TIFF Review: Stray Dogs

I don't know when this will get distribution, but for now it is safely my favorite film of 2013, and, if it comes out next year, an extremely high bar for 2014's slate. If this is Tsai Ming-liang's last film, he leaves cinema richer, more evocative and, with his startling use of digital as an extremity of length over assembly, more advanced than he found it. His mostly static takes, stretching for minutes at a time, elicit gulfs of Kuleshov-esque interpretation from actors' subtly modulating faces, playing out a commentary of economic strife, existential isolation and emotional longing with few words. It was the last film I saw in Toronto, and the that best proved that cinema still has new territories to explore.

Read my full review at Film.com.

What Time is It There?

When someone describes a film as minimalistic, he usually refers to the aesthetic quality, a sparsity of construction and mise-en-scène that leaves a chill in the air. What so many, including myself, fail to adequately convey is that minimalist film, when done well, tends to be richer, more painterly and more evocative than more complicated work. Perhaps it's because the removal of classical elements of mise-en-scène take away the intellectualism of the cinema. Rather than give us symbols to toil over, directors pull back and leave emotions to fill the gap. Thus, it's harder to talk about these movies, because even when shots are deliberately arranged and edited and you see what the director is saying, you cannot fully discuss the picture without investing in it emotionally. For those who believe criticism should strive for objective verisimilitude, meaningful criticism of such works is impossible. It's easy to talk about someone's creative and emotional vision when it comes caged in unlockable elements. It's much harder when you have to expose yourself to talk about someone else's bared chest.

From a conceptual standpoint, Tsai Ming-liang's films suggest minimalism taken to an extreme. Not only is he a master of the long, static take, he reuses the same actors in essentially the same roles. Lee Kang-sheng plays the protagonist in all of Tsai's films, and he even carries the same character name, Hsiao-kang, across more than one feature. Lu Yi-ching tends to play the mother figure, Miao Tien the father. Chen Shiang-chyi plays the young woman, be she a love interest or something else. Tsai even reuses the fish from The River. Plenty of directors work with actors multiple times, but by assigning the same cast to roughly the same parts each time, Tsai expands upon his ideas of dissociation and conformity before a film even starts: though he leaves open the possibility that the feelings of disconnect and ennui in his characters are rooted in the same people, the recycling of casts allows him to make the case that we're all becoming the same. Modern thinking coined the term "nuclear family," and it also made that unit into its own prison. No longer about community, now all we have is our immediate relatives, and we cannot even communicate with them.

The first shot of What Time is It There? hangs outside the kitchen of a humble Taiwanese home as an old man finishes preparing dinner. He walks into the room where the camera rests and sets down his plate on a table, but he doesn't eat, restlessly reaching for a cigarette and fidgeting. Though he sets a plate for no one else, he gets out of his chair and calls for Hsiao-kang, then he steps outside on the back porch and rearranges a plant. His disquiet, though calm, introduces an anxious mood, and the look of emptiness in Miao's face when he sits closer to the camera is haunting but understated. The only dialogue of the entire scene is the father shouting "Hsiao-kang!" The rest unfolds in near silence, only the rustling of the rearranged plant and the creak of the wooden chair putting something in the audio track.

In the next shot, Tsai relocates to a car with the young Hsiao-kang, now cradling a container with his father's ashes. He and his mother head to an interment, located in what almost looks like a reference library, filled with shelves of fine oak cabinets in which to store remains. Instead of the unique and differentiated headstones in Western cemeteries (one of which Tsai later shows), this place literalizes the idea that we are all equal in death, and it also suggests that we are equal and unoriginal in life. As I watched this scene, I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that horrific obsidian wall that reduces the meaningless sacrifice of so many thousands to simply their names, at once an admission of our shame and a final attempt by the powers that be to minimize the disgust by removing all humanity from the equation. We know as little about Hsiao-kang's father in death as we did in the brief amount of life we saw.

Tsai complicates the shot further by introducing the first of many tragicomic elements in the film. As the camera sits in the narrow corridor of this modernized, efficient form of interment, a Buddhist priest performs a funeral ritual, clanging chimes and chanting centuries-old prayers in the middle of this clinical room. The sight of the priest, in his bright orange robe, standing among the polished, nondescript, dark wood paneling is inherently funny, but the sorrow it communicates, of committed Buddhists trying to ensure their beloved will return, is rending. At the same time, the way that the rows of ashes resemble a kind of reference section, a place of storage, also implies that these wee cupboards might actually aid the Buddhist idea of reincarnation: they might merely be places where one's former body is stored while the spirit seeks a new host.

