I went to watch this film at Zhongshan park in Shanghai last Tuesday. When the lights dimmed, a “documentary” about Tibet came on. As you know, this is the sensitive year for anniversaries in China, and is, in particular, the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Tibet that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama.The documentary was called, quite pointedly, “China’s Tibet, Past and Future”. If you’ve followed this issue at all, none of the information presented in this film are surprising:

*Tibet has always been part of China and the Tibetan rulers have acknowledged Chinese suzerainty since ancient times. Here are pictures and images of various historical documents that prove this point.
*WHy bother decrying the vetting of Tibetan religious leaders by China’s central government? Emperors used to do this, including with the latest Dalai Lama, so what’s the big deal if the CCP inherits this role.
*Tibet was a despotic, feudal system before the Chinese liberated it. It was a cruel theocracy of vast socio-economic inequality. The lamas and their families–the upper strata of the ancien regime–owned everything, including virtually all the arable land and other resources of production. Regular people had next to nothing.
*China liberated Tibet and gave it a good dose of progressive socialist ideology–and things improved greatly.
*Tibetan heritage is fluorishng and the standard of living has steadily improved.

It was clearly and unambiguously agitprop, but 21st. century China style, wrapping the historical narrative of Tibet up in and interweaving it with that of modern China as a whole, including the successful Beijing Olympics and the upcoming World Expo. At fifteen minutes, it was long and tendentious, and made me a bit impatient, since even after it finished, there was yet another long preview (of a regular movie), so that the film we came to watch didn’t start until a good twenty or twenty five minutes after the time stated on the ticket.

*24 City (24城記）*

Jia Zhangke has said, over the years, that he wants to alternate making docs and fiction films, and in this case he has melded the two.There are real people mixed with actors doing recreations–Joan Chen, Lv Liping, Zhao Tao, among others–but while these actors put on some decent performances these interviewees, the film doesn’t end up being more than a series of vignettes. I doubt that Jia intended to put together some systematic history of the place, but there is an unfinished, work-in-progress feel to this movie that tends to work towards its detriment. However, many of the interviews with the real people are better, because you know they are real–so here, again,is a meta-level question–how does the fact that you are watching Joan Chen change your perception of what’s being shown? It’s obvious that no matter how good Chen’s acting chops are, what she is doing is a performance. Most of the time, of course, we accept this–because that’s what makes fictional films possible in the first place–however, in this case, while Chen and the others are fine, they are still a bit actorly–and you wouldn’t really notice that fact unless you had all these more “real” performances to compare them with.

Jia is probably too intelligent not to notice this himself, but it still took me aback when he confronted this head on during the Joan Chen segment, where she says in her youth, at the prime of her beauty, her coworkers at the factory compared her to the actress Joan Chen. A little pomo joke? Maybe, but it made me a bit skittish. I suppose I still relish the suspension of disbelief,and don’t like the feeling of being taken for a ride, even if the ride, for the most part, is an enjoyable one.

That said, there are some moving moments, both from the actors and the real interviewees–enough to remind you that Jia Zhangke is one of the only Chinese filmmakers out there that can convey the gravity of China’s changing. That pathos, that uniquely Chinese pathos that glossier magazines and Western media don’t–or rather, *can’t* pick up on–are captured by Jia’s lens. One can almost forgive the lack of polish for that very reason–Jia, more than other filmmakers is continually creating audiovisual artifacts for us, the rest of the world, Chinese and non-Chinese alike–that will, I believe, stand the test of time,not only for their aesthetic excellence but because they are excellent chronicles of China. They are chronicles of physical reality, of its metamorphosis–but more than that,they are chronicles of the spirit, of what Chinese people call *jingshen*, which can mean anything mental, intellectual, spiritual–and in Jia’s case, it’s the emotional undertow, the things that are not said, that are glossed over and ignored by ideological or mainstream rhetorics that finally, as it were, get their say.

