La Saveur de la pastèque

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.

Watching Tian bian yi duo yun ( The Wayward Cloud ) is a really weird experience. I didn't whether to laugh or cry, to celebrate the brilliance of the film, to recoil in shock from the grittiness or to wince at the absurd campiness.

Its amazing how Tsai Ming-Liang manages to get the cast to emote so much through so little dialogue, how he builds an electrifying atmosphere through minimal use of music (except for the campy nostalgic music videos ... really something else altogether, a see to believe phenomenon).

The brutal scenes of porn filming and the drought were really alluding to the director's favorite theme of alienation, which really works very well. The final scene which seems to disgust so many people into walking out is a really fitting conclusion to this treatise on estrangement and is certainly unforgettable.

The Wayward Cloud features everything one expects from a Tsai Ming-Liang film, but it is also much more sexually explicit. The shot compositions, the use of space, and the choreography of the musical numbers are excellent. However, not everyone is going to enjoy a musical number featuring a woman and men dressed as the fluid that she had just received a moment before in the main narrative.

I understand the perspective of those who argue that Tsai doesn't have a clear point here, as he does in his other films. I would argue, though, that the film is more challenging because it does not offer the glimmer of hope found in Tsai's previous films (the woman pulled up in The Hole, May's dignity even as she cries at the end of Vive L'amour). The viewer has to piece together any hope from various parts of the film, as the shocking finale is not at all uplifting.

Tsai has some real insights into the human condition here. Xiao Kang's autoerotic sexuality has a lot to say about loneliness and insecurity. Also, the flirtation between Xiao Kang and Shiang-chyi is very charming, even sexy (I'm thinking especially of the way Xiao Kang leans against the elevator after their date.) I think this film's vision brings to light the way sexuality has become a commodity, and I find it tragic that Xiao Kang and Shiang-chyi find that there is great difficulty in overcoming that commodification.

"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.

This is maybe the most original and bold sequels ever made. Porn is like the one missing ingredient to make his films interesting, and it is a fascinating movie. Very enjoyable, more so than most his others which are shy about sex, but that their sexuality is existing on the corners off screen. This film is also complimenting his tactile oriented cinema, which suits the sexuality of the material like a glove; it is not afraid of the body... and that's the case with all his films, but here especially so. To the point of a certain grotesqueness. Because this is not titillating at all, just extremely intimate. It also carries his foray in physical comedy from Goodbye Dragon Inn, and an interesting thing about watching his films develop is that he learns from each one. By now it is obvious it is the same film every time, it is just going differently into the style each time, taking detours. I do still hold to his first three films because there is something special about an artist not knowing who he is yet and discovering it on screen. I would not even know how to begin to rank his movies.