[What Time is it There?]
Tsai Ming-liang
Technique:
- Slender and patient narrative made abstract by using very limited dialogue and camera movement.
- Remarkable rendition of a tourist's loneliness as Shiang-chyi, unable to speak any French, wanders alone through a cold Paris' cafes and cemeteries.
Notes from Time Traveller by Jason McBride and Mark Peranson (CinemaScope, December 2001)
- Tsai entwines the narrative threads, interweaving the events in Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang's irregular, yet quotidian, lives, moving towards a denouement that is equally cathartic and enigmatic.
- Opening scene shows Miao Tien sitting, waiting and smoking. But in a sudden cut, Miao's ashes are being transported through a long, dark tunnel.
- We're made to anticipate when someone will actually speak; anticipation of what a rare pan or track will reveal beyond the edge of the frame. But the anticipation burns in the characters as well, who wait, usually in silence, for relief to come in the form of a kiss, a proposition, a voice, a hand, or the return of a deceased loved one. (Hsiao-kang waits, we presume, for Shang-chyi to return, as his mother waits for her husband's reincarnation. Shiang-chyi just waits for someone to talk to.)
- But this anticipation is muted in the film. For most of the film, the anticipation that something will happen is replaced by the mourning for what has occurred.
- Cyclical ending, both literally and metaphorically (the symmetrical shot of the giant wheel, surreally resembling a clock) attests to the influence of Buddhism in Tsai's films: path to reincarnation involves suffering. Perhaps What time is it there ? can be considered a reincarnation of Tsai's oeuvre ?
Notes from Peter Bradshow writing in the The Gaurdian:
- The whole thing has such gentleness, reticence and intelligence...