It is this kind of pathos that you don’t normally see among the audiovisual artifacts being produced today: and that’s what makes the contrast with the Tibetan propaganda film so striking. Jia was once an unofficial or underground filmmaker–and he no longer is, and he is, as well as know, no longer a skint and scrappy indie guy. He makes money. He’s got connections. But there’s still something very real, and very heartfelt at the core, and in a world of cinematic
phoniness, there’s something to be said for that stick to your guns type mentality.

To bring it back to Tibet: it is a strange juxtaposition, watching these two films together–we’re so used to seeing just previews before the movie that to see this stylish bit of agitprop is a bit startling: it hearkens back to newsreels of old, a time when the news was delivered on big screens, or when the political just had to intrude everywhere
because the world was in the throes of war or what have you. I feel obliged to mention that when we went, on Tuesday afternoon, even with the half off discount the theater was nearly empty.I highly doubt that Jia is going to make much money off this film, at least on the domestic market. Likewise, watching propaganda in the afternoon with a handful of other people didn’t quite jibe with I am sure that they play the Tibet film before the other, popular movies, so that before you settle down to watching “Transporter 3″ you get a good dose of “historical” education about the Tibet issue. Just in case things get hairy and out of control in Tibetan areas this March, or throughout the rest of this sensitive year.

China changes, or China never changes. Same ideological posture, except now in IMAX. However, Jia’s world, everything changes–and the only thing that lasts, the only thing that binds us are memories.Children are lost to their parents. Migrations, emotional rows, generation gaps all tear families asunder. The ligature of memory is strained as people get older–it seems strong when they are recalling it in front of us–but of course, we know that simply recalling something and saying it verbally doesn’t really do justice to the “strength” or “saturation” of that memory among the many memories that are stored in your brain or the salient memories constitutive of the sense of self and identity. Therefore, you get the uneasy sense that you are watching something that was unearthed quite by accident, and could very well have been lost. Maybe these “little people”, these “laobaixing” don’t mean much in the large scale of things: you read media articles with Chinese government planners, bureaucrats and energy scientists that are talking about the year 2100 like it’s tomorrow. Just about all of us who are alive now will be dead by that time, and our secrets and wounds, the maybes and could have beens–both individual and collective–will be just as gone. I’ve always been afraid that the official Chinese meta-narrative would swamp and subsume everything else–which is why it’s that much more incumbent on artists, in whatever medium, to keep recording the micro-sadnesses, vicissitudes, twists and turns, warp and woof of the individual life and consciousness. Lest it be completely be forgotten by History.

Technorati Tags: tibet, tibetans, dalai lama, china, chinese, ccp, jia zhangke, movies, movie, film, cinema, documentary, joan chen

Fate has it that she runs into James Nichol (Luke McFarlane), the dashing young lad that is sent by his railroad tycoon father to get 2000 coolies to Canada right quick, lest they not able to finish their railroad and thus forfeit everything to their debtors. From there on in you can expect plenty of fortune cookie type moments thrown in, and you can guess who falls in love with who, and you can almost guess if there is a happy ending or not.

The two performances that I enjoyed the most were not by either of the main actors, but by Tony Leung Ka Fai as the bookman with the mysterious scar on his face as well as the venerable Peter O’Toole, who gets to play a drunken, aging old China hand responsible for finding workers for the Nichols. Peter O’Toole’s performance is of note, and not because it’s bad–I think it’d be hard for an actor of his caliber to be awful, but there are some ropey lines in there, especially when O’Toole is speaking Chinese and says some cheesy things like “forgive him, he is but a foreign devil” or just “oh shit”…it’s the kind of role that are easy paychecks for O’Toole John Hurt and the like–a sagging face, a slurred voice, drunken roues, world-weary philosophers, a still posh English accent–its still a joy to watch but there is, truth be told, nothing of real value in a role or performance of that sort. It adds nothing new. It is, literally, just a role.

The story itself, when it moves to Canada, has the normal ups and downs. There are a couple of secrets, a couple of conspirators, an couple of racist baddies, etc. There is also supposed to be this streak of melancholy because of all the Chinese workers that lost their lives in this process–they said 3 for every mile of railroad–and they hit this point home fairly often enough in the movie, when random Chinese workers get tragically killed. There are some bits about the emotional lives of the workers–but for the most part, the story is focused on Little Tiger, the she that is a he, as well as James Nichols, who learns a little something about Chinamen, building railroads, and himself in the process.

