Choreography of Loneliness
by Dag Sodtholt

Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has established himself as contemporary cinema's foremost chronicler of alienation through a string of scrupulously realistic films tinged by his unique brand of sober surrealism. But his latest film, What Time is it There? has not received as much acclaim as his earlier works. Considering the extremely high standards set by his own filmography, it is bound to be compared and judged against the masterworks Vive L'amour (1994), The River (1997) and The Hole (1998) - although the last one saw him slipping ever so slightly. Although his most recent work is undoubtedly a fine film, I must confess a vague feeling of (relative) dissatisfaction with it.

The first thing that must be said about What Time is it There? is that it is a work of enthralling beauty. It is as polished as jade - even more so than his earlier films - and reveling in the beauty of its surface is an integral part of the viewing experience, to such a degree that when I returned to the theatre the day after to see it again, and found that the focus was now just slightly off, it seemed entirely pointless to watch it. The other prominent visual feature of the film is that the camera does not move at all; compositions are thus never ruined and can be constructed to last the entire shot. It is the end station of a visual line that Tsai has been travelling his entire career. The camera is now a totally impassive observer, a portal through which we may spy cautiously on his hapless world of emotionally isolated human beings.

In What Time even animals are confined to separate spaces; a big white ghost-like fish lives in its tank in the protagonist's apartment, in its own zone of existence - it is in fact a realm of the deceased, since that fish will be symbolically linked to a dead person. The colors of the fish tank also sets it apart from the rest of the room, and the impression of separate but co-existing worlds is further strengthened by the use of differently colored lighting, dividing the shot (and thus the apartment) into different zones. The presence of the enigmatic fish and the many-hued colours turn the apartment into some sort of magical place, a new dimension thus added to its function as a barren locus of alienation in Tsai's earlier film The River.

The new dimension is death and the magic is the possibility of a life after it. The first shot of What Time, an extended, static gaze on the father from The River, puts us back in Tsai's tragic universe of the super-dysfunctional family. The shot tells us the life story of a character without uttering a single word, through a synthesis of the weary countenance of Miao Tien (playing the father), his resigned demeanour, and the infinite loneliness of the situation - he calls for his son to come to eat, and getting no response he retreats from the kitchen to seek solace in a lonely cigarette on the veranda. We feel that this must have been repeated thousands of times in his life. But suddenly, in the next shot we see his son Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) in a car holding an urn, and we understand that the father has died. Just as he was escaping the loneliness of the kitchen by retreating to the openness of the veranda, he has now fled his dreary life entirely. Later we shall see that the spirit of the father has somehow escaped to the other side of the globe, to Paris.

The film becomes split into two time zones after Hsiao-kang, a street vendor, falls for a customer (Chen Shiang-chyi) the day before she is to leave for Paris. We then follow the girl's lonely sojourn in Paris, while we simultaneously watch Hsiao-kang longing for her in Taipei, setting any clock he sees to Paris time, all in the wake of his father's death and his mother's failure to cope with it.

The introduction of death to Tsai's symbolic universe, as well as the preoccupation with time and clocks, sets the new film apart from the others, but there are still a lot of similarities. Tsai has said that he looks upon people as plants that need to be watered to survive.

Rebels of the Neon God

Thus his pictures have been drenched in water, right from the first shot of his feature film debut Rebels of the Neon God (1992), which saw two petty criminals stealing coins from a telephone booth during a violent downpour. In the new film, the water symbolism is almost as pervasive as earlier. The most unusual use of the motif is having the son urinate in various bottles to avoid leaving his bedroom; the most surprising is a shot of a suitcase sailing on a Paris pond.

The Hole

What Time features the return of another Tsai mainstay, the cockroach. This creature first appears near the beginning of Rebels, when Lee Kang-sheng's character pierces it viciously with the point of a compass, then leaving it to squirm until it dies.

In The Hole a big fat cockroach comes crawling out of the hole in the ceiling, while the virus at large makes people act like cockroaches. In this film the mother gets the delightfully perverse idea that a cockroach found in the apartment may be the reincarnation of the father, but the son feeds it straight away to the fish - a queasy suggestion of a kind of self-cannibalism, since we feel that the ghostly fish represents the father somehow.

Even if the camera has been brought to a standstill, What Time has, paradoxically, a brisker feel to it than usual. There seems to be somewhat more action in the shots, and the crosscutting between Taipei and Paris also adds to the impression of a quickened pace. But one of the main reasons is that Tsai is playing less with the effects of duration and stasis - a good thing, because I felt that he was on the verge of overdoing it in The Hole. The new film does not have any scenes with extended, total stasis in the shot, yet it is still applying the director's trademark method of extended takes. At one point Tsai plays an almost imperceptible joke on us, tacitly acknowledging his obsession with long takes and at the same time cleverly playing it off against the film's time motif. In a scene where Hsiao-kang sneaks into a clock repair shop, the director places a digital clock prominently in the shot, conveniently measuring the duration of the shot for us (one minute, 53 seconds) - a wryly self-conscious gesture from the king of long takes.

The Taiwanese girl left to herself in Paris seems to me the most interesting character in the film, partly because a new (and very expressive) face in Tsai's by now familiar universe feels refreshing, and partly because the exact nature of her mission is kept an enigma, creating a sense of mystery about her. The Paris scenes offer a subtle and acutely insightful analysis of isolation and the difficulty of communication.

Vive L'Amour The River

Simply by calm observation, Tsai has an uncanny ability to extract the essence from a specific situation, turning it into a universal statement about human behaviour. For example, the pick-up scenes between the real estate saleswoman and the young man in Vive L'Amour and between the father and the gay man in The River are thus turned into expressive displays of human mating rituals.

