"What Time Is It There?"

The humor and the pathos of Tsai's approach is that everything has been reduced to a weird equivalency. Lee's grandest act of time sabotage has no more weight than his calling the operator to find out the time in Paris. Only two brief meetings having taken place between Lee and Shiang-Chyi, the young woman. So why does he do it? To erase one of the arbitrary boundaries between them? As a sign of devotion, like a lover carving initials in a tree trunk? Or just because he doesn't have anything better to do? Each explanation would serve -- and yet each seems finally inadequate.

What distinguishes Tsai from other filmmakers who have dealt with the boredom and emptiness and isolation of contemporary urban life is that while his characters may appear numb, and while his technique -- those long, still, nearly silent takes -- can look indifferent, like a refusal to dramatize (I'd say they are a refusal to dramatize falsely), he never impedes emotion. Like the emotion that wells up in musicals or comedy, the emotion in Tsai's movies -- like Lee's mother confessing how lonely she is to Fatty as he floats, unblinking, in his tank -- is all the more keen because it comes out of a surrounding absurdity. Intercut with the scenes of Lee in Taipei are those of Shiang-Chyi's sojourn in Paris. The irony of the scenes may be that she is no more alone in that city than she was in Taipei (no more alone than Lee, left behind, is), but instead of irony, the scenes radiate with the piercing sadness of a silent heroine's travails. They are the ordinary travails of homesickness (or, in this case, longing for a home that may never have been) and not belonging: wondering how to order in a restaurant; killing time over a cup of coffee; lying awake in a strange hotel listening to the noises from the floor above; not being able to understand train announcements; gazing at an Asian man across a subway platform as if he were a key to something familiar. As we watch Shiang-Chyi, it's as if some magic passage opens between the screen and the audience; her wide eyes and dazed expression bind her to us. The feeling the movie elicits is something like a realization of Lee's unarticulated dream of collapsing time and space -- a way of putting characters and audience alike on the same plane, making us all travelers connected by the desire to connect.

Tsai's method takes some getting used to (this film or "The Hole" are good places to start). The silent, seemingly undifferentiated flow can at first feel flat or even boring. He shares something with directors who allow the audience to respond at their own pace. When you settle into the films, the connections he makes feel magical. (Just as there are unexpected grace notes, pockets of warmth, in the lighting of Benôit Delhomme's photography.) Lee, unable to sleep, huddles in his bedroom watching a video of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (Tsai's favorite movie), looking as lonely as Jean-Pierre Liaud's Antoine Doinel wandering the nighttime streets of Paris. And on a Paris bench, Shiang-Chyi encounters the grown-up Liaud, who offers a momentary bit of human contact (and whose deadpan style is perfectly suited to Tsai). There is certainly magic in Lee Kang-Sheng, who's as handsome as a teen idol. What he does isn't "acting" in any formal sense, but it would take real insensitivity to the subtleties of performance not to see the nuances of feeling in the seemingly fixed expression of his face. (Look at him as he watches Shiang-Chyi walk away from his street corner and you'll see an inexpressible longing, as if his chance for something that will lift him above his routine were receding before his eyes.) If he is Tsai's everyman, he is without the sentimental elevation and implicit condescension that concept usually entails.

It's hard not to keep returning to silent films when you talk about Tsai Ming-Liang, and that is because his is a poetic temperament, and is all the more so because he is operating in a mundane world that would seem to have ruled out the possibility of poetry. To say that "What Time Is It There?" is pure is to make it sound rarefied or austere. Rather, it's enveloping. As in silent comedy, the jokes coalesce unexpectedly out of a transformation of the mundane. And as in silent drama, what wounds us has both gravity and fleeting lightness, like a phrase of music that wafts into the air as it burrows into your heart.

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