San Diego Asian Film Festival 2014 Review: Tsai Ming-liang's "Journey to the West"

Journey to the West (Xi you). 2014. Written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. Produced by Vincent Wang and Fred Bellaiche. Cinematography by Antoine Heberle. Edited by Lei Zhen Qing. Music by Sebastien Mauro. Sound engineering by Frederic Salles. Sound editing by Xavier Dreyfuss.

Cast: Lee Kang Sheng, Denis Lavant.

(Note: this review was originally posted on Asian in NY.)

At last year’s Venice Film Festival, where Taiwanese master auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s most recent feature Stray Dogs premiered, Tsai announced that it would be his last. And indeed, Stray Dogs, which contained references to just about every other film in his oeuvre and featured most of his regular actors, did have the feel of a final statement. However, this was before Tsai won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, so it remains to be seen whether this will encourage him to continue, and prove his “retirement” to be as lasting as Steven Soderbergh or Jay-Z’s.

The most hopeful sign that this will be the case is the fact that just a few months after Venice, at the Berlin Film Festival, Tsai debuted another major work, Journey to the West, a sublime, contemplative creation that is one of his finest. Of course, this is not to be confused with Stephen Chow’s recent big-budgeted blockbuster hit of the same name. Other than the fact that the two films share a title and are based in their own ways on the same classic Chinese narrative, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with two works more dissimilar, or that seem more to exist in separate universes.

Tsai’s Journey to the West evades any sort of easy classification. At just a few minutes shy of an hour, it doesn’t quite qualify as a feature. It also exists far outside the realm of narrative cinema, and is more akin to an art installation.

This is the sixth in Tsai Ming-liang’s series of short films starring his regular lead actor/perennial muse Lee Kang-sheng as a slow-walking monk making his travels in various urban centers around the globe. This ongoing project was inspired by a performance Lee gave in a stage play Tsai wrote and directed called “Only You,” in which Lee walked very slowly on the stage. As Tsai writes in his statement included in the Journey to the West press notes: “His performance was so perfect that I decided to film it. His walking, so special and so slow, recalls that of Xuanzang, the holy monk of the Tang Dynasty, who traveled thousands of kilometers seeking the holy scriptures.”

The series began with Tsai’s 2012 short “Walker,” shot in Hong Kong, which established the template: Lee Kang-sheng, dressed in red monk’s robes, barefoot, head down and arms out in a supplicating gesture, walks very, very slowly, his infinitesimal progress across the frame existing in sharp contrast to the bustle of the city and the people around him. Lee represents a meditative oasis in the midst of the rapid activity that surrounds him, and the films are the apotheosis of Tsai’s inimitable style of wordless contemplation, his riposte to the fast-cutting and over-plotted narrative noise of most other films.

Journey to the West moves the (non)action to Marseille, France, and this time Lee’s monk gains a disciple of sorts, in the person of inimitable French actor Denis Lavant, best known for his collaborations with iconoclastic French auteur Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge, Holy Motors). The film consists of 14 shots, most of them relatively brief, save for two lengthy centerpiece scenes. It begins with a very long shot, a nearly ten-minute close-up of Denis Lavant’s face as he is reclining. With the only sounds on the soundtrack Lavant’s labored breathing, we are invited to contemplate every wrinkle and crevasse on Lavant’s uniquely craggy visage. In this and every subsequent shot, Tsai challenges us to view images in a very different way than we are used to, the regard the act of seeing as a sort of contemplative meditation, the slowness and austerity of the shot forcing us to engage actively with the image, rather than be a passive consumer, as in most other films. In this goal, Tsai succeeds immensely, with exquisitely composed artistry and rather unexpected humor.

The film’s two longest shots perfectly illustrate this. The film’s longest shot is a nearly 20-minute shot of Lee slowly descending a staircase down into a subway, the camera imperceptibly moving to capture his deliberative descent. The delicate movement, colors, and composition of the frame is mesmerizing and simply stunning. Sunlight shines in a halo surrounding the monk, as dust motes fly in the air. The reactions of the people who go past him are also fascinating to watch. The monk mostly has the side of the staircase he is descending to himself, as most of the other commuters going into the subway regard him as an obstruction to get around, and a brief object of curiosity. The only person who regards him closely is a little girl who lingers at the top of the stairs, staring at him curiously as she seemingly waits for a relative to pick her up.

The other long scene features Levant; before this, Lee and Levant are kept apart, existing in separate shots or in scenes where Levant is close to the camera while Lee is a figure in the distance. However, in a long scene in front of an outdoor café, Lee does his slow walk in front of a group of curious and amused onlookers and passerby. As Lee walks, Lavant suddenly appears behind him, walking slowly as well, mirroring Lee’s slow movement almost perfectly, his mimicry a supreme expression of inspired devotion.

Journey to the West ends with its most surprising and striking shot, an upside-down view of a scene, where the mirrored surface of a canopy occupies three quarters of the frame. We scan the scene for the iconic red-robed monk, but we don’t find him. After awhile, the familiar presence appears, entering the upper right of the frame. And with that the film ends, with this postscript from Tsai, quoting the Diamond Sutra:

All composed things are like a dream,
A phantom, a drop of dew, or a flash of lightning,
That is how to meditate on them,
That is how to observe them. 

This perfectly expresses the philosophy behind, and the beauty of, the sublime cinema art Tsai Ming-liang has been creating for over two decades. Hopefully, this isn’t the last we’ve heard from this endlessly brilliant artist of cinema.


Journey to the West screens on November 10, 8:40pm as part of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, preceded by the short "Walker." For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit the festival's website.

"Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou" at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Taiwanese director Zero Chou is one of the more interesting talents to emerge in recent world cinema.  A former journalist who moved into documentary filmmaking in the late 90’s, she is also, by all indications, the only openly lesbian filmmaker in Taiwan.  She works very closely with her life partner Hoho Liu, who also serves on her films as cinematographer and co-editor.  Chou has a distinctively allusive style that freely shifts between realism, dream imagery, and fantasy, an intensively sensual eye that is attuned to human desire in all its forms, with a special sympathy for those who exists on society’s margins.  She has been deservedly acclaimed for her films: Splendid Float won the best Taiwan Film award at the 2004 Golden Horse Film Festival, and Spider Lilies won the Teddy Award for best LGBT themed film at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival.  Five of Chou’s features will screen from June 7 through the 30^th at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in a series called “Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou,” organized by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York. All screenings are free, and Zero Chou will appear in person for introductions and Q&A's at the screenings of Wave Breaker (June 7) and Spider Lilies (June 9).

