A Tsai film is a Tsai film. You know what you're going to get, for the most part. I personally love his work, find it very beautiful and often moving. As similar as this might be to his earlier movies (though it's a sequel to What Time Is It There?, it more frequently brings The Hole to mind), this is his most daring production. Of all things, it sexualizes watermelons. I won't go too much into that stuff. Tsai does it mostly for the images that it brings him, with which I'm fine. The story has Lee Kang-sheng (that guy who's in all of Tsai's films), now working as a porn star (as seen in the short film The Skyway Is Gone), and Chen Shiang-chyi, back from Paris, meeting up once again. They met briefly in What Time Is It There?, but separated abruptly, only to find desperate and painfully meaningless connections to other lovers in the film's erotic tripartite climax (the third prong, if you remember, being Lee's mother). I think what makes The Wayward Cloud particularly wonderful is that, alone among Tsai's films, two people actually find each other and connect, in the middle of the film (unlike, say, The Hole, where the connection is made only at the very end of the picture). The loneliness that is Tsai's signature is gloriously broken. In sequences of intense joy and eroticism, Lee and Chen fall in love, and it's real. It's as tactile as anything in the world of cinema. One particularly memorable sequence Lee climbs under Chen's dinner table and plays around with her feet (the film is heaven for foot fetishists). Another has Chen lustily attack Lee among racks of porno DVDs. The best sequence in the film is the one in which the two meet again for the first time. Up until that sequence, the movie never announces itself as connected to What Time Is It There? Lee has starred in all of Tsai's movies, and Chen has appeared in other Tsai movies, as well. As far as we know, they're just the same actors as before. It takes nearly a third of the film before they meet up, and the scene develops in Tsai's signature, glacial pace. Chen finds him sleeping on a swing in the park. She steals some of his water, but catches a glimpse of his face before she runs off. She slowly approaches the swing (one of those large, two-seat dealies) and quietly sits on the opposite side. For a long time, there is silence as she sits and stares, possibly napping herself. Lee slowly wakes up, looks over at her and sits up, staring. Soon, a tiny grin appears over his face. She simply says, "Still selling watches?" I mean, no other director would have the finesse to pull that off as beautifully as Tsai. It was the palpable love that hooked me to The Wayward Cloud. Of course, that love is contrasted harshly with Lee's work, which is filmed in a way that makes it feel cheap and mechanical. Well, basically, it's filmed like real porn in that way, except even worse because it's pulled back to reveal the camera, the lights and the guy who constantly pours water all over the woman. Of course, the conflict in the film is what will happen when Chen finds out what Lee has been doing for a living. And then there's this final sequence where, well, yeah. I don't want to describe it. I'll admit, it's hard to defend. Maybe impossible. Definitely exploitative. However, I will say that the strength of the emotions the film made me feel earlier, I did find the climax of the film to be quite emotionally devastating. And I didn't even mention that it's a musical, a la The Hole. Actually, the musical elements aren't quite as strong as they were in The Hole, although there are a couple of absolutely exquisite numbers (like the previous film, lip-synced). I can't pretend the film doesn't have its share of flaws. I will, however, happily declare it to be a masterpiece, of the flawed but still tremendous variety.
Review of The Wayward Cloud