On the whole, not too bad, but nothing that you really want to waste your time watching if you have something more pressing to do, or something of real quality to watch.

Like Wong Fei-hung, Fok Yuen-Gep (both played by Jet Li), Ip Man’s general storyline is fairly standard. What makes the film slightly better is that it lacks the wire-fu and melodrama. The whole movie is fairly down-to-earth and generally un-annoying, a virtue in itself. The real star of the film is Wing-Chun style of kung-fu—which is visually quite distinctive, the movements are compact and yet powerful. Instead of heavy left-hooks, you have all four limbs moving together; it’s both fluid and poetic. In fact, it seems that part of the reason why Wing-Chun always beats other types of kung-fu (including karate, and Thai boxing, in some videos seen on the net), is because it lets the opponent make these huge, flailing moves: the roundhouse kicks, etc.— and then takes advantage of the temporary chinks in the armor that these moves expose.

Anyhow, Donnie Yen is a bit more fun to watch than Jet Li, if only because we are too Jet Li-saturated. Yen plays Ip just right. No melodrama, no over-acting. Just the normal amount of emotion you’d expect from someone in his sometimes unenviable position.

Last note: his wife, played by Lynn Hung (Xiong Dailin)—her acting is nothing to write home about. But she is ineffably lovely as the typically virtuous Chinese wife.

It’s not as if this turf hasn’t been covered before, but Winds of September does make a worth successor to this sub-genre. Beautifully shot in some kind of eternal spring/autumn where there is always a gentle breeze and its never too cold to go skinny-dipping.

Winds of September manages to walk the tight rope between slow arthouse film and something more commercial, and while it doesn’t have the blockbuster potential of Cape No. 7, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, or despite the tragedy at the center of the film, get too dark. The film’s most impressive feat is in its pacing and exposition: the deft interweaving of both dramatically light and dark scenes, humor to leaven tension, and no untoward attempts on the audience’s heartstrings. The movie begins with nine undifferentiated characters, and while you have your instantly recognizable stud, nerd, hooligan, fat kid, and pretty girl character types, they do, through each scene, outgrow the cardboard-cutout version of themselves, developing into distinct personalities, with their own thoughts about what the bonds of friendship mean and what responsibilities and obligations they, as friends, have towards each other.

Director Tom Lin has worked as an assistant director for Tsai Ming-liang and Winds is his second feature, part of Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang’s series of three films, all set in different Asian countries, but all telling the same basic story of the vicissitudes of youth and friendship.

Reading the Wikipedia article on Connected makes us laugh: it says that director Benny Chan tried to make the characters more “real and believable” than the Hollywood film Cellular, of which it is a remake.

Though we haven’t seen the original, if Connected is “real and believable” than Star Wars might also be loosely based on a real story. Barbie Hsu (widely known as Big S) plays Grace Wong, a single mother who gets kidnapped, along with her school-age daughter, on account of something her brother did. The baddie is played by Chinese actor Lou Ye, and the hero by Nicholas Koo. The movie unfolds when Grace is able to patch together an old phone in the place where she is being held and make a call to Koo, who must now decide if he ought to save a stranger in distress.

There are some half decent action scenes and good car chases, and the whole thing is not meant to be realistic, but even so, there is just something amateurish in the way the movie was crafted. Nick Cheung’s performance as the good cop that smells something fishy in all these proceedings hits the right notes, but in the end it is only Koo’s performance that manages to (barely) rise above mediocrity.

Technorati Tags: connected, benny chan, loius koo, barbie hsu

I didn’t think especially highly of the film, but there were a couple of things worth mentioning: one is that the modern day love affair between the Taiwanese male and Japanese female protagonists suggests that in the present, Taiwan and Japan can meet as “romantic” equals, that is, they can, in their own circuitous way, fall for each other. In the present day, Japan is gendered as a woman, Taiwan as a man. Both are initially wary of each other, afterwards, its rip each other’s clothes off, head over heels.

