La Saveur de la pastèque

What a strange, strange, strange film. Strangest thing about this is that it was a huge hit in Taiwan, grossing 20 million dollars when the average film in the country makes under a million. When you see a cover with a girl tongue kissing a watermelon, it is understandable to think "I'll pass", but in this case you would be missing out.

As best I can describe, this is a film about two neighbors who live in an apartment building in Taiwan during an unusually hot summer and inexplicable water shortage. One woman named Shiang-chyi Chen sits around her apartment eating watermelon, while her next door neighbor Kang-sheng Lee makes hardcore porn films (which in the opening scene involve a watermelon between a woman's legs).

The film is mostly minimalist and truly beautiful in its austere compositions and delicate urban electric light; shadows and silhouettes are repeat motif used gorgeously. This is interspersed with scenes of graphic sex, albeit no more than you would see in "Crash", "Short Bus", or "WR. Mysteries of the Organism", but just as explicit. The same long takes which lingered on an empty hallway now assume the position of Peeping Tom.

The detached view of sexuality would seem indebted to films like "Crash" and "Salo" where the body is reduced to a writhing mindless thing with genitals. This becomes especially apparent in the last scene, where a women is unconscious/dead (there is some debate between whether this porn actress is dead or passed out from heat exhaustion), but the show must go on, and the crew literally props her up in a variety of positions so the Lee can have sex with her.

This is all watched by Chen, who discovers only moments before when she finds the porn starlet passed out in the elevator, and consequently what Lee does for a living. Their flirting and relationship build up being the emotional heart of the film, which repeats images of watermelon and bottled water, again and again. Our heroin is often scene rubbing water on her arms while alone, juxtaposed with our hero covered in his and someone' else's sweat. They even share Annie Hall homage, of giddily picking up crabs from the kitchen floor. And they laugh, and they love, and the film swerves back and forth between their two perspectives, meeting in an occasional musical number.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a musical. There are about 5 or 6 full on musical numbers, and not merely spontaneous karaoke affairs like "Happiness Of The Katakari's", but full on "Singing In The Rain" level classical Hollywood show-stoppers (one song includes a crowd with umbrellas) if directed by Tarsem. In one scene a character becomes a merman and serenades the moon from a water tower. In another Alice in Wonderland like giant flowers appear around the statue of a Taiwanese politician. In yet another after our hero is having some trouble getting it up, there is a song where a man wearing a life-size penis-suit is surrounded by dancing girls wearing plastic buckets on their heads, in a public bathroom. I can't stress enough how genuinely fantastic (from a technical film standpoint), and absurdly incredible they are.

The songs themselves are assorted 60's and modern soul and folk sounds from Taiwan, and are all unique and lovely in their own right. Weird as all this sounds, it comes together in a smashingly perverse, erotic, socially critical, and emotionally devastating climax, you might find in a Lars Von Trier film at his most crafty like "The Idiots" or "Dogville" "Goodbye Dragon Inn" Ming Ling Tsai's previous directorial effort was so rigid in never moving it's camera's and keeping it's character's in the dark, it distracted from how formally inventive and cinematically fresh the whole thing was. "The Wayward Cloud" as a follow up has no such difficulties, getting its vitality up and keeping it up. It veers between the common and the theatrical so organically it stops feeling strange when the sing-along, follow the money shots, which flow into images of watermelons floating down a river.

As for what "Wayward Cloud" means, I would say it's a love story. The two lead characters, I later read, were in a previous Ming-liang Tsia's film called, "What Time Is It There?" and this is their "Before Sunset" second chance at love. It would have been simple for Ming-liang Tsia, to make a moody little film, about an alienated women infatuated with an alienated man, doing alienated things, which is basically what the film is. However like a true artist Miang Liang imbues the proceedings with a cinematic spirit, through editing, cinematography, MUSIC, and subdued/wildly theatrical performances that becomes transcendent of the films run-of-the-mill social yearnings for genuine connection in the cold, cruel, world. I can't think of any film as repulsive, arousing, beautiful, fun, and sad, at least not with all those gears running at once like they are here.

In a way I thought it was a happy ending. The couple has come together right? No more lifeless proxy sex with sleeping girls and emotional amateur porn, and no more isolated peeking around the corner from what we desire while waiting for the water (life's lubricant) to return. I don't know, maybe I'm all wrong, and our heroine's tears are from a place of even deeper sadness. Or maybe their courtship was so convincing and extraordinarily arranged that I was rooting for the couple to come together, regardless of their strange and horrible acts.

Only one thing is certain, the watermelon has lost its innocence in the fruit kingdom, it must now go in the adult's only banana and kumquat, sectioned off by beads, part of the produce aisle.

"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!!!

The English title is given as "The Wayward Cloud". I saw this film in Taipei where the director, Tsai Ming-liang, stopped in for a surprise speech before the show. (Wouldn't it be great to meet the director before every film instead of sitting through the assault of those damned previews, previews evidently aimed at folks who are deaf and dumb?)

He spoke informally for a few minutes just to assure the audience that he intends the film to have _redeeming social values_ -- as US lawmakers used to say. This seems necessary because the government in Taiwan spent 2 weeks meeting with consultants to decide whether or not to censor the film. They let it show uncut.

That is to say, don't bring your kids to see this -- but adults will be able to see that it is not porn, but rather a critique of porn. This is a simplification, since the main theme of the film is general alienation. The wayward cloud and the drought in the film are shown to be symbolic of the emotional and interpersonal "drifting" and "dryness" that each scene highlights. The film shows how porn is merely one symptom of people's awkward attempt to connect with each other on a deeper level.

The film is unusual in style, (see previous user comment) so don't expect it to imitate Hollywood conventions. It is recognizably in Tsai Ming-liang's previous grim and dim style (i.e., "The Hole" and "The River" and "What Time Is It There?") but here he adds a lighter note of wit to that.

Personally I don't enjoy musicals, but the handful of musical interludes in this film are delightfully surreal and humorous, and while they address heterosexuality, the aesthetic is gay in both senses of the term. I especially liked one of these, where a smiling state statue of historical dictator Chiang Kai-shek is the central prop for a tongue-in-cheek erotic song & dance troupe of lovely ladies. Also the music in itself is attractive since we don't usually get to hear those old songs from Shanghai in the '30s and Hong Kong in the '60s.

The final scene officially raises the bar for the visionary use of a sex scene to reflect on alienation. Those who remember the historic shock of "Last Tango in Paris" (Bertolucci's "Ultimo tango a Parigi") so many years ago will see what I mean by raising the bar. It will make its own peculiar mark in underground film histories.

I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it was the most memorable film of the fest--more so than other great films screening like Capote or Brokeback Mountain and for sure, your run of the mill, Hollywood films like Elizabethtown, In her Shoes, Walk the Line, etc. Wayward Cloud is a daring film about love, sex and isolation, and it's set in an almost apocolyptic time when watermelon has become the source of water, food and fetish! The film is amazingly original.

Definitely, the "real time" shots which are often utilized in Taiwanese film, can try your patience, but indeed there is a "zone" for Tsai Ming Liang's films and once you get there, all the images are mesmerizing--watching a woman walk up a flight of stairs, etc. And the sex scenes (which are plenty b/c the film deals with porn) further highlights our voyeuristic "mesmerization" reflected in the style of the film.

Short of writing a spoiler, please please see this film (if it is distributed in your area)...the last shot is the most disgusting and most beautiful thing ever...you'll have to see for yourself.