More so than even What Time is it There? (Nov. 21), his watershed unrequited romance, Vive L’Amour (Nov. 17) is perhaps Tsai’s most quintessential film in that it relates the three iterations of a ménage a trois through various different indoor and outdoor locations. Ah Jung (Chen Chao-jung) is a borderline alpha male extrovert so he works outdoors selling his wares on a beach towel; Shiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng, a staple of Tsai’s films) is a suicidal introvert, selling funeral urns; and Mei Lin (Yang Kuei-mei) is a realtor, picking up and dropping off property without any lingering sentimental attachment. They converge at an unlet apartment but rarely talk with one another, let alone knowingly inhabit the same room at the same time.
Tsai similarly relates his lovers’ need to possess each other as a slow, intrusive conflation of their respective personal spaces in The Hole (Nov. 21), an elegiac, post-apocalyptic countdown to the Millenium. Set in Taiwan a week before 2000, the film follows Shiao-Kang (Lee again; Shiao-Kang is his name in all of Tsai’s films) and his nameless downstairs neighbor (Yang again) as they try to wait out a mysterious epidemic in their abandoned, water-logged apartment complex.
The Hole is fairly similar to Vive L’Amour save for a vital complication: It features the most alternately ominous and ebullient musical numbers to grace the big screen until Justin Timberlake’s lip-sync of “All These Things That I’ve Done” in Southland Tales. Set entirely in in-between places—stairwells, hallways, the elevator—these numbers in The Hole are the heart of the film, allowing the couple to consummate their perpetually deferred passion outside of their well-furnished caves. Just like the ending, they’re tinged with an uneasy comic hopefulness that defies the film’s inescapable atmosphere of mounting dread.
Tsai’s protagonists are always seeking that elusive “other” place where they might be reunited with their loved ones, only to find that they are never able to meet up. What Time is There? introduces us to Tsai’s ultimate elsewhere: Paris, France. In its final mystifying sequence, Paris becomes a hub of coincidence, a place where it might even be possible for the film’s forlorn lovers to be with one another or even just find happiness. To Tsai, Paris is the city where an old DVD of The 400 Blows seen in Taiwan can conjure up a chance encounter of a now wizened Jean-Pierre Leaud at Pere Lachaise. Leaud’s Antoine Doinel persona is the romantic ideal for Tsai’s waifish dreamers, making his cameo a fitting wink at Truffaut’s influence.
Which brings us to Face, which in many ways plays out like a meta-reflexive admission of Tsai’s mixed feelings at the prospect of making films in his fabled Paris. Set primarily in Pere Lachaise, Tsai gathers together several of his regular collaborators and some of Truffaut’s, including Fanny Ardant, Leaud and Jeanne Moreau, for a series of listless, narrative-free snapshots of the different generations of actors interacting with one another. The film’s melancholic tone suggests that Tsai is both relishing this rare opportunity to gather together so many ghosts of his cinematic past in one spot and dreading its inevitable conclusion. A love letter to and an update of Day for Night, it serves as a showcase of everything that makes Tsai such a vital contemporary auteur.
>Faces of Tsai Ming-Liang
At Asia Society, Nov. 13-21