Corner’s (2001)

This impressionistic documentary about a gay bar in Taipei has many levels, beginning with the voiceover by Hoho Liu (Chou’s partner, co-editor and cinematographer), which is in French.  Running throughout the film, this voiceover reflects the feelings of displacement felt by many of the subjects of the film.  Mandarin is inadequate to express the feelings Liu wants to express; French gives her the proper words in which to do this.  Corner’s is a place where, as one subject says, the patrons can “relax” and freely be who they are.  It is a respite from the strictures of conventional society, and the coming of the dawn is a dreaded event, meaning a return, for some, to hidden desires and concealed sexual lives.  In one striking sequence, people exit the club into the street, but the framing makes it seem like they are all entering dark closets.  The bar was closed after a police raid, so the film also represents a memorial to this place, and what it meant to those who patronized it.  There is a very sensual passage in which two women, whose faces we don’t see, are in the process of making love, and as is the case with the film itself, it is a powerful affirmation of desire in the face of societal opposition.  The name of the bar itself represents marginalization, being in the corners of society, rather than out in the open.

(June 30 at 6:30pm)

Splendid Float (2004)

The theme of dual lives in Corner’s carries over to Splendid Float, Chou’s second fiction feature and the first in her “Rainbow Colors” series of films, each of which is defined visually by a key primary color, in this case, yellow.  This is the color of a T-shirt worn by Sunny, the lover of the protagonist Roy (James Chen), a novice Taoist priest by day and a drag performer, named Rose, at night.  Rose performs with a troupe of fellow performers on a traveling float that performs in a different location each night.  One night when the truck the float is mounted on breaks down, Rose first meets Sunny (I-chin Zhuon), a very handsome surfer type, at a roadside café.  Almost instantly, they act on their attraction to one another, but almost as quickly, they must part from one another.  Their separation is sealed shortly afterward when Sunny mysteriously dies by drowning.  Torn apart by grief, Rose finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the two separate lives he leads, and he embarks on a quest to learn why Sunny left so suddenly, and throughout the film, he communes with Sunny’s ghost.  The narrative is deliberately slim and spare, all the more to concentrate on how Rose grapples with grief, and there are frequent sequences of the drag group performing to appreciative audiences.  The film floats freely between the past and present, frequently superimposing time periods visually on top of one another; this is a stylistic hallmark of the entire trilogy.  Splendid Float beautifully captures not only the sadness Rose feels, which he expresses through his performance, but the camaraderie that exists among the family of performers that surrounds him, and which provides an anchor and source of comfort that the world outside this nurturing environment lacks.  One of Rose’s fellow performers jokingly expresses dread at the coming of the dawn, in which they will no longer be beautiful women, but horrifying hags, transformed by the harsh light of day.  The film is awash in glittering rainbows of color that express a hopeful quality in the midst of grief, loneliness, and despair.

(June 16 at 6:30pm)

Spider Lilies (2007)

Takeko (Isabella Leong) and Jade (Rainie Yang), the two women at the center of Spider Lilies, Chou’s intricately layered second feature (the “green” section of her “Rainbow Colors”), have retreated into worlds of their own making as an escape from loneliness and trauma.  Their destinies have become intertwined as the result of a massive earthquake that figures in both their pasts.  Jade works as a web-cam girl on a sex site, broadcasting from her bedroom, a room adorned with beaded curtains, dolls, and plush fabric to give the illusion of a girlish boudoir.  Just beyond Jade’s camera frame, and unseen by her customers, her room is a drab dwelling, the walls stained and peeling.  She also lives with her senile grandmother, who in a funny early scene, wanders into the room during one of her web-cam sessions.  At the suggestion of a customer who says she should get a sexy tattoo, Jade finds her way to the tattoo studio run by Takeko, and she requests a pattern of spider lilies that adorns the wall of the studio, and matches a tattoo on Takeko’s own arm.  Takeko refuses, saying the pattern is cursed.  Jade and Takeko first met years ago; Jade remembers their first encounter, but Takeko doesn’t (or claims not to remember).  Jade invites Takeko to visit her website, and later excitedly relates on her next web-cam session the story of how they met, hoping that Takeko is one of her online viewers.  The film frequently flashes back to both of their pasts, and the earthquake in which they both lost family; Takeko lost her father, and Jade (supposedly) lost her mother.  Takeko has retreated into her own world just as Jade has, though her meticulous attention to her tattooing art, spending hours creating designs for her customers and keeping diaries on her creations and who is wearing them.  Her tattoo matches her father’s, and she wears it as a unique form of therapy for her younger brother Ching (Shen Jian-hung), who witnessed the earthquake and lost his memory of his identity as a result.  Meanwhile, David (Kris Shie), a vice cop assigned to investigate and plan a raid of Jade’s website, has fallen in love with her and delays the investigation as much as possible. 

Chou freely melds fantasy and reality, the present and the past, and interior and exterior worlds, to create a very complicated story that is far more elaborately plotted than Splendid Float.  The discursive, roundabout style of storytelling here allows Chou to fully explore how members of societal subcultures – online sex workers, tattoo artists, gangsters – plot out their lives on the margins, making worlds much richer than that of the larger society that marginalizes them.  While the themes of lesbian desire Chou presents here may be familiar ones, Chou and cinematographer Hoho Liu’s sensually-charged images and bold juxtapositions elevate the experience into an aesthetically intense one.

(June 9 at 6:30pm, director intro/Q&A)

Drifting Flowers (2008)

The “red” section of “Rainbow Colors,” Drifting Flowers is a decades-spanning triptych exploring the romantic and emotional lives of three women at varying stages of their lives, grappling with love, desire, and longing.  This film pulls back from the dreamy and allusive style of Chou’s previous features, adopting a more realistic and less stylistically adorned filmmaking style.  While Hoho Liu’s cinematography is as lovely as ever, the choice to ground the film more in objective reality exposes its themes as overly familiar, and its issues are too much on the surface and lack the intricate depth of Splendid Float and Spider Lilies.  Drifting Flowers remains compelling, however, due to its strong performances and evocative visuals.  The three sections of the film are connected by a train passing through a dark tunnel, on which some of the major characters happen to be traveling.  It’s a familiar metaphor, but appropriate one for the life passages all the characters go through in the course of their narratives. 