In contrast, in the flashback love affair, which happens at the end of the second World War, Taiwan is gendered as a woman, Japan as a man, and it is only the man that speaks of his love of the woman and Taiwan. He cannot take the woman with him: why, exactly, we are not sure. Japan had to relinquish Taiwan and other colonial pretensions. But again, it is only the Japanese man’s voice that we hear. The woman is never fully seen—we get a few brief glimpses of her in the past, as she watches the boat with her Japanese lover leave the harbor, and in the present, we only see her back and weathered/withered hands. We never hear her side of the story, and thus we never understand her pain. I think this is quite interesting–it seems that the Japanese male never mailed the letters, and so the Taiwanese woman never replied–nonetheless, that isn’t exactly a justification for why her voice is absent from the film. It does suggest that people of that generation, and especially those that had “sensitive” relations with the colonizers, have many more secrets than we’ll ever know, things that we of the latter generations may accidentally happen upon, or even consciously uncover, but which will always just be the tip of the iceberg.

On a less highfalutin level, there is also the fact that this film has been the most successful local film in Taiwan for a long, long time, and everyone is trying to figure out why that happened. One of the more thought out articles on this is from Asia Pacific Arts magazine, where writer Brian Hu comes up with a list of seven reasons why he thinks the film was so successful in Taiwan, while debunking some of the pat and what he thinks are incorrect answers. His list begins with 1. Because it appeals to both local and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Hu points out that in this regard, this film can only be understood within the context of the Taiwanese film industry, including among other things the Hou Hsiao-Hsien pioneered Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Hu argues that the appeal of Cape is not in some “realism” a la the Taiwanese New Wave. Verisimilitude and social realism don’t necessarily equate with box office success. Hu’s second point: 2.Because it makes people laugh. Anyhow, there are seven total and the article is a good read.

Hu’s conclusion is quite thoughtful and is worth quoting here in its entirety:

Cape No. 7 got great word of mouth because it got great word of mouth. For a local film — that most despised category of film in Taiwan — to get good buzz was enough for everyone to want to see it to believe it. In that sense, this inflated box office may only be a one-time deal, since the next Cape No. 7 won’t come with that element of surprise. But what the Taiwanese industry doesn’t need are more shocks like Cape No. 7. What it needs are directors interested in making comedies that are funny, romances that are romantic, and melodrama that’s moving. I’m fearful that Cape No. 7 will lead to copycats rather than craft, which is what Cape No. 7 demonstrated most impressively. The industry can’t rely on word-of-mouth to win back the audience. It needs to win back the audience’s trust, not just its attention.

Then Li Mi takes on a fateful fare: two shifty migrants that have something to hide. Many convenient coincidences later, in a plot invovling hostage-taking, extortion, drug mules, mistaken identities, and changed identities, and Li Mi just might be close to finding her missing lover and closing the door on that part of her life.

It is in the nature of these films to rely on coincidences and other deus-ex-machina elements to move the plot forward—it doesn’t matter that they aren’t realistic, because movies aren’t based on probability theory in the first place. However, you sometimes wish that there could be a bit more judgment exercised as to when enough is enough and it’s time for you to sober up and go home. The tangled skein of the plot does get unraveled by the end, but as enjoyable as it is to know (almost) everything that transpired in this movie universe, there in a sense in which presenting all the facts makes the film seem too pat, too clever. It would have been better to leave the audience some unsettling loose-ends to quibble over.

As far as performances go, Zhou Xun, as Li Mi, is obviously the center of the film. She has plenty of good moments and a few maudlin ones, but otherwise manages to carry the film. Variety seems to concur:

Pic is motored by another saturated perf from the remarkable, throaty-voiced Zhou, who’s ably partnered from the halfway mark by Zhang (the lead in the big-budget war drama “Assembly”) as the tough but fair cop. Deng, also from “Assembly,” is fine as the slippery Ma/Fang.

