Tsai Mingliang=Taiwanese porn?
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
First of all, NO, I wasn’t downloading porn. I was actually looking for information about Taiwanese films, and what search result pops out other than 台湾情色电影拍摄现场记录／组图 (Taiwan sex film production stills). These pictures were given with no explanation in writing whatsoever—and on a health website no less. The funny thing is that more than half of the pictures they show are not really from Taiwanese porns, but are stills from arthouse director Tsai Ming-liang’s ouevre, and although it’s been awhile since we’ve seen his films, we believe that the shots in the article are from The Wayward Cloud, which is the last film in a loose trilogy: What Time Is It There?, The Skywalk is Gone, and ending with The Wayward Cloud. His films have gotten more sexually explicit of late—they’ve always had some weird (e.g. son and father) sex, but in his earlier films it was a bit more oblique, no spread legs pointing at the ceiling business. But things changed when, at the end of Skywalk, we find that Lee Kangsheng’s character, Xiao Kang, no longer peddles watches and has instead gone into the commercial penetration business (the last scene is him “auditioning” for his new job in a very un-Boogie Nights but typically Tsai-style scene). So, make a film about a porn star, and you’d expect people to be gettin’ jiggy widit at some point in the movie. OK. This is sexually explicit arthouse fare, not your average seqing movie. What is the point of such inaccurate and misleading postings, and for a health site no less?
If you’re scratching your head and wondering who Tsai Ming-liang is, put on your thinking cap and read what Darren Hughes has to say on Senses of Cinema.