Each section is named for the character it focuses on. Two of these characters are May (Pai Chih-ying) and Diego (Chao Yi-lan), who we meet at two stages in their lives.  Eight year-old May lives with her blind sister Jing (Serena Fang), who works as a bar singer, with Diego as her accordion and piano accompaniment.  Diego’s butch appearance causes May to ask her, “Are you a boy or a girl?”  This question gets variously asked by, and of, different characters throughout the film.  Diego eventually begins a romantic relationship with Jing, which makes May jealously angry, though she is unsure why she feels that way at this young age.  May’s schooling is affected by being kept up all night and sleeping at the bar, since Jing is raising May on her own.  After May angrily sends Jing on a dangerous trip outdoors by herself, after having witnessed Jing and Diego kissing the night before, Jing is compelled to leave May permanently with foster parents.  The foster mother asks Jing and Diego to stay away from May, since she feels that the environment “isn’t good for a young girl.”  The tragedy of the story is that the confluence of May’s jealous feelings and society’s prejudice and strictures drive these sisters apart.  Diego’s section, the final part of the film, details her life before she met Jing, exploring her gender confusion and grappling with her attraction to women and her wish to look less like a typical girl.  This causes conflict with her mother, who tries to get her to conform to a girlish appearance, and her brother, who objects to Diego inheriting any part of the family puppet-show troupe.

The middle section focuses on Lily (Lu Yi-ching), an old woman with Alzheimer’s at a nursing home, who is visited by Yen (Sam Wang), a gay man who is Lily’s legal husband.  Years earlier, they got married to appease their families, while pursuing secret same-sex relationships.  Lily in her senility mistakes Yen for her lover, who died years before.  Yen is HIV-positive, but refuses to take his medicine because of their vicious side effects.  Yen has lost the will to live because of his illness and a cheating younger lover.  The film’s last section flashes back on a younger Lily (Herb Hsu), who works as a showgirl on an outdoor stage.  The younger Lily encounters the younger Diego, whose family’s puppet troupe is losing customers to Lily’s titillating stage show.

Drifting Flowers shares its languorous pace and melancholy mood with other Taiwanese cinema stalwarts such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, although Zero Chou’s style is more accessible than either of them.  The presence of Lu Yi-ching, a regular actor for Tsai, reinforces this connection.

(June 23 at 6:30pm)

Wave Breaker (2009)

A project made for Taiwanese television, Wave Breaker, Chou’s latest feature, departs from the gay and lesbian themes of her previous features, though it is consistent with those other films in its intense identification with those who are different from the larger society.  Hao-yang (Yao Yuan-hao), a teacher and surfer, is stricken with spinocerebellar ataxia, a physically debilitating disease that seems similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease, inherited from his late father.  Hao-yang’s mother, Shen Li-ping (Xu Gui-ying), a councilwoman, is determined not to let his son die the way her husband did, and insists on putting him in extensive physical therapy, even as Hao-yang’s condition gets progressively worse.  As opposed to model son Hao-yang, younger brother Hao-ting is a continual disappointment to his mother, pursuing a music career and refusing to get a regular job, preferring to drive a cab.  Wave Breaker, much like Chou’s other films, approaches its narrative in a temporally non-linear way, beginning with Li-ping taking Hao-yang to drown in the sea as an act of assisted suicide, and backtracking to show what led up to this event.  Although the film never transcends its status as a “disease-of-the-week” TV movie, it admirably avoids false uplift and refuses to offer inspirational platitudes, showing us the weight of unavoidable tragedy.

(June 7 at 6:30pm, director intro/Q&A)

Interview with Shen Ko-shang, Director of "Two Juliets"

On the opening day of "Taiwan Stories," the Film Society of Lincoln Center's survey of classic and contemporary Taiwanese cinema which wraps today, I sat down to interview director Shen Ko-shang at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York (TECO).  Shen directed "Two Juliets," the second section (and my favorite) of the omnibus film Juliets, which reinterprets Romeo and Juliet in contemporary and historical Taiwanese settings.

What was the origin of the Juliets project?

The project was inspired by director Ang Lee, who won an award of $300,000 (US).  He wanted to cultivate some new blood into Taiwan’s film industry, so he decided to use this money to do that.  He gave the money to his brother Khan Lee, who was the project manager of the Juliets film.

You were a documentary filmmaker before participating in this film.  Why did you choose this particular project as your first foray into fiction?  Was this a long-standing aspiration of yours?

I’ve always dreamed of being a director of feature films, but it takes a great deal of capital to make this kind of film.  I cherish every opportunity to let my voice be heard, and there is a market for documentaries in Taiwan and internationally, so I got involved with documentaries at first.  My experience in making documentaries was a great help for this project.

Could you talk about Beigan, the island setting for “Two Juliets”?  What was it about this particular location that was attractive to you for this story?

I scouted many locations before I settled on Beigan, but none of them fit the allegorical tone that I wanted for my film.  Being an allegory, the story has to be beyond time and space, and very abstract.  The island of Beigan is really far away from the island of Taiwan proper, and I found that this island contained all the elements I’d imagined.  I even revised my script to reflect the particulars of the setting.

I was very impressed by how intricate your film was, for such a brief running time, being set in two different time periods: the 1980s and the present.  Could you talk about how you came up with this particular structure?

Figuring out how to reinterpret the classic story of Romeo and Juliet was a very difficult task.  I decided to focus on women’s self-awareness.  I highly value women’s persistent attitudes toward love and relationships; I think women are more courageous than men in this respect.  The time structure of my film is like a circle.  In every relationship we start from love, which eventually comes to an end.  But this ending also means the start of a new relationship, so it’s just like a circle.  The first two thirds of the film focus on the previous time, or the “old Juliet.”  The final part of the film concerns the present time.  This is how I chose to deal with the dilemma of love.  I purposely made the male character kind of dumb; he’s the only one who doesn’t know that Juliet hasn’t gone crazy.

I was also impressed by your lead actress, Lee Chien-na, who beautifully pulled off the dual role of the two Juliets.  This must have been very difficult for someone with no previous acting experience.  How did you find her?