It's impossible to feel optimistic about that line of thought, though, when you follow the reactions of the son and wife left behind. The mother continues to hold Buddhist rituals in the hopes of bringing her husband back, constantly setting his plate for dinner and interpreting anything remotely suspicious as her husband's ghost floating around. Hsiao-kang, who does not seem as if he was ever that sociable, retreats into his room, not even leaving to urinate. Instead, he pees in plastic containers -- bags, bottles -- like Howard Hughes. During the day, he leaves the room only to go sell watches on the street, where a woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) approaches him looking for a watch that can keep two times as she is leaving for Paris soon. Unimpressed by any of the watches he's flogging, Shiang-ciyi asks if she can buy the one Hsiao-kang is wearing. Having received the watch from his father, Hsiao-kang feels not only an emotional connection to the timepiece but a superstitious one, fearing that he would give away a piece of his dad. But he relents, and the woman goes on her way.

After this brief encounter, Hsiao-kang's behavior begins to shift. On a whim, he begins to set the watches in his case to Parisian time, then any clock he can find. He visits a bootleg stand and asks for French films, taking home François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Tsai's favorite movie). At night, he sits awake, watching this scratchy, panned and scanned version of the movie that lops off 2/3 of the original frame. Later in the film, Tsai shows the woman in Paris sitting on a bench when the star of Truffaut's masterpiece, Jean-Pierre Léaud, sits beside her and attempts to make small talk.

These tendrils snake and wave, directionless as the tentacles of a sea anemone, but they never converge or brush against each other. The vague connection that tugs at Hsiao-kang is perhaps not romantically motivated so much as the outgrowth of his increasing hollowness. No one else who stops to buy the boy's watches makes any impression, as they do the usual: they scan over Hsiao-kang's wares, maybe haggle a bit and move on. Shiang-ciyi stood out, and whether he feels any attraction to her is secondary to the mere fact that she broke the routine.

When Tsai takes his camera to Paris to follow the woman, though, he does not resort to portraying her as some free spirit to extend her unorthodox actions with Hsiao-kang. Rather, she seems as lost and without purpose as the man whose watch she purchased, if not more so. In Paris, she is naturally alienated from the domestic population, and she does not make clear why she even came. She nurses a piece of paper with a phone number but never calls the mysterious person, leaving her isolated in France. Listlessly, she wanders Paris, not even taking in the sights as she uncomfortably sits coffee in cafés as if she heard that's what Parisians do and just repeats the action over and over in an attempt to fit in. A sense of displacement pervades the film, but Shiang-chyi literalizes it, having traveled to another part of the world to find somewhere she might belong, only to be even more lost.

Compared to the ragged howl of pain in Wong Kar-wai's films, loneliness and loss in Tsai Ming-liang's movies are more contained, held behind a dam that holds back the flood until cracks appear. He denies us the catharsis of full release, achieving a pain even greater than that of Wong. Where his previous film, The River, was more explicitly about modernity and the threat of interpersonal loss in a world that now functioned on a global scale, What Time is It There? approaches the same general subject in a way that complicates and deepens it.

The problem Tsai finds in the modern world here is not that we lose all sense of connection but that there are so many possibilities opened up to us that we experience sensory overload and shut down. The mise-en-scène in Tsai's shots is always static and angled, not in mathematical precision but to ensure that no one faces horizontally, where they might make eye contact with someone to their side, nor directly at the camera, where they might at least feel us watching and caring about them. They have options, but in their confusion they wind up stuck in the middle, facing diagonally to nothing.

