Et là-bas, quelle heure est-il ?

As the credits began to roll after the screening of Tsai Ming-Liang's latest movie What Time is it There? a crowd quickly assembled in front of an enlarged NYT review thoughtfully set up in the lobby. There was a palpable hunger to understand this enigmatic film. Their frustration no doubt was compounded by the feeling that this movie was not just an exercise in absurdity but that something significant was going on. My companion and I left the theater in a similar frame of mind. Being admirers of Tsai and familiar with all his major cinematic works we knew that this one was successful and we marveled at his unbroken string of remarkable films. But this one seemed more of a puzzle than the others and we had to figure it out.

The story is deceptively simple. A man dies alone in his small apartment he shares with his son (Xiao Kang) and wife. After the interment of his remains and a simple religious ceremony the son returns to his work selling watches on the sidewalk. There he meets an attractive young woman who after examining his merchandise insists on purchasing the very watch Xiao Kang is wearing. He politely refuses but she is adamant and finally persuades him to part with it. He learns she is flying to Paris the next day. Meanwhile his mother is preoccupied with the reincarnation of her husband and dutifully carries out religious practices to ensure his reincarnation is successful. It appears she expects him to return to life or at least attempt to communicate with her. She is devastated by the sudden loss and becomes increasingly unhappy and her efforts at communication border on the hysterical. Xiao Kang is newly fascinated with all things French and inexplicably begins turning all clocks to Paris time. This increasingly becomes an obsession and he goes from changing his own timepieces to adjusting public clocks.

The scene then shifts to Paris where we follow the young woman through a rather non- descript area of Paris. She seems disoriented and sad, unable to properly communicate with busy Parisians. She occasionally tries to telephone someone but is frustrated in her efforts. Becoming ill in a restaurant she meets a kind fellow Chinese woman she can talk to, but after a thwarted romantic advance towards the woman she is left to wander the streets more miserable than ever. Falling asleep on a park bench, she is robbed of her suitcase by a group of boys who toss it in a lake. The suitcase drifts out of sight but is recovered from the edge by a man who is none other than the dead father. He is then seen slowly walking towards a large illuminated Ferris wheel slowly spinning in the distance. The movie end.

On the surface What Time is it There? looks a lot like his previous films. Tsai even used the same three actors portraying a family in two other movies, although one should not presume they are the same people. As in his other films, we find sad, alienated people doing strange obsessive things, characters unable to communicate with each other in a sterile, ugly urban milieu, all themes familiar to Tsai's admirers. But that stunning ending changed everything and called into question all that came before it. The questions piled up. Is he dead? Is he reincarnated? Why is he in Paris? What does the girl have to do with him? Is she dead? We looked for answers and as we talked a sort of poetic sense emerged and actions that seemed absurd suddenly became purposeful. Tsai was communicating to us in an indirect metaphorical language, one that had to be decoded, and not simply passively experienced. We were forced to look back for clues, for signs, much like the son and mother looked for signs from the dead father of his imminent reincarnation.

What emerged from our discussion was that What Time is it There? is in its essence a spiritual film, a meditation on the meaning of death with conclusions drawn from traditional Buddhist belief and Tsai's own take on the subject. Buddhist symbols of reincarnation abound, though in modern form. The face of a clock, a waterwheel in an urban mall, the great Ferris wheel, are all reminiscent of the traditional Buddhist symbols of reincarnation. The act of turning back clocks may be a modern way Xiao Kang is trying to (consciously or not) manipulate the process, in contrast to the conventional religious methods his mother employs to the same end. Xiao Kang's existence becomes trance-like; he seems to have no customers, and the few encounters he does have take on mystical dimensions. The "pervert" who runs off with Xiao Kang's stolen clock may be warning him albeit humorously not to "screw" with time. Similarly the prostitute who steals his case of watches perhaps intends a punishment for his insistent interference in matters he does not truly understand. (continued in Part2... )