Before I started shooting, a lot of people thought I was crazy, because I cast someone who had never acted before, and who has to play two roles in this movie.  Lee Chien-na was a contestant on Taiwan’s version of American Idol; she came in 10^th place, I think.  So she clearly had singing talent, even though she had no acting experience.  I spent a lot of time talking with her, and I could see that she was kind of obsessed with love and passion, and these were the kind of characteristics I was looking for.  So I decided to choose her to take the leading role.  Before formally shooting, I spent about a month with Chien-na to go over the script, to explore her acting potential.  Do you think she performed well?

Oh yes, very much so.

Compared to other actors of the younger generation, I think Chien-na is less “urbanized,” as we’d call it.  But you can still feel she’s very energetic and localized.  She’s like a stone that hasn’t yet been crafted by other artists.

So she’s more natural, you mean.

Yes, she’s more natural.

Did you sense this about her the first time you saw her?

No, the first time I only thought, she’s pretty! (Laughs) I cast her based on a hunch, and also the way she talked about her previous love experiences.  I decided to bet on her.  In addition, her upbringing is similar to the character she plays; her real family ran a singing troupe like the one depicted in the film.

It’s very interesting to hear that you drew upon your actress’ real-life experience to shape the character she played.  This leads me to wonder how your experience as a documentarian informed the way you made this fictional work.

Before Juliets, I spent about 8 years making documentaries.  Because of my abundant experience making documentary films, I’m always in touch with real life and real people.  Based on my long-term observations of reality, I imported these images into this film.  While I was making the film, I would think of how real people breathe, how real people act, how they sound in the documentaries, and then bring this to the fiction.  It’s very funny that when you’re shooting documentaries, you always want to make people more dramatic, but in fiction you want people to look more authentic, more real.

How much leeway did you have while making this film, as far as your interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet concept, and its connection to the other two films?  I was struck, for example, by the dominance of the color red throughout all three films.  How hands-on was Khan Lee in supervising this project?

I had 100 percent freedom in creating my film.  Producer Khan Lee did not interfere at all.  Before shooting, we all discussed it, and came up with the concept that the three directors would subvert the classic Romeo and Juliet.  Then Khan Lee just left it to the three of us to interpret it in our own way.  He completely disappeared from the whole project after that.

"Taiwan Stories" Video: Q&A with Shen Ko-shang, Director of "Two Juliets"

Shen Ko-shang, the director of "Two Juliets," the second segment of the anthology film Juliets, introduced his film and did a Q&A after the screening this past Saturday. Video below.

"Taiwan Stories" Review: Chung Mong-hong's "The Fourth Portrait"

The Fourth Portrait (Di zhi zhang hua). 2010. Directed by Chung Mong-hong. Written by Chung Mong-hong and Tu Hsiang-wen, based on an original story by Chung Mong-hong.  Produced by Tseng Shao-chien. Cinematography by Nagao Nakashima [Chung Mong-hong]. Edited by Lo Shih-ching. Art direction by Chao Shih-hao. Sound by Tu Duu-chih.

Cast: Bi Xiao-hai (Zhu Wen-hsiang), King Shih-chieh (Chang), Hao Lei (Wu Chun-lan), Leon Dai (Wen-hsiang's stepfather), Na Dow (Big Gun), Terri Kwan (Huang).

Twice in The Fourth Portrait, Chung Mong-hong’s downbeat, episodic, and almost surreally fragmented second feature, Wen-hsiang (Bi Xiao-hai), the ten-year old boy at the narrative’s center, enters, and emerges from, dark tunnels.  The first time, he enters a tunnel to retrieve a shirt that drifts away from him as he washes it at a river.  The second time, he is on a train with his mainlander mother Chun-lan (Hao Lei), who retrieves him to live with her, after having abandoned him years before.  This act of traversing dark passages neatly serves as a central metaphor for most of the characters in this film, set mostly in depressed backwaters of the Taiwan countryside.  Even though The Fourth Portrait is set in the present day, it’s very difficult to tell from most outward appearances, this setting being far from the modern urban landscapes of Taipei.  The film’s bright, deeply saturated colors, ranging from lush forest greenery to the neon of a karaoke bar, forms a sharp contrast to the darkness of the characters’ existences.

           

At the outset, Wen-hsiang has lost his father, and is forced to fend for himself, which he does by stealing others’ lunchboxes from his school.  He is caught by Chang (King Shih-chieh), the school’s caretaker, who relates a story of a traumatic experience from his own childhood fifty years earlier when his home was bombed by the Japanese in his native Shanghai.  Chang, despite his gruff exterior, begins looking after the boy, taking along with him as he raids a destroyed, abandoned house for objects to sell to earn money to give to Wen-hsiang.  Soon after, Wen-hsiang’s mother collects him to live with her new husband (Leon Dai), a fish seller who is instantly hostile to his stepson.  The couple also has a baby of their own.  Chun-lan lives a rather harsh existence as a marginalized Mainland Chinese immigrant in Taiwan, escaping dire circumstances in her homeland only to end up as a bar hostess servicing surly gangsters and coming home to a churlish, violent husband.  One of the film’s best scenes is a monologue Chun-lan delivers to Wen-hsiang’s teacher (Terri Kwan), expressing the travails of her life and the sacrifices she went through to get her hard-earned Taiwanese identity card.  A narrative thread that dominates the second half of the film concerns Wen-hsiang’s older brother, who lived with their mother and stepfather, who has now been missing for a long time.  Wen-hsiang often dreams about his brother, and his quest to learn what happens to him becomes a growing obsession.  In the midst of this rather depressing milieu, some comic relief is provided courtesy of a portly petty thief (comedian Na Dow) who calls himself “Big Gun,” who meets and befriends Wen-hsiang, taking the boy along on his robbery sprees.

The Fourth Portrait takes its title from Wen-hsiang’s penchant for drawing, and is structured around pictures the boy draws of key features of his existence.  The film’s tone is markedly different from Chung Mong-hong’s previous feature Parking, which had much more comedy, a sort of Taipei After Hours.  Chung’s nonlinear method of telling his story, at least initially, makes it difficult to immediately discern the relationships between people and to connect the episodes that are presented here almost like a puzzle.  The necessary information is doled out slowly and gradually over the course of the film, which may cause audience confusion (as it did to at least one viewer at this past Friday night’s screening).  Also, one major question remains unanswered: why did Chun-lan separate the brothers in the first place, only taking her older child to live with her and leaving Wen-hsiang to stay with his father?  This potential flaw is mostly overcome by Chung’s intriguing stylistics, most especially his visual palette, which is never less than strikingly beautiful.  The Fourth Portrait also benefits greatly from brilliant performances all around; Bi remarkably essays Wen-hsiang as a tough, plucky, resilient kid who navigates his harsh world and the troubled adults who inhabit it.  Hao Lei, best known for her excellent turn in Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, is just as impressive here as the mother who makes rather ill-advised life choices, yet is never less than deeply sympathetic.  Actor-director Leon Dai (Twenty Something Taipei, No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti), who also appeared in Parking, is riveting, adding considerable depth and shading to a character who, at least on paper, would seem to come across as simple a one-dimensionally evil character.  The Fourth Portrait, along with Parking, impressively exhibits the considerable range of its director, who is shaping up to be one of the most interesting to emerge in recent Taiwanese cinema.

