The opening scene is of a mother watching her 2 children asleep in bed while brushing her hair. For 4 minutes. She turns her hair (and head) momentarily our way looking very sad, almost depressed.
She sits there in this internal reverie. The children sleep on. Nothing happens. Or rather, that is all that has happened. I’d have been inclined to cut 4 minutes to 1 minute max.
So its going to be one of those films. Where the sense of time uninterrupted is prolonged, with mis en scenes composed as still images without much dramatic purpose, and you sit watching itching for something remotely interesting to happen.
I don’t mind static cameras, and still images, and quiet composed scenes. But I’m not going to sit through 4 minutes of a sad woman brushing her hair. I can see the fast forward button will need to be used in this film, to cut all these too slow, and deliberately deadened blots of time.
I’ve had previous with this Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang before in a film called Vive L’Amour. And he was doing the same boring long takes then.
Here’s another scene that goes on for far too long
We’ve been watching these 2 anonymous people stood there holding their placards selling real estate for the last 2 and a half minutes. Why? What was the point? There’s no context for it. I could just as easily have filmed something similar with my digital camera
He goes back and shows them holding their placards for another 2 minutes. And then a third time for another minute.
And now a guy taking a piss in some tall grass for 40 seconds. And now he’s smoking a fag, and looking as depressed as that mother brushing her hair in the opening scene.
We’ve watched him sadly smoking that fag for the last 2 minutes. And now we switch to seeing where he’s smoking it
Squatted on a scrap of rubbishy wasteland.
I think I might quit this film soon. Its just one interminably long depressing scene after another.
Now I get it. He’s the one in the yellow rainmac holding the placard. No wonder he’s totally pissed off.
He is now tearfully reciting and singing ‘My valiant heart loses hope’ a 12th century poem from the Southern Song dynasty.
While stood there in the rain hung onto that placard. We’ve been watching this pitiful scene for the last 6 minutes. I think he might have been trying to defiantly pep himself up. But it hasn’t worked.
The 2 kids asleep in the opening scene are his kids.
Just about every scene can be watched on fast forward. Its just one long take after one long boring take.
At this point I’ve stopped my running commentary. It would be more of the same as the above. Unvarying repetitions of this alcoholic homeless dad trying to hang on to his 2 stray dog kids.
For the last hour I’m watching this film almost permanently on fast forward. I don’t know why I didn’t just give up.
The final scene of the film is the long take to outlong long takes.
The sad dad and the mother-like woman stand staring intently at an indistinct charcoal mural landscape in a disused ruin of an apartment. We watch them staring for 20 minutes. Well, I don’t. I’m not that daft. I’ve hit fast forward to speed this towards a rapid and – sigh of relief – gloomily inconclusive end.
No more of this Tsai Ming-liang for me. I haven’t got all the time he takes to waste my short life with.
Dir: Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan
3/10
Windows on the World 