Tian bian yi duo yun

I saw the film in a screening in the Jerusalem film festival in Israel. Tsai came with lee kang-sheng his actor and together they introduced the film to us Israeli film buffs. The film was a blast.

Tsai said many people leave before the end of the film, it certainly happened, but us who managed to enter the special "mode" tsai requires from his audience enjoyed a modern masterpiece! To me it felt like a mixture of tati's "playtime" and oshima's "in the realm of the senses", to witch you must add obscure eastern musical numbers. It was breathtaking, funny, disturbing, sad and romantic.

It's true, the film shows men and women in degrading situations - but that is the main issue of the film and it deals with it with great compassion. The image of kang-sheng sitting in the street after the shooting of a porn scene, to discover ants crawling on his chest and forehead says it all.

Thank you very much Tsai Ming-liang.

The Wayward Cloud features everything one expects from a Tsai Ming-Liang film, but it is also much more sexually explicit. The shot compositions, the use of space, and the choreography of the musical numbers are excellent. However, not everyone is going to enjoy a musical number featuring a woman and men dressed as the fluid that she had just received a moment before in the main narrative.

I understand the perspective of those who argue that Tsai doesn't have a clear point here, as he does in his other films. I would argue, though, that the film is more challenging because it does not offer the glimmer of hope found in Tsai's previous films (the woman pulled up in The Hole, May's dignity even as she cries at the end of Vive L'amour). The viewer has to piece together any hope from various parts of the film, as the shocking finale is not at all uplifting.

Tsai has some real insights into the human condition here. Xiao Kang's autoerotic sexuality has a lot to say about loneliness and insecurity. Also, the flirtation between Xiao Kang and Shiang-chyi is very charming, even sexy (I'm thinking especially of the way Xiao Kang leans against the elevator after their date.) I think this film's vision brings to light the way sexuality has become a commodity, and I find it tragic that Xiao Kang and Shiang-chyi find that there is great difficulty in overcoming that commodification.

"The Wayward Cloud" opens with a scene of sex with a watermelon though neither the melon nor the sex look particularly appetizing. We are in Taiwan and there's a heatwave which might explain the copious amounts of nudity as well as the watermelons if not the behavior of the characters. Ming-Liang Tsai's film, (it appears it follows on from earlier work but this is the first of his films I've seen), doesn't really have much of a plot and very little in the way of dialogue and what 'plot' there is doesn't really make a lot of sense, (the bloke who metamorphoses into a sea-creature in a large tank and breaks into song is only the first of several very camp musical numbers). Unfortunately this picture, which lasts close to two hours, is aimed very much at an art-house audience who like their sex movies to be vague and abstract rather than simply down and dirty, (even the money-shot is basically abstract). Of course, you could be forgiven for thinking that the very explicit sex scenes have, within them, a sense of comedy or at least are meant to be 'tongue-in-cheek', (no pun intended), and that the musical interludes are aimed at a largely gay audience. Either way, "The Wayward Cloud" isn't going to wow them in Middle America or down at the multiplexes but it's sufficiently pretentious and sufficiently weird to be at least interesting. I may have been perplexed but I was certainly never bored.

From the very inventive start to the wicked, tense climax, "Wayward Cloud" is an allegory of longing, frustration and tongue in cheek solutions. Deliciously slow at times, intercepts with frenetic musical scenes in Technicolor splendor, and contrasts with gritty-down-right-dirty voyeuristic insights into pornographic industry; this was the stuff Barney tried to create with 10 times the budget in his Cremaster Cycles (and none of the wit)

The use of 60's Chinese Pop, choreography with enough cheese to put any Madonna's clip to shame offered a break from the relentless heat and the hilarious sex scenes, their seemingly unconnectedness served to heightened the restless state of wander that the characters seem to float in.

In this drought, water isn't the only thing that's running scarce.

Water melons will never be seen in the same light!!!

This is a movie about pornography, romantic love, isolation and watermelons. In some unspecified city, a man and a woman fall in love. She does not know it, but he is a porn actor. There is a drought going on, and people are using watermelons for water, and some other, sexier, activities.

It is sad and hilarious. It is slow, and then there are some weird and funny music videos I cannot quite understand, but worth very much the while. There are images that are worthy enough to be photography as art, just turn them into posters. It does feel dreamy, whether you find it gloomy or absurdly ridiculous, or both. And the last scene will stay with you, even if you laugh.