Che ora è laggiù?

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.

No lengthy review from me this time, just a very small personal musing, as I'm in a melancholy mood, because it's Christmas...

Funny how movies can connect. Like lives sometimes do, I suppose. The oddball male protagonist of "What time is it there" watches Truffaut's "Les Quatre-Cents Coups", as a way to somehow connect himself to the girl who is obviously the girl of his dreams, even though he's only barely met her, when she bought his watch before going away to Paris. He also, of course, sets all the clocks in his house, and all other clocks he can get his hands on, to Paris time, prompting his mother to think that the ghost of her dead husband has returned. The watch can show two different times at once, and the girl want to be able to see Taipei time as well as Paris time, to keep herself connected to her own country whilst abroad.

In one scene in "Les Quatre-Cents Coups", the two rebellious boys steal a movie poster outside a theater. The poster (look carefully, or you'll miss it) shows Harriet Andersson in a famous pose from Bergman's "Summer with Monica". Another connection. I don't know if it means anything.

This year, I gave my ex-girlfriend all three movies - "What Time is it There", "Les Quatre-Cents Coups" and "Summer with Monica" - for Christmas. I guess it was an attempt to connect myself back with her. We always shared a love of movies, Bergman in particular, and I think I wanted to tell her something. Perhaps that sometimes lives and the common themes in them stick together and connect across oceans, across time, across our personal universes, in ways that can be hard to recognize, but that are impossible to deny.

Well, in any case, I don't think she picked up on it. She's still my ex-girlfriend, she's still away in some far-off land, and I'm still here alone and pretty much miserable. I'm still glad that I gave her those three movies, though. It's only right that she should have them, too, as she still has my entire DVD collection.

I guess I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that in all three movies, human connections ultimately fail or break down. The two boys in "Les Quatre-Cents Coups" are broken out of their doomed youthful rebellion and torn apart by society and the pressures of the world. In Bergman's film, Monica abandons Harry by her own volition and leaves him heartbroken (like I am now) because she is to much of a dionysiac to deal with an ordered, adult, appolinian life. In "What Time is it There", there's hardly any initial optimism to destroy. Every person is an island from the outset, and when they long for connectedness, it's in a silent, subdued way, like their hearts have already been broken in advance and they are only going through familiar motions by some force of habit, but without real hope. The girl attempts a lesbian affair that fails as soon as it's initiated. The boy takes out his frustration in an impersonal encounter with a prostitute. The mother is last seen in a heartbreaking masturbation scene that more than anything else seems like sex with a ghost.

In one celebrated scene, the girl meets Jean-Pierre Leud, who played the lead role in "Les Quatre-Cents Coups", in a Paris cemetery. He is now a middle-aged man. He's a ghost as well, the ghost of the boy in Truffaut's movie, that another boy is compulsively watching in Taipei while thinking of the girl, who in return hardly knows that he exists. She doesn't recognize him. He gives her his phone number and tells her only his first name. She just seems to think he's some nut case. Nothing comes of it. That is all. Connections attempt to be made. They fail completely.

At the very end, of course, the ghost of the dead father and husband does indeed materialize itself. However, it is not to the wife and son in Taipei, but, mysteriously, to the girl in Paris. She doesn't see him. She is asleep in a chair in a Paris park. Perhaps she's just exhausted from loneliness, perhaps her own personal clock is still set to Taipei time.

Oh well. Maybe I'll feel better in the new year. Happy holidays to all.

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.

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.

Tsai's unique style gives rise to another film about isolation in urbanization. Hsiao-kang's father has just died, and he and his mother must hold together. He doesn't have much problem doing that, but his mother is going insane with loneliness, so much so that she entirely imbues herself in her religious beliefs. Around this time, Hsaio-kang sells his personal watch to a girl about to fly to Paris. Soon after this, Hsiao-kang becomes obsessed with her (or is it the watch?) and decides to set all his watches (he sells them on the street) to Paris time, and then all the clocks in his house, and then all the clocks he can find. The girl gets stranded in Paris, having lost her plane ticket. The film moves slow and it has little dialogue, as is Tsai's style, but it is incredibly beautiful in its composition, editing, everything. The story is quite great, too. Tsai is a wonderful humanist. The film builds up to a silent crescendo, where the three main characters each endure cold acts of love and failed attempts at communication. When the film closes, all three are asleep, two in Taipei and one in Paris, all three alone.

Okay, I should have ended it there, but I do have two problems with the film, go figure. First, Hsiao-kang's clock setting is highly amusing at first, but it does get very old after a while. The sequence that ends in the movie theater bathroom is gold, perfect, so Tsai should have just stopped there with that motif. The scene where he sneaks into a clock store and the scene where he resets the clock tower are superfluous. We got the point, and it should have been moving forward. Secondly, I think it's about time Tsai moved on. I love the three films of his I've seen, including The Hole and Vive L'Amour, but the style is the same in all three, as is the theme. Michelangelo Antonioni, who is obviously Tsai's main inspiration (though this particular film has a lot of references to the Truffaut film The 400 Blows, including a very funny cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud), had a problem moving on from this material, as well, with everything from L'Avventura to Red Desert being very similar (although his style evolved more than Tsai's has), and even after that his films had comparable themes. As much as I like Tsai (and Antonioni), if his next film is just like this, I'm sure it will hurt my presently high opinion of him. 9/10.