Numerous moments of the film speak to this disconnect. At a subway station in Paris, Shiang-chyi sees an Asian man, perhaps Taiwanese, across the gap, but when he board the train that fills the space between them, she does not move to make conversation despite the longing for communication that's plain on her face. Hsiao-kang and his mother cannot relate to each other, but if they could just sit down and talk about their emotions over the patriarch's death, they might move forward. Instead, the mother is reduced to sobbing and begging for answers from the family fish as she grips the tank desperately. Later, Hsiao-kang listens to a frothy, lightweight radio show that recounts silly news stories as a chirpy but disengaged female voice bounces through titillating nuggets. One of the stories concerns a dog running around a highway, and the woman on the radio goes through a series of awful jokes about it trying to get a suntan, only for someone to call in and say the poor thing got run over. After the slightest pause and downturn in the host's voice, she returns to business as usual, masking a sense of pain with the same hollow façade Hsiao-kang and the others use, even if they're not as bubbly.

In the film's most tragicomic moment, Hsiao-kang sits in a theater after leaving a store where he rearranged the time on the clocks. The other customer who watched him do it comes in, sits next to Hsiao-kang in a nearly empty theater, takes the kid's giant clock and walks off. Hsiao-kang follows him, ending up in a bathroom where the man opens a stall to reveal dropped pants with the clock covering his penis. It's quietly absurd, but it suggests that the man was snapped out of his own ennui and disconnect by watching Hsiao-kang. Just as the boy felt an imperceptible tug toward the woman, so too does this man to Hsiao-kang, and while it's funny when he casually knocks the stall door closed on the man and walks out with a sigh, it's also sad because Hsiao-kang cannot see his own pain in others.

There are casualties in Tsai's view of the modern world, however. The director sees the irony of his fears of cultural loss in a homogenized world when his own cinephilia sprang from European cinema, and he rather reluctantly places the New Wave on the chopping block. The hissing, snowy bootleg of The 400 Blows casts the young Jean-Pierre Léaud as a ghost, and when Shiang-chyi meets the aged Léaud, they sit in a cemetery (itself contrasting classical Western interment, ornate and influenced by Christian social values, with the crematory policy of Taiwan). Shiang-chyi has no clue who he is, both a result of generational gap and cultural separation, and Tsai clear mourns the New Wave even as he makes clear that if the final nail had not been put in the movement's coffin, he is going to be the one to do it.

The title of the film is What Time is It There?, but 'where' is a relative term dependent on 'here.' Nothing makes time more disjunctive than the cinema, which can cross space and time in a single cut. For a film that uses clocks as a central symbol, the movie wryly has a non-linear progression even though it does not seem to ever double back. The structure of the film becomes as displaced as its characters, always moving forward but never really going anywhere, never recognizing what's happening.

The climax of the film is among the most haunting I've ever seen, similar in its culminating expression of directionless ennui and existentialist doubt to the ending of Tokyo Sonata. Each of the three primary characters engages in a sexual activity that only separates them further from others. In Paris, Shiang-chyi meets a woman in a restaurant and comes back to her hotel room. They sleep together, in a literal sense, but Shiang-chyi leans over and kisses the woman as if repaying the favor of talking to someone. The woman is unresponsive. Back in Taiwan, Hsiao-kang has sex with a prostitute, while the mother vents her sorrow and her fantasies of her husband returning by masturbating with the container of her husband's ashes. The awkwardness of this and Shiang-chyi's moments might be funny, but they are intensely affecting. The mother in particular seems to think that this perverse act with bring her closer once more with her husband, that his ghost might return and pleasure her. In the end, she seals herself off, reduced to isolated self-love she envisions as reconnection instead of finding someone else. (And what Western actress would sob noiselessly, avoiding histrionics and awards-baiting monologues, while still letting snot run down her face?)

The film's final scene does not bring these people together, because that's not the point. Where so many of the "network narrative" try to link people, the only thing the characters in What Time is It There? have in common with each other, even the relatives, is how alone they are. Tsai moves at last to Paris, unable to bring mother and son together, to close on Shiang-chyi. She sits by a pool, lounging uncomfortably and meditatively in a chair built always to lean back. Behind her is an empty chair. Some children play with her suitcase, throwing it into the pool, only for Hsiao-kang's father to walk by and fish it out. What does this mean? I cannot say on a first watch, but it spoke to me about those tendrils that connect even the loneliest of people, and that perhaps all that we saw was Hsiao-kang's projection of the woman he obsessed over, looking to her to get over the pain of his father's loss. In his mind, maybe she actually did take a piece of his father with her to Paris, where he now lives. It's a magical moment, reminiscent of the end of Being There, but it also has its bleaker side. The woman who made an impression on Hsiao-kang is stuck in Paris, and his father is there too. But he remains in Taiwan, possibly imagining all this but never going there himself. Some part of him knows Paris won't really be like that, and that he will just become as alienated as Shiang-chyi there. It's the final joke in a dryly comic film, the prospect that a third of the story, as depressing as it was, was actually someone's most hopeful fantasy. But like all the other gags, it's rooted in a deep sadness that turns laughter into tears.

