Like a cross-section between films of the Taiwanese New Wave and a mood piece, 1987's Gondola is a curious gem. With little in the way of audience coverage for it or its director, the few that have sought it out seemed to have done so by word of mouth and comparisons to works sharing a similar appeal. From what I've gathered, August in the Water and the early 80s output of Edward Yang (That Day on the Beach, Taipei Story, and The Terrorizers) are what's picking up steam as a selling point. Seeing it for myself, I'd say the end result is somewhere in the middle.
Like August in the Water, there's a strong emphasis placed on its ephemeral/vaporwave aesthetic and daydream tone. And of the two, August might be the one that consistently sustains it, but not to the detriment of Gondola's efforts; its success derives elsewhere. It achieves a synthesis with its vapor-trail style and narrative threads, a singularity where written content and feelings are unified. Motifs that serve multifaceted purposes, complementing each other throughout. It's not just a great aesthetic, it's a reinforcement of the screenplay. Water, music, translucent objects intermix; glass for barriers, figurative distance, and isolation, water for longing, a point of return-memory for one character, a dream state for the other-music as a representation of a missing parental figure. A constant reminder of a bygone time, changing with the development of the narrative itself, becoming something of a healing agent. If any comparisons to 80s Yang are to be made, it's here, in the way the architecture of the cityscape lives and breathes with the personal lives of its inhabitants. An ecosystem of mutual give-and-take.
There's more than "vibes" to soak in here. There's a story of loneliness, of coping, the role of the family as a sculpting component for the way children turn out. Gondola's narrative stays in the forefront, holding equal weight to its visual fidelity. An elegy dedicated to those that feel like ghosts of their society, a part of yet apart from the crowd. Empathetic and therapeutic, to the right person, Gondola could be more than 2 hours to kill, it could be a source of comfort. Something to revisit when you just need to tune everything else out.