Il gusto dell'anguria

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.

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.

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.

"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.