On the streets one afternoon, I came across this young man sitting quietly on a motorbike, and I asked him whether he would be interested in auditioning for my TV show. And, true to form, Hsiao Kang actually took a long time to reply. He didn't say a word. He just waited and waited and waited, until finally, he said, "Okay. Here's my telephone number." (...) I realized that his rhythm was a little strange, just a little bit slower than everybody else's. When he interacts with another performer, it's not as if he's not reacting to what they do, but it just takes slightly longer for his reaction to register.[1]

Maybe this slower rhythm of Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai Ming-Liang's favourite actor explains somehow the peculiar structure and speed of the director's films. The films in which the traditional plot loses its meaning and in which the centre of gravity is shifted from the feature-style logic of reasons and results to completely different areas. Tsai doesn't focus on telling stories, he doesn't cumulate impressive situations. He doesn't draw his spectator's hand - he rather throws his audience into a reality, which is spiritual and metaphysical and yet very physical and bodily. Tsai watches reality carefully: in its everyday and trivial form; in long shots we observe his characters eat, wash, rest, wander in the city. But both the trivial aspects of existence and the placement of characters in very specific space (even if it is purposefully made to seem unreal) pushes the actual sense of these films beyond the physical and material. This 'beyond' is the characters' spirituality, their inner world, a complicated image of suppressed emotions.

No spectacularity

My question is: is film really only about storytelling? Couldn't film have other kinds of functions? (...) Of course my films have something like a story. But I direct my attention to daily life and living. In our own lives there's no story, each day is filled with repetition. Movies today feel like in their two hours they have to tell a story so they're filled with indexes and indicators to point to the completion of a story. The audience has gotten used to it. I think film can be more than just that. I believe that the stories of my films can all be told in two sentences. (...) I'm trying to remove the dramatic elements from the story to disguise it. Film and reality are different, but by removing that kind of artificial dramatic element, I believe that I'm bringing them closer.[2]

This is true, the lack of spectacularity - which Tsai believes is typical of everyday life - structures the world presented in his films. Hsiao-kang, his mother and father are usually shown in situations devoid of any momentum, and this style is enhanced by long shots, so characteristic of this director. Motionless but tender observation of characters eating, ironing, walking slowly in the city maze provides basic information about the characters and introduces us into their privacy. But intimacy - even related to sexuality - does not reveal anything unusual, it is not spectacular either. When in the Rebels of the Neon God Ah Tze is masturbating, eavesdropping on a couple making love next door, or when in The River Hsiao-kang's father goes to a Japanese sauna to find a lover, there's nothing sensational or pornographic in these scenes. This is enough to evoke spectators' emotions. Emotions related not to what you are watching, but with what you can read in the characters' experience, what you can learn from observing the characters, an observation undisturbed by any dramatic (or dramatising) intervention.


The Hole, dir. Tsai Ming-Liang

But in Tsai's films there is also hyper-spectacularity present: the trivial realism of everyday life is interrupted by hyper-intervention, by a show. This is what happens in The Hole, where the silent observation of two lonely neighbours getting slowly closer to each other thanks to a hole in his floor/her ceiling is intertwined with musical shows with songs by Grace Chang, Tsai Ming-Liang's favourite singer. In The Wayward Cloud these musically-styled additions become the structuring principle of the entire film. Hyper-spectacular moments do not involve the spectator more in the plot - not at all, the spectators are rather knocked out of the film's rhythm, they find distance in seeing that the realist convention called by Tsai drawing reality and life closer to each other is actually pseudo-realist. Realism draws the audience inside the film world, helping spectators get used to it. But the world shown in Tsai's world keeps us outside somehow, doesn't let us get closer or accustomed to it.