Tsai Ming-Liang is a Director you either "get" or don't. His work reminds me to a point of Jim Jarmusch, their pacing is similar. If you've ever seen and liked Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise", you will probably like this. The story introduces you to people who lead mostly ordinary lives, just in Taipei. Ming-Liang's use of the long shot (setting up a scene and waiting for something to happen-usually, very little does) is very important. I think it adds to the simplicity of the story, ostensibly about a watch salesman who sells the young lady the watch he is wearing. He then changes the clocks in Taipei to Parisian time, where the young lady is going on vacation. The film also captures the side story of the watch salesman's mom, who just lost her husband. She looks for ways for him to "come back". It is a bit sad, but also touching. She almost steals the film. For lovers of independent film, a must. If you liked "The Departed", forget it. I'd like to add two things: The interlude "The Skywalk Is Gone", appended on the "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" DVD, is a 20 minute short which is also worthwhile, continues the story. Lastly, "The Wayward Cloud", the real sequel, is not quite as good (I give it 7 out of 10). It has images of fairly explicit pornography. I do recommend it, but it, like all of Ming-Liang's films, is uncompromising. The only major complaint I have with it is the mother is barely in it. I miss her. I want to tell you how it ends, but I can't, I can't spoil it. In the theater watching "The Wayward Cloud", the guy sitting behind me was flat out snoring. I was wide awake. All in all, "What Time Is It There" cemented Tsai Ming-Liang's reputation as a force to be reckoned with. He deserves the praise.

The method is that of the high-school science experiment: Tsai

Ming-Liang lines the camera up at an odd angle to the action,

locks it down, and puts together the ingredients of what might be a

scene--and which often turns out not to be. Organized in blocklike

scenes that land with a monumental thud, WHAT TIME IS IT

THERE? fascinates in the way its romantic-comedy premise lands

on the rocklike surface of its style and evaporates with a quiet hiss.

It seems there's this kid in Taipei--not a kid really, from some

angles he looks to be in his thirties, but babyfaced--who falls in

love with a girl who wants to be a "dual-time" watch. He sells her

his own watch so she can tell Taiwan time and also time in Paris--

where she is going for reasons unknown to us. The movie follows

her journey in the big Western city (which looks and feels exactly

like a New York City where people speak French) and the kid's

lonely mania at home, turning all the clocks he can find in Taipei to

Paris time. The kid's mom, obsessive over the imminent

reincarnation of the kid's recently deceased father, adds to the

Jihad-vs.-McWorld quality of Tsai's bicultural comedy.

There is really only one blatantly laugh-desiring moment in WHAT

TIME IS IT THERE?--the appearance of a fat flasher holding a

clock over his genitals, the hands springing to attention at 12:00. (It

suggests the horror-movie jack-in-the-box moments in a Richard

Foreman play.) I can scarcely think of another movie so brave in its

veering from one tone to another as this one. Tsai is one of those

courageous souls who makes up his own form absolutely from

scratch. The friend I saw the movie with commented on its

similarity to Antonioni, but Tsai's style is all his own--and his

structure too.

Like Duras, Tsai affords us the time to process the world in ways

we usually don't get to do in movies--with many of the toxins and

additives removed. And he invents the relationship of story to

meaning anew--no easy feat in this post-Memento, post-Mulholland age of high-tech narrative convolution. Tsai's

stories do not convolute at all; like the substances for which he

has become semi-hemi-famous, they flow freely. Tsai offers us

the freedom to look and look again.

(...continued from Part1)

The most significant encounter, of course, was with the young woman heading to Paris, the "there" in What Time is it There? I believe she is a ghost and her contact with Xiao Kang and the exchange of the watch is somehow responsible for his peculiar behavior and experiences. If France can be taken to be a metaphor for death or the "otherworld," then Xiao Kang's strange fascination with all things French can be seen as his desire to understand his father's death. Viewing an old French film becomes a way to catch a glimpse of the "otherworld" where his father might be. Drinking French wine may be yet another method to reach the trance-like state that facilitates communication with his father.