The Fourth Portrait screens at the Walter Reade Theater today at 3:30. Click here to purchase tickets.

"Taiwan Stories" Review: "Juliets"

Juliets. 2010. Produced by Khan Lee. Consists of three short films:

Juliet's Choice. Directed by Hou Chi-jan. Written by Hou Chi-jan and Kelly Yang Yuan-ling. Cinematography by Mahua Feng Shin-hua. Edited by Ku Hsaio-yun. Production design by Tsai Pei-ling. Music by Han Cheng-ye.

Cast: Vivian Hsu, Wang Po-chieh.

Two Juliets. Directed by Shen Ko-shang. Written by Shen Ko-shang and Lu Hsin-chih. Cinematography by Tao Chien. Edited by Ku Hsiao-yun. Production design by Tang Chia-hung. Music by pigheadskin.

Cast: Lee Chien-na, River Huang.

One More Juliet. Written and directed by Chen Yu-hsun. Cinematography by Chen Chien-li. Edited by Ku Hsiao-yun. Music by Chris Hou.

Cast: Kang Kang, Liang He-chun.

The omnibus film Juliets consists of three short films set in the 1970’s, the 1980’s (in flashback), and the present day, all riffing on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  As with most portmanteau films of this kind, the quality varies, with the final episode being the weakest.  But all three of them, especially the strong opening two sections, are diverting and well-made films, and feature clever closing twists.  As the title indicates, the focus, at least in the first two films, is very much on the women in the romantic relationships depicted.  Here, they take the initiative, the risks, and find their own strength and agency in pursuing love, much more than the men do.

The first film, Hou Chi-jan’s “Juliet’s Choice,” set in 1970’s Taiwan during martial law, concerns Ju (Vivian Hsu), a disabled young woman who works in her father’s print shop.  She is withdrawn and shy, hiding her face behind her hair, and seeming to wish to disappear.  She feels trapped within both her body and her circumstances, scarcely venturing out of the shop, and hardly speaking to anyone.  However, a possible path of escape emerges in the form of Ro (Wong Po-chieh), a handsome college student who comes to the shop seeking to print banned Marxist materials for his dissident student group.  Rejected by Ju’s father, an instantly smitten Ju offers to print the materials surreptitiously after hours.  As she travels to the college to deliver the materials, she feels she is getting closer to “Romeo,” as Ro’s friends nickname him.  She begins wearing red lipstick and wearing a red dress. (Red is a dominant color in all three films.)  But when she suffers a humiliating episode during one of these trips, her reaction leads to the film’s clever emotional twist.  Sumptuously shot in a nostalgic glow justly compared to Wong Kar-wai’s films, “Juliet’s Choice” also intriguingly juggles its chronology in a similar fashion to Hou’s previous film, the feature One Day.  The film also boasts a strong central performance by pop star Vivian Hsu, boldly cast against type as the awkward and dowdy protagonist.

The second and strongest short, Shen Ko-shang’s “Two Juliets,” ambitiously spans two time periods, the 1980’s and the present, and features a fantastic performance by first-time actress Lee Chien-na, who portrays the two central female characters.  The Juliet of the present is suffering from a recent break-up, so much so that she has become suicidal.  She drives her father’s cab and picks up an unusual fare: a middle-aged man who is going to a mental asylum where he has gone to find his Juliet, whom he has left there after promising to rescue her from there thirty years earlier, and failing to follow through on that promise.  The man’s story as told to the present-day Juliet forms the bulk of the film, an extended flashback which relates the love affair between the man (played in his younger days by River Huang) and Julie (Lee Chien-na).  This story hews the closest to Shakespeare’s original story of warring families, as the lovers have to be in secret because of their rival fathers.  The young man’s father is a puppetmaster, and Julie’s father is a vaudevillian who runs a show in which Julie is a featured performer.  They have their secret trysts in a purportedly haunted house, and they believe they see ghost lovers who also use the house.  Julie is much bolder than her lover, and his diffidence and weakness lead to the tragic conclusion to their love story, which extends to the present and the man’s regret and wish to rectify the past.  Shen, a documentary filmmaker making his fiction debut with “Two Juliets,” impressively uses a very sophisticated narrative structure that packs an incredible amount of depth and poignancy into its brief running time, and has an acidly clever, emotionally satisfying twist.

The final segment, Chen Yu-hsun’s “One More Juliet,” in stark contrast to the other two films, is a broadly comic tale of a male Juliet (TV personality Kang Kang), who after 28 unrequited love affairs, attempts suicide on the eve of his 40^th birthday.  This male Juliet, named Chu Li-ye (say it out loud to get the joke), while trying to hang himself, is drafted by a film crew to join a commercial for a slimming Spanx-like garment made for men.  “One More Juliet” gives the anthology’s theme a twist by featuring a gay protagonist, whose Romeo is an extras actor (Liang He-chun) he meets on set.  Unfortunately, the frenetic humor here mostly falls flat and is more energetic than clever, and would seem to have more resonance with Taiwanese audiences familiar with its popular comedian star.

Juliets screens at the Walter Reade Theater on May 7 at 1:30 and May 18 at 4pm as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s film series “Taiwan Stories: Classic and Contemporary Film from Taiwan,” a 20-film survey spanning from the 1960’s to the present.  Click here to purchase tickets.

Interview with Arvin Chen, Director of "Au Revoir Taipei"

Below is an interview I conducted by email with Arvin Chen, the writer/director of Au Revoir Taipei, which was published in CineVue, the annual magazine of the Asian American International Film Festival. It accompanied my article on the Taiwanese films that screened at this year's festival.

CineVue: Could you briefly describe your background, and how you came to Taiwan to make films?

