What Time Is It There?

Tsai Ming-Liang is a Director you either "get" or don't. His work reminds me to a point of Jim Jarmusch, their pacing is similar. If you've ever seen and liked Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise", you will probably like this. The story introduces you to people who lead mostly ordinary lives, just in Taipei. Ming-Liang's use of the long shot (setting up a scene and waiting for something to happen-usually, very little does) is very important. I think it adds to the simplicity of the story, ostensibly about a watch salesman who sells the young lady the watch he is wearing. He then changes the clocks in Taipei to Parisian time, where the young lady is going on vacation. The film also captures the side story of the watch salesman's mom, who just lost her husband. She looks for ways for him to "come back". It is a bit sad, but also touching. She almost steals the film. For lovers of independent film, a must. If you liked "The Departed", forget it. I'd like to add two things: The interlude "The Skywalk Is Gone", appended on the "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" DVD, is a 20 minute short which is also worthwhile, continues the story. Lastly, "The Wayward Cloud", the real sequel, is not quite as good (I give it 7 out of 10). It has images of fairly explicit pornography. I do recommend it, but it, like all of Ming-Liang's films, is uncompromising. The only major complaint I have with it is the mother is barely in it. I miss her. I want to tell you how it ends, but I can't, I can't spoil it. In the theater watching "The Wayward Cloud", the guy sitting behind me was flat out snoring. I was wide awake. All in all, "What Time Is It There" cemented Tsai Ming-Liang's reputation as a force to be reckoned with. He deserves the praise.

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.

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.

Tsai's unique style gives rise to another film about isolation in urbanization. Hsiao-kang's father has just died, and he and his mother must hold together. He doesn't have much problem doing that, but his mother is going insane with loneliness, so much so that she entirely imbues herself in her religious beliefs. Around this time, Hsaio-kang sells his personal watch to a girl about to fly to Paris. Soon after this, Hsiao-kang becomes obsessed with her (or is it the watch?) and decides to set all his watches (he sells them on the street) to Paris time, and then all the clocks in his house, and then all the clocks he can find. The girl gets stranded in Paris, having lost her plane ticket. The film moves slow and it has little dialogue, as is Tsai's style, but it is incredibly beautiful in its composition, editing, everything. The story is quite great, too. Tsai is a wonderful humanist. The film builds up to a silent crescendo, where the three main characters each endure cold acts of love and failed attempts at communication. When the film closes, all three are asleep, two in Taipei and one in Paris, all three alone.

Okay, I should have ended it there, but I do have two problems with the film, go figure. First, Hsiao-kang's clock setting is highly amusing at first, but it does get very old after a while. The sequence that ends in the movie theater bathroom is gold, perfect, so Tsai should have just stopped there with that motif. The scene where he sneaks into a clock store and the scene where he resets the clock tower are superfluous. We got the point, and it should have been moving forward. Secondly, I think it's about time Tsai moved on. I love the three films of his I've seen, including The Hole and Vive L'Amour, but the style is the same in all three, as is the theme. Michelangelo Antonioni, who is obviously Tsai's main inspiration (though this particular film has a lot of references to the Truffaut film The 400 Blows, including a very funny cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud), had a problem moving on from this material, as well, with everything from L'Avventura to Red Desert being very similar (although his style evolved more than Tsai's has), and even after that his films had comparable themes. As much as I like Tsai (and Antonioni), if his next film is just like this, I'm sure it will hurt my presently high opinion of him. 9/10.

(...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.