Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Puiu's real-time descent through Bucharest's failing emergency rooms turns institutional decay into a procession of small abandonments, each corridor and waiting bench echoing the rituals nobody attends anymore. Like the empty Fu-Ho cinema, the hospital becomes a vessel where civic care has thinned to ghostly procedure.

Each episode lingers in the negative space of a depopulating Ohio town built atop strange machines, finding pathos in retired diners, abandoned tractors, and a school auditorium where someone still hums an old song. The series treats infrastructure as memory-storage, the way Tsai treats a movie palace.

Ben Jelloun stages a friendship through the dimming cafés, prison yards, and Tangier cinemas where Maghrebi men once gathered to argue politics and watch dubbed melodramas. The novel's grief is architectural—rooms remembered more vividly than the people who filled them.

The album was recorded in a converted swimming pool, and its glacial reverbs hold the architecture of that emptied vessel inside every track. Like the Fu-Ho's leaking corridors, the record turns abandoned civic space into a resonant body for collective ache.

Yuasa's protagonists are swallowed inside a whale, and the film transforms that interior into a derelict communal hideout where survivors invent rituals, screenings, and dances against the closing dark. It shares with Tsai's cinema the conviction that enclosed spaces can become tender shelters precisely as the outside world recedes.