Arvin Chen: Though my parents are from Taiwan, I was born and raised in the USA, never really thinking that I might one day end up living and working in Asia. Like a lot of American kids, I grew up loving action films, fantasy films, blockbuster stuff. But in my late teens, I began to watch a lot of foreign films, independent films, arthouse films, and though I didn't study film in college (I was an architecture major), by the time I graduated I had gotten really into contemporary Asian cinema: Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and Edward Yang, whose film Yi Yi I saw shortly after finishing with school. Yi Yi was an especially inspiring film to me – it was so (deceptively) simple in terms of storytelling, yet was quite profound and moving and universal. Though I had never met him, I knew Edward Yang through a family friend, and flew to LA to meet with him just to get some advice. I was about to start film school at the time, but Edward immediately dissuaded me (he's not a big fan of film schools), and offered me a job working for him in Taipei. I took the offer and within a few weeks was living in Taipei. I didn't realize it at the time, but I guess Taipei had quite an effect on me – not only was it the first time I lived in another country, but it was also when I first started to think about making films. I eventually still went back to film school some years later, but my time in Taiwan continued to be something that stuck with me.

CV: You've said Au Revoir Taipei is a loose expansion of your earlier short, Mei. Could you describe that film and how you transitioned from that to your feature?

AC: Mei was my final thesis film for graduate school at USC, though it was shot entirely in Taipei. At the time, I had just gotten kind of sick of shooting in LA, and wanted to try something different, yet simple, in a new environment. Mei is really just a very small little love story that takes place in the nightmarkets - a slightly romanticized vision of nightmarkets. I made Mei really thinking of it only as a short, so I was actually surprised, when I began showing it in film festivals, that there were people interested in seeing it expanded as a feature. I had never completed a feature-length script before, so it also seemed natural to take Mei as a starting point (the idea of a romanticized Taipei and young people wanting to leave the city). Unfortunately, I quickly realized that something like Mei really existed best in a 10 minute short – there really wasn't enough story or theme or conflict to be able to last in a 90 minute film. So, the script slowly mutated from a straightforward romance into something a bit more comedic and absurd. I guess you can think of Au Revoir Taipei as Mei, but with gangsters and dancing.

CV: Au Revoir Taipei has been compared by many critics to Woody Allen, especially Manhattan. There are also affinities to the multi-character films of Edward Yang. Are there other less obvious influences or inspirations for your film, for example other Taiwanese/Asian or European films?

AC: As a first time feature filmmaker, it was actually tough not to just want to pay homage to/rip off all my favorite films and directors, so definitely there are many influences from all over the place (early Woody Allen being an especially big influence). French New Wave films were something that I always thought of when writing the film, but I think people may be more surprised to find that Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, or something like [Jacques Demy’s] The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or even a more recent Korean New Wave film like [Bong Joon-ho’s] Memories of Murder, were all films that I watched and found inspiring elements I wanted to bring into this film and play with.

CV: What were your experiences apprenticing for Edward Yang? Was there any specific advice he gave you that was helpful to your own filmmaking?

AC: It was just amazing to be around someone who I consider to be – for lack of a better word – a genius, but it was also quite inspiring just to witness firsthand the dedication and hard work it takes to be Edward Yang and to make the quality films that he did. In terms of an experience, it was actually quite difficult since Edward demanded a lot of those around him, and definitely had what you would call an artistic temperament. Edward was a great teacher of everything, but I think that one thing that sticks with me is something he told me the first time we met, which is that "when you know what you want to say, how you say it is not that difficult.” 

CV: Did you face any challenges making films in Taiwan?

AC: The filmmaking itself I would say was no more difficult, or less difficult than filmmaking any where else in the world. It's always tough for similar reasons. The biggest challenge overall was probably trying to convince investors that we could make a film that could play not only to Taiwanese audiences, but also internationally (and vice versa).
  

CV: Do you consider yourself a Taiwanese filmmaker, or an American filmmaker who happens to make films in Taiwan? Or do you not think in those terms?

AC: I've been trying less and less to think in those terms, only because I've realized it makes me over-analyze myself and the kind of films I want to make, and also creates preconceived notions of what Taiwanese cinema and American cinema are. It sounds simple, and perhaps a bit naive, but lately I've been thinking the most productive way to think of my filmmaking in general is just to think...is this the kind of movie I'd like to see?

CV: What has been the reception to the film in Taiwan, and how different are audiences' reactions to the film in Taiwan as opposed to outside Taiwan, if they differ at all?

AC: One of the most encouraging things that have come out of the process of making Au Revoir Taipei is discovering that people all over the world pretty much see our film in the same way, and that what's considered amusing or romantic is the same for everyone. Of course people will always identify with certain characters or moments more, but just having been able to sit in different theatres with different audiences (Taiwanese or non-Taiwanese), I find that the reactions are almost identical. What's more interesting, though, is that in Taiwan Au Revoir Taipei is considered a commercial film, and in the rest of the world and at festivals, it's considered an arthouse film. That may be just how Asian films are viewed outside of Asia (perhaps with the exception of genre and martial arts films).

CV: What are your next projects? Do you envision returning to the US to make films, or do you plan to remain in Taiwan for the foreseeable future?

AC: I had never planned to make another film in Taiwan, but as I was editing Au Revoir Taipei, I kind of stumbled across another idea for a film that I started to really get into – which I basically describe as an homage to Billy Wilder's The Apartment, but set during the Asian economic boom of the 1980s. So, as long as I can find the money to make it, I think that will be my next project. I'd very much like to shoot in the States eventually, but it also seems like right now, there's a lot of exciting things happening in Asia, and it's not a bad place to be for someone just starting to make films.


Arvin Chen's short film Mei:




Clips from an interview with Arvin Chen for Taiwanese television:

Taiwan Cinema Now

I had the great opportunity this summer to be chosen as this year's editor of CineVue, the annual magazine for the Asian American International Film Festival. Besides being editor, I also contributed two articles: one on the Taiwanese films at the festival, and one on the Filipino films. Below is an expanded version of the Taiwanese cinema article; the one on Filipino cinema will be posted here at a later date.

