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.
