What Time is it There?

Headnote

Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2001

Despite the astringent pleasures of his previous films, Tsai Ming-liang's latest, What Time Is It There?, may be his most profound. The central family unit is familiar, last seen in The River (96), his starkest depiction of curdled human relations to date, but this time around the father (Miao Tien) barely gets to smoke a cigarette before suddenly dying. His son, Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng), peddles watches on the streets of Taipei. There he meets a girl, Shiang-Chyi (Chen Shiang-Chyi), who coaxes him into selling her his own dual-time watch, so she can wear it while traveling in Paris. As Hsiao-Kang becomes increasingly estranged from his mother (Lu Yi-Ching), who tries first to tame, then trap, her husband's spirit as if it were an animal, he develops his own partly erotic obsession, compulsively resetting clocks and watches to Paris time. Unfolding across two time zones and summoning the soul of the French New Wave, the story is shot through with subtly rhyming events and images-as if Tsai, always in impressive control of the medium, has relaxed enough to allow viewers what Nabokov called "a shiver of artistic satisfaction."

As the film alternates between scenes in Taipei and Paris, its rhythm is as graceful as Benoit Delhomme's cinematography is glowingly...