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.

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.