Et là-bas, quelle heure est-il ?

This film-known in the US as "What Time is it There?" captured me in ways that I never expected a film to be able to do. Do not see this film seeking plot-linear connections-causal relationships. See this film to slip into a different view of the world we occupy. A world where feelings for one another do not necessarily have results we are aware of. Where the occasion of place and time and circumstance carry weights of understanding without explanation. I can only really tell you this film is slow-and deeply touching; plotless and driven by the regard for the persons in it; visually stunning without any visual trickery. Overall this film went instantly to the top of my own personal "best movies" and I don't even know how to tell you about it. Do see it.

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.

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.

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.

(...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.