There is something wonderfully oppositional about the oeuvre of director Tsai Ming-liang (b. 1957): No less than half a score of movies about a young Taiwanese who walks around constantly looking as if he was sitting on a toilet - lost to the outside world and with a pressured look on his face.
It doesn’t get any less eccentric when you consider the motives recurring all through this cycle of films: watermelons, watches, instant noodles, lonely people, retro-songs, apartment buildings, sex, constant lows and water in different shapes and forms. It is a little miracle in itself that Tsai Ming -liang succeeds in making this fictional universe not only thought-provoking, but insisting to the viewer.
Films by Tsai Ming-liang look like something that Jacques Tati, Michelangelo Antonioni and Roy Andersson could have done together: refined, unpredictable tales in the border zone between comedy, tragedy, symbolism and satire.
Human zoology
A scene from the movie “The River” can serve to illustrate the director’s mastery of balance. In an averagely dysfunctional nuclear family where everybody goes about minding his own business, it suddenly starts to drip from the ceiling during a tropical storm. In the course of a few days, the dripping grows into a stream - and continues even after the rain has stopped. From then on, the family is no longer the same.
As a movie maker, Tsai Ming-liang is more interested in symptoms than in causes. He looks at his characters as a zoologist would regard animals: with a certain sense of compassion, but also with a fitting detachment. The result of his many investigations cannot very easily be reduced to one single diagnosis, but Tsai Ming-liang is obviously worried about our behavior and incredible ability to adapt. In “The River”, patterns of behavior are as irrational as they are recognizable: Clutching to their habits, people barricade themselves from the outside world and isolate themselves from each other. The director depicts all this without much ado or rush, but through the use of a uniquely insisting and revealing gaze. Water flows. Juices rise. A world cracks open. No-one considers dealing directly with the cause of it all until at the very end.
From teen rebel to porn actor
In this series, we will screen 6 of Tsai Ming-liang’s feature films. The films are not meant to be seen in any chronological or other order, but they intervene in each other’s universe in a way that is both unusual and ambiguous.
They all have the same Taiwanese leading actor in common: Lee Kang-sheng (b. 1968). His characters often bear the same name in every movie, but it still remains unclear if they are indeed the same person. In the first feature film he plays a delinquent teenager. Later, he reappears as anything from a salesman of burial sites to a movie theater manager, a salesman of watches, a voyeur and a porn actor.
Despite all the character changes, the personae are connected: Lee Kang-sheng becomes the image of the turn-of-the-millennium urban misfit, at once both sensitive and callous, who hears the ticking of the clock. He is completely alienated - there is no drive from within, no pressure from the outside. All in all, it is quite disheartening. And the depiction is both sharp and moving.
The paradoxical charm of these movies lies partly in the way self-trained Lee Kang-sheng equips his main character - a walking existential deficit - with a disposition as naive as it is stupid. His realistic and taciturn interpretation slowly manages to uplift his characters from caricatures to real human beings.
The look of an outsider
49-year-old Tsai Ming-liang is a Malaysian citizen, but since 1989 he has almost exclusively produced his movies in Taiwan. His unique style has earned him occasional ridicule and mockery in his adoptive home country. Nonetheless, the look of an outsider is clearly one of his major strengths. He has made a virtue out of not inquiring into the causes for people’s actions - which allows him to channel his energies into portraying their behavior in more amusing and revealing ways. International film festivals have been aware of the work of this unique artist for a long time now, and prestigious awards in Cannes, Berlin, Venice and elsewhere are evidence of the fact that even with simple means and a limited number of motifs, it is indeed possible to grasp at the root of the conditions that shape modern life. The world is no joke in Tsai Ming-liang’s movies. But it is funny. After all, we humans are peculiar, aren’t we?
Schedule
Date Time Title
5/9(WED) 21:30 Rebels of the Neon God(1992)
5/11(FRI) 16:45 Vive l’amour(1994)
5/12(SAT) 21:30 The River(1997)
5/13(SUN) 16:45 What Time is it There? (2001)
5/13(SUN) 19:15 The Wayward Cloud(2004)
5/16(WED) 21:30 The Hole(1998)
5/17(THU) 21:45 Vive l’amour(1994)
5/18(FRI) 19:15 Rebels of the Neon God(1992)
5/22(TUE) 19:15 What Time is it There? (2001)
5/22(TUE) 21:45 The Wayward Cloud(2004)
5/24(THU) 19:00 The Hole(1998)
5/24(THU) 21:30 The River(1997)
By Rasmus Brendstrup, Program editor at Cinemateket
