This latest film from director Tsai Ming-Liang is a return to his very
minimalist style after the rather outrageous, offensive and I thought quite
wonderful “The Wayward Cloud”. In a film almost deplete of dialogue except
as background noise, he painstakingly etches a melancholy scene of urban
loneliness, longing and our need for human contact. Full of long static takes
in which I sometimes felt I could take a coffee break and not miss much,
the story inches along like an earthworm but still manages to build in its
wake an overriding sense of empathy and poignant fragility. The ending is
perhaps absurd and rather cinematic but touching and hopeful.
The urban setting is not his usual Taipei, but Tsai instead shifts it to
the impoverished backstreets of Kuala Lumpur. This may seem like an odd choice
for the director, but Tsai is actually from Malaysia and on a trip back last
year he felt inspired to make a film there. Using a series of short wordless
shifting scenes, Tsai gradually depicts a group of disparate characters in
a desolate and loveless landscape. A homeless Chinese foreigner (played by
his usual actor of choice, Lee Kang-Sheng) is set upon and beaten by a group
of conmen and left damaged in the streets. He is spotted by a group of poor
Bangladesh workers who have found a used mattress in the garbage and they
take both discarded items back to their barely functional apartments. Rawang
(Norman Atun) nurses Hsiao back to health – washing his body, standing him
upright to urinate – and a suspected sexual wanting begins to possibly surface.
In another parallel thread, a waitress (Chen Shiang-Chyi) has to care for
the paralyzed son (also played by Lee) of the owner of the place where she
works and she too in similar fashion to Rawang has to wash him down and in
one instance is shown by the mother how to jerk him off. The three of them
slowly close this circle and their distance apart in their desperate desire
to simply feel something other than isolation. Though I admit to at times
feeling frustrated by the glacial pacing of the film, it pays off finally
and the film received a very nice hand of applause at the end. Though the
settings of the film are little more than an abandoned building, a cesspool,
dark alleys and patchwork apartments, Tsai and the cinematographer do wonders
as they lavish this world with stunning and striking visuals – at times there
are some truly beautiful shots such as the older mother looking at herself
in an aging mirror, a butterfly landing on a bare back or a dream like scene
of people encased in gasmasks (because of the smoke from fires in Indonesia)
eerily standing outside a store watching an Indian music video on TV. There
are moments of sly humor as well – two of the characters trying to make love
with those gasmasks on and frantically trying to kiss and breathe at the
same time. Funny on one level, but it is also an urgent cry for love. As
is this film.
