Rainmaker - Tsai Ming-Liang's film, Et la-bas, quelle heure est-il? - Review

ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Howard Hampton

This May 17, TSAI MING-LIANG's fifth feature film, Et la-bas, quelle heure est-il? (What time is it there?), premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Now, New York audiences will have a chance to assess the Taipei-based filmmaker's startling oeuvre. Howard Hampton sets the stage for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's upcoming retrospective "Urban Ghosts and Legends: The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang" at the Walter Reade Theater, June 29-July 12.

The numbed-down recurring characters in forty-three-year-old Malaysian-born, Taiwan based director Tsai Ming-liang's films behave like diseased guppies in an urban fishbowl. Moving through the brackish aquarium that is a dourly semi-modernized Taipei--a rain-drenched, leak-springing, backed-up-plumbing perdition where even layers of societal algae and existential murk can never quite efface the city's sterility--they aimlessly swim in circles. Here contact and isolation, comfort and squalor, are indistinguishable; even sex has turned into an ironic ballet of synchronized disconnection.

Tsai's Taipei is the Atlantis of anomie: The twentieth century's waterlogged myths of freedom and building a better life through progress are interned there. Though that's putting it much more baldly--and didactically--than his films ever do. They treat estrangement as a form of man-made weather, while the torrential downpours and submerged apartment floors seem like natural outgrowths of that malaise. There's nowhere to turn and no chance of escape. Tsai's straggling guppies have had to adapt to their polluted surroundings: They've learned to live with the stuff that's gradually killing them. In 1998's plague musical The Hole, a state of contradictory emergency (officials warn residents to leave the quarantined area at once--no wonder they're confused) reinforces the home-detention status that's always been implicit in the solo doldrums of Tsai's compartment-dwellers. A botched repair job at a public-housing tower leaves a gaping hole in a man's living-room floor, giving him a glimpse into the quarters of th e frazzled, exhausted woman who lives below. With an already tenuous hold on sanity, caught in a citywide epidemic of contagious irrationality (that mysterious "Taiwan virus"), she becomes further unglued at the sight of her neighbor's eye peering away at her. She starts hallucinating herself performing lipstick-synching, cha-cha-cha production numbers in the building's corridors, and has phone-sexy chats with an imaginary caller. Yet she goes through the motions of normalcy, eating her instant noodles, indignantly phoning the repairman ("Do you think you're the only plumber left alive around here?"), and keeping up disintegrating appearances as best she can.

Reflected in the stare--gaze is far too polite a word for it--of Tsai's coolly unflinching camera eye, the voyeurism is so objectively detached it turns despair into a form of slapstick abstraction. His movies immerse the viewer in an undersea-sick world where pain and desire have all the stifled, tongue-tied lassitude of silent comedy, only the pratfalls have been displaced onto the casual indifference, cruelty, and humiliation of everyday life. The woman downstairs--The Hole's nameless, allegorical pair suggest the living dead risen from Dennis Potter's field--zaps the prying eye with bug spray. Sitting on her toilet later, underwear around her knees as she holds a plastic container atop her head to catch the dripping water from yet another leak, she's the poster woman for urban survivors who've learned to endure whatever life subjects them to.

Tsai now has five features to his credit. The first four--Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l'Amour (1996), The River (1997), and The Hole (aka Last Dance in the version shown on cable TV)--will be screened this summer in New York as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective of the director's work. (As we go to press, his latest film is making its debut at Cannes, under the title Et la-bas, quelle heure est-il? [What time is it there?]) The River stands as Tsai's benchmark work, though it is only now getting a New York premiere and belated US release--four years had to pass before anyone would touch this intransigent, calmly unfazed riff on disease, abjection, familial chasms, and accidental incest. Vive l'Amour is likely his best-known movie in America, a triangular hide-and-miss, music-free roundelay between Yang Kuei-mei's desperate real estate agent, Chen Chao-jung's clothing hustler, and funereal salesman Lee Kang-sheng (selling urn space to people who already live in a columbarium) as they unwittingly share duplicate keys to an empty high-rise condo. Its neatly atomized figures plunked into a schematically "bleak," concrete-molehill landscape immediately suggested parallels to the alienation-chic menu that Michelangelo Antonioni dished up in the '60s (L'Ennui with Red Desert sauce). But such overly obvious, less-than-skin-deep comparisons merely served to obscure Tsai's singularity, making the movies harder to see for what they really are. There's none of Antonioni's anxious, patrician hand-wringing here, and Tsai's far too rooted in transient, morose physicality to fret over the sufferings or spiritual poverty of the Beautiful People.