TAIWAN CINEMA NOW:

Taiwan’s Contemporary Global Films – Beyond Hou and Tsai

Ask any reasonably informed cinephile what comes to mind when the words “Taiwanese cinema” are mentioned, and chances are good that three names will pop up almost immediately: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and the late Edward Yang. However, despite the critical praise and awards showered upon these directors, the fate of their films in their home country is a far different story. Although Hou and Tsai have core followings in Taiwan, for the most part audiences there have stayed far away from their intellectually and aesthetically demanding films. Tellingly, the most recent features by Hou (Flight of the Red Balloon) and Tsai (Face) are not set in Taiwan at all, but rather in France, where both directors’ films have received their warmest commercial reception. Hou and Tsai’s latest films seem to have abandoned Taiwan, just as Taiwanese audiences have mostly abandoned them.

However, in the past two years, the Taiwanese cinema landscape has changed greatly for local films. A renewed push by the Taiwanese government, and especially the establishment of the Taipei Film Commission in 2008, has created the conditions for a commercial renaissance that may in time prove to be as significant to the history of Taiwanese cinema as the 1980’s new wave that brought us Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. Wei Te-Sheng’s Cape No. 7 (2008), a music-themed film with a parallel historical plot, was a massive box-office success that is now the second-highest grossing film in Taiwanese history, behind Titanic. This year saw the recent release of Doze Niu’s gangster saga Monga (Taiwan's foreign language Oscar submission), which broke opening-week domestic-film records when it opened on Chinese New Year. These films proved once and for all that Taiwanese cinema has what it takes to compete with Hollywood at the box office.

This renaissance is not limited to commercial blockbusters; smaller films have also been gaining favor with local audiences. Four of these films are featured in “New Taiwanese Cinema,” a presentation of the 33^rd Asian American International Film Festival, in association with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York (TECO). These films are by talented new voices in Taiwanese cinema, all first or second features eligible for the AAIFF10 Emerging Director, Narrative Feature Award. They do not partake in the austere aesthetics of Taiwanese films familiar to Westerners, but neither would any of them be mistaken for Hollywood blockbusters. They occupy a fertile middle ground rife with creative possibilities, which all four directors impressively make full use of.

Arvin Chen’s debut feature Au Revoir Taipei (also the AAIFF10 Centerpiece Presentation) is a low-key, effervescent charmer that looks kindly on those true believers in love. Directed by a California Bay Area native who apprenticed for Edward Yang, Chen’s film is a love letter to his adopted city, shot with a loving glow that exists in a different universe than the loneliness of Tsai Ming-liang. At the outset, the film’s lovelorn protagonist, Kai (Jack Yao), watches his girlfriend Faye depart for Paris. Kai composes love letters to Faye in French, and haunts a bookstore each day to bone up on the language. Susie (Amber Kuo), a pixie-cute bookseller, notices him and eventually strikes up a conversation with him. While it’s not hard to predict where things will eventually go with these two, it is a testament to Arvin Chen’s subtle writing and direction, as well as the appealing performances of its actors, that none of it feels rote or clichéd. A romantic comedy wouldn’t be worthy of its name without complications, and Au Revoir Taipei offers plenty, involving cops, gangsters, orange-suited wannabe drug kingpins, and a mysterious package. Brother Bao (Frankie Gao), an aging small-time gangster, delivers the film’s key line: “It’s nice to be in love, isn’t it?” After seeing this film, only the most stone-hearted viewer would answer that question with anything but a resounding yes.

The search for love also drives the title character of Håkon Liu’s debut feature Miss Kicki, played by the wonderful veteran Swedish actress Pernilla August. One fascinating aspect of the Taiwanese films at AAIFF10 is that they present Taipei as a truly globalized city; the hybridity of identity and culture that results informs what happens both behind and in front of the camera. Miss Kicki, like Au Revoir Taipei, is made by a filmmaker not born in Taiwan; Liu was born in Norway to a Taiwanese father and a Norwegian mother, spending his childhood in Taiwan and going to film school in Sweden. Miss Kicki was written specifically for August, and she rises to the occasion tremendously, portraying an instantly memorable character. Kicki returns to Sweden after many years abroad to reconnect with her son Viktor (Ludvig Palmell), who has been raised by Kicki’s mother. Kicki takes him with her on a trip to Taiwan, not telling her son her ulterior motive for going there: searching for Mr. Chang (Eric Tsang), a long-distance lover. Largely improvised, Miss Kicki has a unique eye for Taiwan, presenting such places as the Taipei 101 building and Sun Moon Lake in ways we’ve never quite seen before, investing its fish-out-of-water scenario with a vivid electricity.

Cheng Yu-chieh’s second feature Yang Yang, like Miss Kicki named after its protagonist, puts issues of racial and cultural identity at its center, focusing with intimate intensity on its Taiwanese-French lead actress, Sandrine Pinna, who appeared in Cheng’s previous feature Do Over (which screened at the 2007 AAIFF). Pinna plays a track runner whose mother (Shelly Yu) has recently remarried her track coach (Chu Lu-Hao), now making her stepsisters with her friend Xiao-Ru (Her Sy-Huoy). This seems like a beneficial arrangement, but Yang Yang’s mixed-race identity soon causes major problems. Yang Yang is admired for her unusual, “exotic” looks, but this attention is a double-edged sword; it makes her feel like an outsider and objectified by others. Xiao-Ru’s boyfriend Shawn (Chang Ruei-Jia) becomes attracted to Yang Yang, a situation that eventually drives an irreconcilable wedge between the half-sisters. Yang Yang abandons her athletic career to pursue acting and modeling, where her looks are a major asset but are still a source of tremendous internal struggle. Yang Yang has elements in common with Taiwanese art films, especially the sustained long takes and unhurried pacing.  But it also shares some affinities with certain American independent films, most especially those termed (accurately or not) “mumblecore,” populated by young people who awkwardly feel their way through life, acting impulsively, their motivations as hazy to themselves as they are to others. Yang Yang’s racial/cultural identity adds a fascinating layer to this.

