The Wayward Cloud
Directed by Tsai Ming-ling
In Tsai Ming-liang’s porno musical The Wayward Cloud, pop songs express the hermetically-closeted feelings of its three protagonists—a street vendor Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), a young woman Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi) and a porn actress (Lu Yi-ching). The songs are Taiwanese adaptations of American pop (especially Gogi Grant’s “The Westward Wind”) and Tsai stages each production number like an uncensored Busby Berkeley: a dancer wears a penis-shaped cap, a chorus line has red buckets on their heads, others trail spider-web costumes, all while chirping lovelorn sentiments.
These numbers occur in unexpected contrast to the humdrum dailiness that is Tsai’s specialty. He introduces his characters as they wander the gray, dull, bizarrely empty city; sometimes walking past each other without recognition—almost refusing to communicate. This reticence is the exact opposite of what movie musicals are about. Isolation is the explicit subject of Tsai’s first set-piece, a comically lewd sex scene featuring a woman holding a halved watermelon in her crotch and a man licking, poking the fruit, simulating cunnilingus and then ejaculation with a big-finish deposit of juice, pulp and seeds—bukkake-style—on her face. The scene is energetic but unhappy. It might just be a fantasy of impersonal sex that the detached, deluded couple telepathically share.
When Tsai follows this dysfunctional union with musical numbers, it demonstrates a changed perspective on human relations. Today, even the romantic fantasies of typical movie musicals are infected with pessimism. The Wayward Cloud isn’t a deconstructed musical like the great postmodern Pennies from Heaven. Instead, Tsai reconstructs a classical genre to match the desperation of an era that has rejected musicals’ implicit outworn utopianism. For some viewers this depersonalization will make Tsai’s vision seem new, perhaps even radical, rather than simply depressive. But it’s a coherent vision and unafraid of emotional affect. Tsai dramatizes a new approach to anomie. Linking private sexual thoughts is his way of giving shape to a pervasive loneliness. The idea reaches its peak when Hsiao-kang sneaks into a rooftop water tank where he transforms into a sequined amphibian with fins on his back and sings an aria: “And still alone is that half moon.”
Unlike the insipid “Tears and Rain” (sung in English) that became the leitmotif of Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Three Times, the songs in The Wayward Cloud (sung in Mandarin) evidence a Westernized—that is to say, globalized—sensibility. It isn’t sentiment treacle like Three Times, but is a self-conscious musical about dislocation—an, at times ingenious, at times, enervating variation on Tsai’s usual unhappy theme. At least Tsai’s poetic focus is superior to Hou’s formalism. Showing shelves and shelves of VHS and DVD pornography hints at cultural malaise surrounding his enigmatic characters and a shot of a woman’s lost key embedded in newly tarred pavement becomes a poignant, universal detail.
Hou’s formalism is merely that, laying out a space and iconography meant to be expressive—a code of references, visual rhymes, but without the lyricism and sensuousness by which one feels (sees) the hand of a great filmmaker.
Unfortunately, after the heightened emotional quality of Tsai’s musical numbers, he also retreats to distanced long shots and detached framing held so long it drains your involvement. The Wayward Cloud culminates in a marathon copulation scene that unites the three protagonists in desolate joylessness. It cannot be the fault of decadent western pop but of Tsai’s own preference for pseudo-profundity. His anti-musical is, finally, equivalent to joyless sex.
