The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News October 1, 2004

Time in Taipei: Pan film showing

Solitude in an empty room often makes one lose a sense of time. Utter disintegration from the surroundings punctuates the functionality of time. How do we keep up with time? Why do we want to keep up with time? The 2004 Pan Chinese Film Festival presented Tsai Ming- Liang’s What Time Is It There? on Wednesday night, giving one of the many interpretations of time in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.

The story revolves around a watch vendor, Xiao-Kang, whose old father has just passed away. While he is immersed in bitter memories of his father, his mother fantasizes about his father’s return as a spirit. One day, Xiao Kang sells a watch to an anonymous woman who is leaving for Paris the next day. The woman gives him a slice of cake during their last encounter. Xiao Kang gradually grows attached to the woman. Obsessively missing the woman, he starts to set all the clocks in Taipei to Paris time and watches Truffaut’s The 400 Blows to imagine Paris and feel nearer to her.

Although What Time Is It There? is set in Taipei, its sense of time is not built around the hectic and accessible metropolis. The film moves at a slow pace. Time is delayed and prolonged by the characters’ nostalgic fantasies—Xiao Kang sets Taipei time seven hours back to Paris time, being reluctant to live in the present. In addition, his frequent insomnia slows down his sense of time. His mother adjusts dinnertime to 12 a.m. (because the broken clock at home once showed 7 p.m. when it was really 12 a.m.); she believes that her husband will return at that hour. She lives in the time of the dead. The anonymous woman travels to Paris to fly back in time.

What Time Is It There? is like many of Tsai’s other films. He tends to express the characters’ emptiness by depicting them going through the routine and mundane motions of everyday life—eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, excreting. Consequently, the characters are eager to break this emotionally paralyzing cycle through romantic love. However, Xiao Kang, his mother and the anonymous woman are only able to imagine “love” through passersby. The “lovers” never unite. In Tsai’s films, romantic love is tantalizing. It is temporarily giving, and everlastingly unforgiving.

Tsai effectively landscapes the crowded but aloof, lonely and languid emotional terrain of Taipei. There is no music in this film other than the music from The 400 Blows. Tsai employs obscure and stark lighting, limiting the color scheme to a small pallet of dim shades, to convey the bleakness of the film. Characters are often fully or partially submerged in the dark. There are a few blackouts lasting for a few seconds, from which a character will emerge in solid darkness, creating a haunting effect. One character often dominates an unusually long take with a stationary shot, enabling the audience to closely observe the characters through small gestures. The film also cuts away at one point to a clip of Antoine stealing milk in The 400 Blows, again drawing parallels between the two films.

The general feeling towards Tsai is that his films are “slow,” “monotonous” and “boring.” I think that this is exactly what he wants to achieve. Tsai has transcended the literal meanings of these adjectives, transforming them into an honest and dauntless creative expression.

The Pan Chinese Film Festival lasts until Oct. 2. The Festival is showcasing a series of films by major directors from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, followed by a kung fu demonstration by Mr. Tony Yang and a Chinese Musicians performance. Upcoming shows include Johnny To’s Running Out of Time on Friday, Oct. 1, and Wang Xaioshuai’s Beijing Bicycle on Saturday, Oct. 2, both at 8:30 p.m. at West Lecture Hall.
 
 

   

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