However, there was one performance bothered us a bit, which was that of Wang Baoqiang’s, the young actor that has become quite popular in China for his small but often memorable roles in films, ranging from A World Without Thieves to Li Yang’s Blind Shaft, as well as
the main role in the hit TV series Soldier Sortie. What tends to grate is the fact that he plays similar roles in so many of the movies:the innocent, hapless migrant worker. It was, in his earlier films, somewhat endearing. No matter what side of the law he was on, he was always the victim and the hero—he represented the pure heart of inner China, the migrants who can no longer make (or want to make) a living off the land and are forced to the move to seamy underbelly of Chinese cities, a moral vacuums where dodgy characters operate and manipulate them. Wang’s performance is not bad as it goes, but you wonder whether or not the guy, barely twenty-five years old, has already been typecast.

Final verdict: nothing life-changing, but not a bad yarn. This is a step in the right direction.
We wouldn’t mind seeing a few more Memento-esque films come out of China. Missing
people, mistaken identities, desire, obsession—take these ingredients and give it a dark spin.

In the early 1980s, Fujian became a vital hinge on the open door policy that fostered China’s economic miracle, which brought suburbs, video games, and minvans to the province. At the same time, it lured many Chinese to seek their fortune abroad, and has made Fujian a center for human trafficking, particularly the “golden triangle” of Fuqing, Changle and Pintang. Into this picture step the Neon Knights, the gang of Roppongi, Amerika, and Dragon, who capitalize on the void left by emigre husbands by catching their “remittance widows” with local lovers (sometimes one of their own), and blackmail them. Call it a Chinese version of trickle-down economics. That some knights bear nicknames reflecting their fathers’ destinations adds poignancy to this sad state of affairs.

“Neon Knights” is also the title for the movie’s first half, which focuses on Amerika and his mother, a woman involved in the local church and local trafficking operation. Bonds are already strained between mother and son – the college grad won’t get a job, hangs around bad influences. The plot picks up when he finds out she’s also taken a local lover. Amerika convinces his reluctant friends to videotape and blackmail her mom. It works, but his expressionless face at seeing his mother make the cash drop is telling. There is no victory in this game, and no joy in their decadant lives.

Mom is angry and asks “the Czech”, the local underworld leader and smuggler in Fuqing, to smoke out the extortionists. This development puts a little fright to the little gang and sends them to chill out in Pingtan. Here, for the first time, the young folks seem to enjoy themselves and their youth, riding ATVs on the beach, taking a ferry ride to visit their friend, and having sex with the local girls. One of Fujian Blue’s achievements is its street-level perspective and non-judgmental tone, which allows us to become involved with its characters, and draw us into experiencing their world as they live it, including its moments of elation and wonder.

A couple of such moments come near the end of their merry vacation from petty crime, when Amerika and a friend are visiting Dragon, who is hiding out back home for reasons of his own. On the very old and small ferry, one of them acts out the scene from Titanic where Jack Dawson (a stowaway, incidentally) is flying without wings. Later on that ferry trip, he notices a mass of Taiwanese boats, and wonders why on earth they would be here, off the coast of China. To refuel for their fishing trips, comes the ferryman’s reply. Can ships that small cross the Straits? Even smaller than this one, says the ferryman. You can picture the gears turning in Amerika’s head.

Dragon is the subject of the second half, “At Home, At Sea”. It is set in motion when the gang decides to give him the windfall from Amerika’s mom. We realize why when he returns home to his poor fishing village and family in debt for his older brother’s emigration. Dragon uses part of the illicit cash to help pay off those debts as well as support his mom and sister. The rest of it – let’s just say its fate involves an even younger group of rogues in a scene both hilarious and sad.

In an especially plangent scene, his younger sister declares during a break from school she doesn’t want to head back, but instead wants to go abroad. No, Dragon says, go back to school. They have a fight. Pretty basic stuff, but the following silence is heart-rending. How can he explain how cruel adult life can be? They compromise: she skips school that day, her brother taking her to walk along the breakwater. If the neon wilderness of Fuqing is disappointing, there are no hopes to disappoint in his homely backwater village. The price of his family’s survival may be its ultimate fracture.