Tsai explores the various avenues of communication between the living and the dead. He shows the Buddhist rituals, the food offerings, burning ghost money, etc., intended to establish contact or at least help the deceased. He shows how non-spiritual ways such as memories, mementos, and imagination are all employed to keep that person "alive." Xiao Kang's tampering with time is his idiosyncratic approach. We even see him using an antenna, a communication device, to adjust a giant clock. In return for these efforts the deceased is expected to communicate to the living by way of signs or in dreams. We see Xiao Kang crying in his sleep-perhaps a visitation by his father in such a dream. His mother desperately looks for signs of her husband's return, even if it's only as a cockroach or a fish.

Tsai points out in this film that contacting the dead is a difficult and frustrating endeavor only leading to more suffering. He adds that the dead are having an equally difficult and frustrating time communicating with us. Moreover, they are having trouble adjusting to their new reality-at least until reincarnation occurs. The young woman in Paris is seen wandering aimlessly and communicating only with difficulty with the Parisians. Her aborted telephone calls can be seen as attempts to contact the living, probably loved ones. There is evidence that these loved ones are somehow getting through to her; the snack plate she nibbles on in her hotel room uncannily resembles food offerings to the dead. The overwhelming feeling we get from her experience is that of frustration and profound sadness. Her exhaustion and eventual collapse may indicate her resigned acceptance of death.

Xiao Kang's father though appears to be farther along in the process. He seems calm and sure in his actions. His struggle appears over. His walking toward the Ferris wheel is deliberate, reincarnation imminent. The film ends here on this hopeful note.

What Time is it There? has much in common with Tsai Ming-Liang's earlier films. He again explores the difficulty in communicating or establishing connections with others. Only this time he included the dead in his universe and in the process created a rich and mysterious work. Despite an elliptical and metaphoric structure, and despite an imperfect understanding of Buddhist philosophy, upon reflection the meaning of What Time is it There? emerges slowly but surely.

What Time Is It There at a first glance is a boring, frustrating and complex puzzle of broken narratives which leave the viewer struggling to stay out of a sleepy haze and focus long enough to draw some sort of cinematic conclusion to an otherwise ambiguous film. Yet once all the amateur film goers and the rest of ADHD ridden America, the true film goers can marvel at a cinematic masterpiece, so far on the spectrum of complexity that it almost goes full circle to simplicity. Full circle being the key phrase here.

Much like other Asian filmmakers, Tsai deals with alienation, loss, and a search for something. The story of the film is simple: a boy's father dies and he and his mother are forced to deal with the loss. If you look for anything, story wise beyond this, you must look harder. The film shows how these two individuals deal with loss through their own idiosyncrasies, yet they both are getting at the same thing. Reincarnation. The young man meets a woman who wants to buy his watch and after some prodding, he relinquishes it. Whether it is because of her or not, he becomes obsessed with turning back the clocks he encounters, as if he is literally trying to turn back time itself. It even becomes quite comical at times when he goes to all sorts of lengths to turn back the clock. While his mother on the other hand deals with reincarnation in the literal sense through her religion. She rigorously practices her faith in hopes of bringing back her husband. In fact she becomes so obsessed with it that she believes he is trying to contact her and won't hear otherwise. Both contrasting view points on reincarnation show the different beliefs on religion and science not fully marrying the film to one of the ideas.

The imagery that comes with these practices is astounding. Tsai has shown that he is the master of mise en scene. Each scene has the camera set up in one position and doesn't move or cut until the end of the scene. The eye is allowed to move freely about the depth of the image while finding the imagery Tsai leaves behind as clues. He uses a water wheel in a mall, a Ferris wheel, and clock faces to show the visual interpretation of turning back the clock. The final image of the film is the Ferris wheel spinning counter clockwise leaving a retrospective idea in the viewers mind.

Truly this film tackles the idea of reincarnation and the dealing with loss and alienation so masterfully that any who attempt to address the same subject matter will just feel like a weak attempt. Tsai's What Time Is It There truly is a simple story with complex themes and visuals that is unlike any film going experience that should be appreciated for its content and relevance and not its entertainment value.