The River (1997)

Common sense for writing a film review dictates that the critic should never spend more time than necessary describing the movie's plot. The reasons are obvious: the reader either has or hasn't seen the film, thus making plot synopsis redundant for one group and too-revealing for the other (though why people read entire reviews for films they haven't seen and subsequently bitch about even minor spoilers is quite beyond me). Also, the purpose of the review is to describe and analyze the film in one's own words, not to regurgitate what happens like the host of a personal Chris Farley Show. Some films are dense enough to require a bit more explanation before explication, of course, and frankly sometimes you just fall into the trap of padding, even if doing so unconsciously. Tsai Ming-liang's third feature, however, is a film told so lyrically that it becomes sorely tempting not simply to write down what happens scene-by-scene, confident that even separated from the images a synopsis would read more beautifully than any attempt to tackle the film.

Take the first half hour alone: The River opens with a low-angle shot of an escalator in a Taipei mall, clacking loudly as its stairs rotate. The shot holds until a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) rides down the escalator as a man, Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), rides up. They recognize each other and converse, and the woman takes Xiao-kang to a location shoot where a director -- real-life Hong Kong director Ann Hui -- fusses over a dummy meant to simulate a corpse drowned in a river. She asks Xiao-kang to enter the fetid, scummy water in the dummy's place, and he reluctantly agrees. Tsai moves from Xiao-kang, who cleans himself off in a shower and has sex with his lady friend, to a middle-aged man in a sauna attempts to solicit a tired young man who rebuffs him. Tsai follows this older man home, where he crosses paths with Xiao-kang, who develops a bizarre ache in his neck that cause him to crash his motorcycle. The older man rushes to his side, and we see that they know each other, and then realize that the man is Xiao-kang's father. Tsai cuts away from them both to a middle-aged woman (Lu Hsiao-ling), an attractive elevator operator who gets off work and heads home, where she sits at her bedroom mirror removing her makeup. Someone knocks at her door, and Xiao-kang enters asking for aspirin. The woman is his mother.

Even when trying to prove a point, I rushed to spare you any intricate, wordy detail, but just look at that pacing. That action takes you almost precisely to the 30-minute mark of a two-hour film, at which point do the nature of the three characters under Tsai's focus become sufficiently grounded and identifiable. By introducing each character separately and slowly working each into the company of the others, Tsai makes ostensibly arbitrary cutaways into expertly paced introductions. Furthermore, this structure, and the imagery already peppered within, outlines the emotions, themes and symbols of the film. The amount of time that it takes the director to establish the three characters as related, not in a cosmic sense but simply a familial one, emphasizes how distant they are from one another. This family is clearly dysfunctional, but not in the way that American films usually exploit for laughs at the expense of those who have it worse than "us," whomever that may be. No, this trio is practically inert: the son speaks to the parents occasionally, but the parents do not communicate with each other at all. The one time the father calls the mother, he gets her answering machine.

From their disaffected lives, Tsai charts three main concerns: the lack of communication in the modern world, the existential doubt that modern world imparts upon its residents, and the physical manifestation -- in body and environment -- of that spiritual corruption. The way that Hui and her crew debate the obvious falsity of the dummy, proposing futile solutions of smearing mud on it and weighing the feet down with rocks for more realistic effect, serves as a microcosm for Tsai's own preoccupations with human movement and behavior. His characters are apathetic and anomic; that the on-screen director would turn to someone like Xiao-kang, who often stands as motionless as an inanimate object and doesn't even register that Hui is speaking to him until she loudly repeats herself, makes perfect sense. He might as well be a wooden doll.