Eventually, Dragon decides to go abroad and seek his fortune in the West, perpetuating the cycle of debt and desperation, but also hope and persistence in the face of a two-faced globalization that welcomes the movement of goods and ideas but is cruel to the movement of human beings, all of which it fuels. This persistence may seem absurd, when sometimes emigres leave to pay a “snakehead” for having previously smuggled their relative, or even a prior unsuccessful trip they’d taken themselves. A reference to the human-trafficking tragedy at Morecambe imbues real-life gravity to their plight. But this persistence of dreams is also a persistence of memory, of the fact that Fujianese are everywhere, making up a majority of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the United States. It also reflects the persistence of a buccaneering spirit, reckless but not always self-destructive, which fuels both the crimes and the dreams that feed on each other. Like generations of Fujianese before them, they don’t accept their truncated roles – not in the new China of great expectations.

Several qualities make Fujian Blue a unique standout effort. Weng’s employ of non-professionals punctuates the palpable realism in every scene, whether its the young men teasing the sole woman among them in a gently sexual way, or giving running commentary on the date in their blackmail video. His use of ribald humor also anchors the characters’ authenticity – the Czech tells his card-playing friends that Czech detention wasn’t so bad because they let you watch porn. I also have to give props to the subtitles team, as I’ve never seen Chinese or any other foreign language translated as “beayotches” and “bros before hoes” (sic).

Speaking of the colloquial, yet another unique and daring feature is the liberal use of the Hokkien dialect (Fujian), which is as different from Mandarin as English is from French. Such use is both accurate (reflecting how people really speak) and illuminating (of China’s true polyglot history and sense of regional identity). Indeed, it’s mentioned that two of the gang hail from Hunan and Sichuan (which also signals that in much of China, Fujian is a placed to be envied). Finally, it is also politically and even psychologically daring to suggest that young men in Fujian (the winners of globalization, both in the world and in China) look wistfully at Taiwan. Perhaps it’s not that Fujian itself is envied, but it’s the closest to what is enviable in the world.

Along with some other features, the attitude towards the characters and their lives reminded me a bit of a breakthrough Scottish film called Trainspotting. Like that movie, we have young men and one woman, lives of petty crime and decadence, and sometime exuberance that the audience is invited to share. Even the usage of dialect lends a superficial resemblance. More likely, much of it is coincidental, or rather convergent – they share distinguishing traits of a great narrative, lightness in the face of gravity, specificity in the face of stereotype, and multiplicity in the face of dogma.

The problems they face are ultimately different, too: whereas the struggles of Scottish addicts are self-induced, that of these Fujianese rogues result largely from their legitimate though MTV-fueled dreams and the contrasting reality of their horizons. The Chinese title Jīn Bì Huī Huáng is an idiom literally meaning magnificent looking in green and gold. It is used to describe a building, or to use an English idiom word, a facade. After watching the movie at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I learned that Robin Weng is just 26. I have every hope that he will continue to seek out facades and with his remarkable vision, penetrate them.

Squat – The Moss via kwout

Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough time to devote to this website. I wrote a review that appeared on Batgwa/Squat, which you can read by clicking on the link above.

moss, shawn yu, violence, hong kong, society, police, cops, China, drama, action

Take the betelnut bar on the side of the road, under the apartment where he lives. That proximity–his apartment is right above the betelnut place–is already interesting. Furthermore,the girls in the betelnut place are dressed in fetish costume, and sit on a raised platform, sliding down a metal pole in order to serve their customers.I don’t know if things like that exist in Gaoxiong (don’t think I’ve seen anything like that in Taipei, but maybe i was in the wrong part of town), but it is just stranger than fiction. This film has that effect–like any “middle earth”, narnia, lord of the rings films, it brings you completely into its world, sans the need for CGI dwarfs, dragons, or alpine scenery. Li creates it out of the physically existing urban fabric of contemporary Taiwan, which I think is much more difficult, artistically, than making another orcs vs. humans for middle earth type film.