Cho Li was a producer on Miss Kicki, and her debut feature Zoom Hunting raises interesting ethical issues related to the creative process.  Cho’s film is a thriller in the Hitchcock Rear Window mode, with allusions to Antonioni’s Blow Up thrown in.  In contrast to the almost fairy-tale Taipei of Au Revoir Taipei, the Taipei of Zoom Hunting is more dangerous and menacing, full of secrets and illicit behavior.  Cho replaces the male gaze of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window with the female gazes of two sisters: Ruyi (Ning Chang), a fashion photographer; and Ruxing (Zhu Zhi-Ying), a mystery novelist.  Ruyi stumbles upon photographic evidence of an affair between a man (Wen Sheng-Hao) and a woman (Zhou Heng-Yin) married to other people, paralleling the novel her sister is trying to write.  With a deadline looming, Ruxing asks Ruyi to continue her surveillance so she can gain inspiration for her novel and get herself unblocked.  The film’s mystery deepens, and the line between what is real and what is fictional becomes increasingly blurred.  Cho is adept at both creating suspense and illuminating the emotional lives of her characters.  Zoom Hunting’s prodigious command of genre tropes adds yet another facet to the amazing diversity of contemporary Taiwanese cinema today.

So there you have it: in just the four films featured in AAIFF10’s “New Taiwanese Cinema” showcase, we have an incredibly dynamic and eclectic snapshot of some of the best new voices in Taiwanese film.  There is the quirky romanticism of Au Revoir Taipei, the mother-son conflict of Miss Kicki, the almost painful intimacy of Yang Yang, and the nail-biting suspense of Zoom Hunting.  These and other recent Taiwanese films are this national cinema’s best hope of breaking out of the arthouse ghetto and appearing in places where regular folks can enjoy them.  New Yorkers, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor; these films suggest that the names of Chen, Liu, Cheng, and Cho will, with time, promise to be worthy enough to be spoken by cinema fans with the same reverence as Hou, Tsai, and Yang.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Tsai Ming-liang, "The Hole" (1998)

The Hole (Dong). 1998. Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. Written by Yang Ping-ying and Tsai Ming-liang. Produced by Cheng Su-ming, Chiu Shun-ching and Pierre Chevalier. Cinematography by Liao Peng-jung. Edited by Hsiao Ju-kuan. Art direction by Lee Pao-lin. Choreography by Joy Lo. Sound by Yang Ching-an.

Cast: Yang Kuei-mei (The woman downstairs), Lee Kang-sheng (The man upstairs), Miao Tien (a shopper), Tong Hsiang-chu (the plumber), Lin Hui-chin (a neighbor), Lin Kun-huei (the child), Chen Shiang-chyi, Dephne Han, Wei Bo-chin, Jacques Picoux, Yee Chih-yen, Lu Hsiao-lin (Narrators).

One of the most interesting things about Tsai Ming-liang’s filmmaking career, considering what an inimitable and uncompromising artist he is, is the fact that three of the nine features he has directed to date have been commissioned projects. This is true of his two most recent films. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), Tsai’s first film to be set in Malaysia, the country of his birth, was commissioned by Peter Sellars to be part of the New Crowned Hope Festival, a celebration in Vienna to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Tsai’s latest, Face, was commissioned by the Louvre museum, as the initial installment of its “Louvre Invites Filmmakers” program; this film, as Tsai remarked during a discussion after its screening this past Sunday at Asia Society, will play in the museum for a year.

Tsai’s first commissioned film was The Hole, which was part of French production company Haut et Court and television station La Sept Arte’s series “2000 Seen By …,” a collection of eight films imagining the upcoming end of the millennium. The Hole has a vaguely science-fiction premise: Taipei has been struck by a mysterious virus called the “Taiwan Virus” which has as its symptoms bizarre behavior by those stricken with “Taiwan Fever,” which turns its victims into human cockroaches who crawl on the floor scurrying into dark places, hiding from the light. But as is typical for Tsai, he refuses to conform to any of the hallmarks of films like this. The premise is set up at the beginning of the film where, over a black screen with no images, we hear news reports and interviewees describing this situation. The Taiwan government has issued an evacuation order to the cities infected with the virus, and will cut off the water supply to those who remain; garbage collection has already been halted – in the apartment building where the film has set, residents routinely drop their garbage out of their windows. The film begins one week before the end of the millennium; the government has stipulated that on January 1, 2000, water will be cut off. Many of the voices we hear take the government to task for their inadequate response to this crisis. “They didn’t try to protect us,” says one. “To hell with our government!” says another.

The Hole focuses on two apartment dwellers who refuse to heed the evacuation call: a woman (Yang Kuei-mei) plagued by the constant leaks who obsessively hoards toilet paper and tissues; and her upstairs neighbor (Lee Kang-sheng), who goes to work every morning to the convenience store he runs, although he has no customers. The separation between these two lonely souls is breached one day when a plumber visits the man’s apartment to investigate a leak that the woman downstairs has been complaining about, and leaves a gaping hole in the floor, never to return. The rest of the film concerns itself with the consequences of the plumber’s action, which forces a connection between these two people who have probably never spoken to one another before this event. This hole has all the connotations one would expect, including sexual ones (which is made explicit in one scene in which the man sticks his leg into the hole). This hole is also a portal to a fantasy world, which contains the musical sequences that are the heart of the film. Tsai assiduously eschewed non-diegetic music in his two previous films; in The Hole, he breaks this trend in the most glorious way, with five charming and dynamic musical sequences, all featuring the songs of Grace Chang, a popular songstress of the 50’s and 60’s beloved in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Although these sequences are influenced by Hollywood and Hong Kong classic musicals, they are much more earthbound, especially in their environments, which are in various areas of this very old, run-down apartment building with leaky, peeling walls. It’s as if the imaginations of the characters in this film are so restricted and limiting that even in fantasy, they cannot truly escape their depressing milieu. Also, it is unclear who these fantasies belong to: the woman downstairs, the man upstairs, or the collective unconscious of the building itself? Tsai provides very witty and humorous transitions in and out of the musical sequences: the first number, “Calypso,” featuring Yang Kuei-mei dancing in an elevator, is preceded by a shot of the hole, with cockroaches crawling out of it; after it ends, we cut to Lee Kang-sheng sprawled out, drunk, in the elevator.

The Hole, despite the pre-millennium tension that permeates it, and the familiar crying and despair that exists in its world, is Tsai’s most light-hearted and hopeful film. And although Tsai would disagree, a shaft of light suggesting a passage to heaven, a proffered glass of water, an outstretched hand, and a final love song from Grace Chang, all lead to what is as close to a happy ending as you’ll find in Tsai Ming-liang’s oeuvre.

The Hole screens at Asia Society on November 21, 3pm as part the series “Faces of Tsai Ming-liang.” Click here to purchase tickets.

Yang Kuei-mei performing "Calypso" from The Hole:

Grace Chang performing "Calypso" from the film Air Hostess (Wen Yi, 1959):