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

ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Howard Hampton

A shrug of acceptance is coded into his movies, a clinical embrace of the absurdities of existence and, beyond that, of the void itself. He may present horrific sitiuations, but there's no horror in his view of them--he probes his subjects with all the fascination of a coroner who loves his work, poking into every nook and cranium. Hence Tsai works in the fissures of pathos and mortification, ferreting out the innately ridiculous details that accrue in and alongside trauma, shame, anguish, and desire. Especially desire. Love Tsai Ming-liang style means Lee hiding under a squeaking bed and jerking off to the tune of Chen and Yang fucking mechanically overhead. Vive l'amour indeed.

Boilerplate sobriquets like "strange and shocking" or "terrifying and beautiful" aren't very helpful when applied to Tsai's materialist reveries (his aesthetic is nearer to Jacques Cousteau than Jean Cocteau). Well-meant stylistic comparisons tend to mask the Deadpan Zone eccentricity of Tsai's observations and the intimately defamiliarized life forms he sets wriggling onto the screen--so distant from how we prefer to think of ourselves yet much too close for comfort. The usual critical signposts (Warning: Profundity Ahead) and reference-point shorthand (so-and-so is x crossed with y) are a tricky business when it comes to Tsai Ming-liang, maybe because he doesn't seem particularly interested in playing the film-as-art game. The what-the-hell-is-this-ness of his work doesn't smack of affectation--it isn't meant to turn heads or impress cinephiles, although for precisely that reason, its offhand rigor and private fixations give critics all the more chiliastic goose-bumps. His early shot-on-video TV dramas All Corners of the World (1989) and Youngsters (1991) have a bracing form-follows-functionalism that carried over to his movies, adapting television's generic language to his own devices as he would later do with cinema. Deploying soapy melodrama, 400 Blows-ish learning curves, and socialist-realist worker concern merely as points of agnostic departure, these scaled-for-TV studies of growing up absurd incorporate such disparate dramatic conventions while displaying an evenhanded skepticism toward all three modes. In All Corners of the World, a family of movie-ticket scalpers hustle seats to sell-out showings of Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness; in comparison to Tsai's blank-generation images, the Godfather of modern Taiwanese cinema's moral universe is as sentimentally tragic and reassuringly artistic as Coppola's Corleone family operas.

From Tsai's debut feature Rebels of the Neon God on, Lee Kang-sheng has starred in every one of his films, playing the character/alter ego Hsiao-kang, who first materialized as the blackmailing bully in Youngsters. The slight, unprepossessing actor is no magnet for identification. In Rebels he's a haplessly un-Platonic Sal Mineo in search of a James Dean (Chen Chao-jung's delinquent biker Ah-tze). Lee's only exultant moment comes after vandalizing the scooter that belongs to the unaware object of his affection; becoming so excited watching Ah-tze's angry reaction from his window, Lee jumps up and down on his bed and cracks his head on the ceiling. So much for gratification (though stuck under the creaky bedsprings in Vive l'Amour, he probably enjoys himself more than the pair above manage to). In The River, he winds up being anonymously jerked-off by and then fellating his dad in a darkened sauna room--another case of nonrecognition, until the old man switches on the light and slaps Junior across his girlish mouth.