WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
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Page Not FoundWE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together. |
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Page Not FoundWE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
Inside a shadowy banking system that secretly moves trillions of dollars around the world.
With Bush’s new nukes, the world gets more dangerous.
The Failure of Brand USA
Why the Bush administration can't sell America abroad.
Learning from Enron
Will Washington ever get it?
It’s time to fight the Enronization of the media.
Dangerous Lives
Colombia’s generals finally have the war they want, but their country’s people pay the price.
Editorial
Steeling Home.
Sharon’s Lessons in Terror
War crimes tribunal for Cambodia proves elusive.
Polluters rewrite the Clean Water Act.
Indian Rights
American tribes take their case against Washington to international courts.
No Fun or Games
Chinese sweatshops churn out toys for the United States.
Intimidation Tactics
Neal Horsley: One mean anti-abortionist.
FILM: What Time Is It There?
The Cricket-Loving Marxist Dandy
BOOKS: C.L.R. James: A Life.
The Invisible Band
MUSIC: Gorillaz in our midst.
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March 15, 2002
Twice Upon a Time
What Time Is It There? is Tsai’s fifth feature and perhaps the
best place to begin a beautiful friendship. (No, it’s not a sellout; if
anything, Tsai has further refined his minimalist tendencies, trimming dialogue
and motion to a purist’s pinprick.) The story concerns two young people,
one in bustling Taipei, the other abroad in unfamiliar Paris. While never linked
romantically (they only meet twice, and briefly at that), they wander through
a shared haze of intercontinental longing, spun by Tsai like an ingenious clockwork
of weird habits and desperate expressions. Think of it as the anti-Amélie,
without that movie’s hypercute aggression, and told with a far richer reserve.
Now the fissure is timezones, in all their arbitrary fixity, but also the temporal
divide between the living and the dead. What Time Is It There? springs
off from a family about to be derailed by grief; in its first uninterrupted
moments, we see the old man (Miao Tien), smoking in his tiny quarters, an uneaten
plate of food before him. He gets up to move a potted plant. He sits down again.
He broods. In a cut, he’s gone—now presumably the contents of the funeral urn
being transported by taxi to a final resting place. What follows can safely
be called a ghost story, but notice Tsai’s marvelous economy in just that
opening shot. For all his ordinariness, the father burns into our memory and
stays there, as he does on the haunted brow of his son, played by Tsai regular
Lee Kang-sheng. Lee, with his bee-stung lips and bruised gaze, is one of those
rare gifts to directors jonesing for transparency. He’s often been compared
to James Dean, but he’s more like an ideal union of Dean with Sal Mineo,
his curious tag-along from Rebel Without a Cause: the swoon coupled with
a gawky sense of ruffled oddity. You can’t take your eyes off him. Lee makes a lackadaisical living selling watches as street vendor. Instantly,
one feels protective for him when a slightly pushy young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi,
another outstanding Tsai find) fixes on his own wristwatch with a covetous squint.
Demurring, he tells her it’s bad luck, that he’s in mourning, but
she’s not having any of it. She needs his dual-time mechanism for a trip
to Paris. Eventually, she gets her way, but not without dropping on him more
than cash and her gratitude; he can’t seem to let go of her memory. Buried
under his bedsheets, Lee dials the phone operator in the middle of the night
and asks the film’s title question. A muted amour fou is born.
Why does he do this? Passion, perhaps—or maybe it’s just his way
of mourning. In either case, Tsai never comes out and says so, and the modesty
feels right; such are the mysterious impulses people feel when they’re
hurting. Tsai’s patience is oddly catching as he floods the frame with
minute invaders given their proper due: a pigeon strolls leisurely across the
widescreen, a white carp cruises in its fishtank. (The serene photography is
by Benoît Delhomme.) Such pictorial sensibilities are rare these gabby
days, leading many to praise Tsai as a rediscoverer of silent-era potency. But
while he certainly merits this, it only speaks to half his skill as a storyteller
who builds from implicit solitudes: On a rooftop, Lee uncorks a bottle of red
wine, pours a glass and stares westward. Over the horizon, there is a Paris tale being woven in, featuring the watch-buyer,
her assertiveness long dissolved into a kindred isolation. Chen drifts through
cafés and metro platforms, a stranger in self-imposed exile. Why did
she ever come so far to be so blue? Again, Tsai leaves motives unspoken, instead
courting the off-kilter charms of more abstract connections. Lee basks sullenly
in the cathode glow of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, channeling the
nighttime prowlings of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud gulping from a stolen
jug of milk; Chen, meanwhile, has an actual encounter with the grown-up star
on a Parisian cemetery bench. (Léaud, looking supremely Gallic in his
leather coat and insouciance, hits on her.) Finally, the sweetest kind of movie
reference: one that makes sense without a cinema studies degree—an expression
of unquenched thirsts, ready for the tapping. Throughout, Tsai makes his rhymes work with an almost subliminal grace: from
him to her, from clocks to hearts, from an ancient Paris graveyard to the modern
passageways of locker-like columbaria, where Buddhist rites are performed over
ashes. With understated rigor, What Time Is It There? eventually synchronizes
its loners and themes to such a degree that the result is close to spiritual.
Clocks are circular, as is the final image of Tsai’s coda, a ferris wheel,
and we’re left with the hopeful intimation of release, maybe even rebirth.
It’s a perfect picture of nirvana, one that stays in the mind for days.
To intellectualize it further would be a crime. Try this one—I promise
it won’t bite. |
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WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
sai Ming-liang, the Taiwanese director of a decade’s worth of urban
hilarity—all of it bone-dry and gorgeous in structure, not to mention achingly
sad—deserves better than praise. He deserves to be seen. I say blame the
messenger: Tsai invites the most flattering of comparisons from grizzled posses
of critics bent on running down the next severe master à la Antonioni
and Ozu. Yes, Tsai is all that, but know too that he’s funnier and far
less intimidating. Urgently, he needs to be saved from his flat-footed penpals,
and who better to do that than audiences?
ove equals loneliness in the Tsai universe, and I suspect this will strike
a chord with even the pixie-haired sprites of the world. With each film, he
presents a different obstacle to human attachment, often disguised as the very
opening for those feelings in the first place. In Vive L’Amour it
was a vacant apartment, host to rotating squatters, home to none. In The
Hole, undoubtedly the sweetest musical about plague to date, Tsai links
two strangers via a bizarre puncture in the floor. (Or the ceiling, depending
on your perspective.)
f Tsai were a lesser artist, he might rate some of the well-intentioned term
papers coming from fustier reviewers: Existential Alienation, ahoy! But fortunately,
he’s too damn entertaining for that. Obsessions suit Tsai to a T (he has
a thing for dripping water) and immediately, he devotes himself to establishing
a living presence of all the ticking clocks in the vicinity. Lee starts by purposefully
resetting every timepiece in his case to seven hours earlier, the full ashtray
by his side speaking volumes to a strange mania. Soon, he secretly turns back
the kitchen clock (his mother interprets this, touchingly, as the return of
her husband’s spirit, leading to some unorthodox dinner times), and even
the huge hour-hand on a large building’s facade becomes fair game.