Tsai tracks the characters' listlessness with a detachment of his own: he only places the actors in shots from the medium range and beyond. Yet he still captures their eyes, the disturbingly similar looks of mall patrons gazing at tawdry attention-getters in shop windows that suggest just enough "class" to warrant their special placement, people absent-mindedly watching television, even the older men who wander the Taiwanese saunas doing some window-shopping of their own as they search each room for willing, nubile flesh. The same glazed look clouds everyone's eyes, blinding them to the rest of the world.

Only when people engage in sex do they even seem to notice anyone else, yet Tsai undercuts any potential gratification the numerous sex acts might give the characters -- or audience -- with his lighting. The director obscures the copulating bodies in shadow, allowing only one small beam of faint light in nearly all of the scenes depicting sex; only when pornography is shown does any sort of sex appear in full light, but it is either scrambled or, as when the mother watches it with her smut-dealing lover, made a tiny blip in the background or in a reflection. We see only Xiao's back and his lady friend's hand as they wordlessly, almost statically, exhale and shift; the young man who first turns down the father is almost completely covered in shadow save for his stomach down to his calves, an area that is itself covered up by a towel. Rather than portraying sex as dirty -- though the pitch-black, deeply unsettling saunas are the most recurring of sexual images, he does not differentiate between these seedy, literally steamy hookups and those of the heterosexual ilk -- or shadowing as a precautionary method against censors, Tsai's lighting suggests the anonymity and detachment in even the most physically intimate of acts. Sex does not serve to dull their pain because pain is a sensation and thus not felt at all.

Which is what makes the strange nature of Xiao-kang's ailment all the more striking. Visits to doctors, chiropractors, acupuncturists, even faith healers do nothing to ease Xiao-kang's pain. Indeed, his neck ache only becomes more excruciating, to the point that he suffers a breakdown about halfway through the film in which he frantic hits himself and cries for death to end this suffering. His predicament comes to resemble Carol's strange, incurable affliction in Safe; it doesn't make a great deal of sense that scummy water, dangerous as it may be, would cause the sort of ache that plagues the boy, and perhaps its development is as psychological as it is physical. With his ever-titled neck, Taipei becomes even more of an alienating oddity, not only cold in its modernity but canted as if in a fun house, an alteration both comedic and -- like any good fun house -- more than a bit terrifying. Tsai teases the audience with the possibility of Xiao-kang's sickness bridging the broken family, but the despair simply runs too deeply. When the poor kid suffers his mental collapse, his mother rushes to his side, only to chastise him for his agony; "Haven't I done enough pampering?" she cries, focusing the attention back onto herself, while the father keeps his distance, looking perplexed and uncomfortable as if merely struggling with a tight suit. At times, the director employs abysmally dark comedy upon this family that links their collective disengagement with their individual, sexual indifference: in one scene, the mother sits in her bedroom alone and puts on a porno tape with a look of arousal mixed with frustration. She just sits there watching it as if something's missing for her to get off, and Tsai then cuts to Xiao-kang massaging his neck with a vibrating rod that his mother gave to him. When the boy hops on his motorcycle to meet with the first doctor, his father will not allow him to ride with his twisted neck, so he sits on the back of the cycle and holds his son's head straight. It's likely the closest and most intimate moment they've shared in years, only to form a sharp contrast to a later, horrific event between the two in a sauna.

Like a similarly styled film from the same year, Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, The River occasionally loosens its grip too much and allows an otherwise gently wafting film to stagnate. But Tsai Ming-liang displays an extraordinary ability to place his narrative, themes and symbols completely out in the open while structuring them in such a way that the finished product always manages to slip just out of reach. The prominent imagery of The River is, as you may have guessed, water, the symbol of life. Yet here it is a destructive force, ostensibly causing Xiao-kang's illness, fogging the hellish world of the saunas in the form of steam and leaking through a roof in the father's bedroom until neglect and delayed repair cause a full flooding of the family's apartment. Water indeed represents life, and if the first shot of it in the film is a disgustingly contaminated river, what does that suggest about life in the modern age? By the end of the film, Xiao-kang learns to live with his pain, to cease searching for a cure and to accept his condition as just something to work around rather than confront. He learned this lesson near the start of the film, when he showered after his stunt work and found that the stench of the river, of life, cannot be washed away lest one scrubs to the bone. So, he perpetuates the cycle of disenfranchisement and displacement that consumed his parents, and it may be only his crippling pain that gives him any sense of self in this world. Sleep tight, kids.