
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. 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.
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