Those pick-ups were successful (after a fashion), but the girl in Paris seems doomed to loneliness. As in the previous films, Chen Chao-jung is the actor playing the object of desire, but the encounter in this film is limited to a few furtive glances crossing the gulf of the tracks in a subway station, both of them carefully avoiding eye contact.

This refusal of eye contact runs through many of the Paris sequences. In a very sweet scene in a crowded French restaurant, which anybody ever having been on holiday alone in a foreign country can identify with, the girl asks timidly for advice on what to choose from the French-language menu. A young Frenchman at an adjacent table hesitatingly helps her out, and Tsai, while keeping things (as always) perfectly natural, orchestrates the exchanges between them with a virtuoso feel for timing; all contacts seem to be launched at the most awkward moment, at precisely the instant when the other person is least ready to respond. In another scene, somewhat darker in mood, Tsai employs a camera set-up as daring as it is expressive, designed to force us into the girl's state of mind even if she is pushed into the background of the shot. She sits at a café table, simultaneously afraid of and yearning for human contact, but also wary of the possibility that people might use her loneliness to make advances. In the foreground we see the back of the head of a man that might or might not be observing her. Our inability to see his face and the fact that he is blurry, due to the soft focus of the foreground, dehumanise him, turning him into vaguely threatening entity. At the same time, like the girl, we long to see his face clearly - but she cannot because she does not want to look too directly at him.

A most interesting aspect of What Time is the homage paid to François Truffaut, who exerted a major influence on the young Tsai. Jean-Pierre Léaud has a cameo as a morally ambiguous person who the girl chances upon in a Paris cemetery, and Hsiao-kang rents and watches a video of Truffaut's famous 1959 debut Les Quatre Cents Coups. In one of the scenes from that film, the runaway Antoine Doinel (Léaud) gulps down a bottle of milk, thus connecting to Tsai's water/drinking motif. The Truffaut work is about alienation too, but the excerpts also demonstrate to what extent Tsai has transformed the Frenchman's influence. One thing is that Truffaut's camera moves freely in contrast to the customary stationary Tsai gaze. More important is the difference in the characters' attitude: when the son watches the film he has an air of apathetic stupor even stronger than usual - a dramatic contrast to the exuberance and joy of life expressed by the famous scene he is watching, in which Antoine is subjected to a dizzying merry-go-round ride. Antoine succeeds in transcending reality, but the son, with the usual lack of self-insight of Tsai's characters, seems as trapped in stasis as ever.

While Tsai's films are realistic in style, there is also a richly symbolic layer to them. Sometimes scenes seem to be included mainly to serve as a visual metaphor for the themes or the characters' state of mind. All the shots in these films have meaning - no shots are there just for atmosphere - and the more cryptic they seem the more important they probably are. To give just one example of this tapestry of meaning - the son has adjusted all clocks in the apartment to show Paris time, but the mother then discovers that they do not show the correct time anymore and decides that this must be a sign from the father's spirit. Tsai seems to imply that the setting of the clocks to Paris time somehow causes the spirit to travel there - for he cuts abruptly to the next shot, the first showing the girl after she has gone to Paris. She hears strange noises from upstairs and then looks at the watch. Since timepieces in the film are symbolically linked to the father (and her watch is even bought from his son), this checking of the time may well be a symbolic action somehow linking the noise to the father.

How to account, then, after all this, for the lingering feeling that What Time is not quite up to Tsai's usual standard? Perhaps a look at the reasons for the extraordinarily strong impact of his earlier films may shed light on the matter. For one thing, the new film is less mysterious than some of its predecessors. In Vive L'amour Tsai created a strong curiosity about the characters' motivation and what they were really up to in the apartment they were "sharing." The River seemed at first glance so opaque that even the point of the film was shrouded in mystery. A considerable part of the pleasure of these movies has been the director's ingenious ways of revealing his outwardly nondescript characters as strange and unique human beings. But in the new film the characters seem less developed and thus less intriguing. There is interesting tension between the son and the girl who goes to Paris, but since they are situated half a world apart for most of the film, there is less interaction between them. The father is more or less absent and the mother is relegated to the background. The son as well is more one-dimensional. His growing obsession with time and with adjusting all kinds of clocks from local Taipei to Paris time is amusing, but his actions are essentially repeats of a pattern, going in the same direction. There are no stunningly revealing moments, rewarding our patient observation, like the scene in Vive L'amour when the Lee Kang-sheng character suddenly dons a dress, disclosing his confused sexuality and putting the character in an entirely new light.

Perhaps the main reason for the somewhat pale impression of What Time is the relative weakness of its ending. One of the reasons that Tsai's best films are unforgettable is that they culminate in an original turn of event, provocative both in content and formally. These endings achieve a crystal-clear expression of the essence of the films' themes - the details meticulously accumulated throughout the picture are suddenly discharged in a deliberately simple, liberating and expansive gesture, often in connection with a long take. Tsai is here seeking a form of transcendence: the film stops being just a film, but is experienced as a communication directly into the spectator's mind, a characteristic of all experiences of great art. Although poetic and touching, the ending of What Time fizzles in comparison to the transcendent endings of his previous works.

I am certain that Tsai intended the new film as a more relaxed piece. But to emerge from screenings thinking "Wasn't that a nice ending" is a far cry from the almost life-changing impact of his earlier pictures. This is still an impressive work of art, but now that we are getting used to Tsai's methods, I have to conclude that, overall, What Time is it There? is treading water that has been better charted before.

©2002 Dag Sodtholt
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