There are a couple of scenes and tropes that I think are worth mentioning: one is the call center. The tracking shots that go through these cubicle-infested centers show the people on the opposite side of the line: mostly women, talking to clients from any number of fields. The sense you get from the fact that they are probably outsourced labor is that “this is sad” because they probably have to switch hats so often and politely service all kinds of people with all manner of complaints, and, on a deeper level, that this is a keen observation of contemporary society, especially in the last few years. The work is farmed out, and most of the time we never see the people on the other side. We consider our inconveniences, which lead us to call them in the first place, but don’t really see their lives.The other side of it is what it says about us: the notion that we need to call other people in order to get help for the problems in our lives. Li’s character calls a lifeline because for whatever reason, he’s at the end of the tether and thinking about suicide. There’s another character: a fat woman in in a loveless marriage with a gay man–that is the person on the other line. He communicates with her not only on the phone but also on MSN messenger (very zeitgeisty, indeed). You get the sense that he’s quite dependent on her; he says she is the only person that really cares about him.The other thing that is quite interesting is the portrayal of sex in Li (and Tsai’s) films. Even when the characters are seemingly enjoying sex (and with the number of positions they use, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t), there is something inherently alienating about the sex–and here I mean alienating both to the characters themselves, and also to the viewer of the film. Li reprises his porn-star character in recent Tsai movies; he fucks in the exact same way: there is biological urgency but no real meaning to it, it’s passionate, but at the same time robotic and mechanical.

Part of what makes it strange to the viewer is the style of the film–Tsai and Li style films don’t need require narrative glue to hold them together. Scenes don’t function purely to explain psychology. The narrative can jump wherever it wants to. However, when it jumps to Li and the betelnut girl fucking, you find them in this empty room illuminated by white lights on the walls…it’s a bit trippy and doesn’t seem like a room in his apartment. The viewer immediately frames this sex act as something as occuring in the space of fantasy. There is something surreal about it. It’s not sex that you are going to watch and feel warm and fuzzy about–I would conjecture that it’s very purpose is the alienation effect that it produces.Another point: frustrated sexuality gets displaced onto objects. For Li’s character, it’s his marijuana plants,and for the fat woman, it’s the eels that her chef husband keeps in the bathtub. In the objects he cooks, you see something vaguely penis-like and something vagina-like. The symbolism is quite obvious and takes on a meaning precisely because this couple is, sexually speaking, dysfunctional–he’s actually gay, and rejects her sexual advances; she’s left with no outlet for her sexuality except for the phallus-like eels that squirm and swim around her naked body in the bathtub. She pushes them gently between her legs.

It reminds me of how in a Tsai film (“Wayward Cloud” I believe) you see Li fucking a watermelon…and there is something similar, if memory serves, in “Rebels of Neon God.” Sex and the sex act are displaced onto strange objects…and of course, these become more than props in the film; they become sexualized. But there’s more to it than what frustrate d weirdos to get off when the normal means are not available–I think that it attacks the normative sense of sexuality. Not the point of condoning bestiality, but in the sense of recognizing the sexuality inherent in the quotidian–the animals, fruits, objects that surround us.The actual sex act in this film is always a bit off-kilter. I mentioned the white room, later on there’s an orgy on the roof, and the light that shines on the fornicating three-some is covered in some Louis Vuitton-like purse pattern. One of the girls watches, from the side: and her face is covered with flashing numbers, perhaps from the stock exchange (you see one earlier in the film). The act of being covered or subsumed by fashion, advertising, the stock market is an interesting statement in itself, and begs the question of why the copulators are covered in this particular pattern. Is this some statement about the whole sex/advertising/consumerism nexus?

There is one thing seems clear: in the Tsai/Li world, normative conceptions of love, sexuality, and meaning in the world are damn near impossible. The characters don’t necessarily even bother trying to get back to the normative. They tend to end up a bit worse off than when they started in the movie, but there is no huge and obvious dramatic arc, no easy solutions and resolutions. That miasma of alienation is omnipresent, the anomie is incurable. Everyone is ensconced in a sadness of his/her own making. The fleeting connections that do exist between the characters are the function of their desires and their most basic existential needs. These connections never last, but are just enough to get by on. And that’s the most the people in the Tsai/Li universe can hope for.