What Time Is It There?
2001 · Tsai Ming-liang
A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.
dir. Tsai Ming-liang · 2001
After his father's death, a Taipei watch vendor becomes obsessed with resetting every clock he encounters to Paris time — the city where a young woman who briefly crossed his path has gone. From this fragile premise Tsai Ming-liang, the great solitary of Taiwan's second cinematic wave, composes a film about grief and longing as parallel time zones that never quite synchronize. His method is unmistakable: fixed camera, long unbroken takes, almost no dialogue, and his lifelong on-screen alter ego Lee Kang-sheng, whose stillness carries whole weather systems of feeling. What surprises newcomers is how funny it is — a deadpan comedy of ritual and compulsion, where loneliness expresses itself in behavior so absurd it circles back to heartbreaking. Cinephilia is woven into the fabric: the vendor watches The 400 Blows on bootleg VHS, and Jean-Pierre Léaud himself appears in a Paris cemetery, French New Wave past and Taiwanese present exchanging a glance across forty years. Tsai builds his films from water, clocks, and bodies in empty rooms, and this one distills the obsession most purely. Few filmmakers have made temporal and spatial distance — the sheer ache of elsewhere — so physical.
Lines of influence
- The 400 Blows (1959) — Tsai literally splices the film into his own — Hsiao-kang watches the Léaud VHS — and casts the actual Jean-Pierre Léaud, importing the Antoine Doinel runaway-boy iconography as a diegetic ghost.
- Stolen Kisses (1968) — The aimless-adult Doinel persona that Tsai reactivates by casting the aged Léaud in the Père-Lachaise cemetery encounter, folding a real New Wave body into his frame.
- Late Spring (1949) — The low fixed-height camera and 'pillow-shot' empty rooms held after bodies exit — Tsai's static domestic geometry and vacated interiors descend directly from this.
- L'Eclisse (1962) — Temps morts and the closing montage of depopulated urban architecture; Tsai builds loneliness from held shots of emptied streets and apartments the same way.
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce (1975) — Real-time durational long takes from a frontal fixed camera observing repetitive household ritual — the clock-watching mother's domestic tasks in WTIIT share this observational patience.
- Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) — The 'model' performance — Lee Kang-sheng's flat, undemonstrative, near-affectless acting is a direct extension of Bresson's anti-expressive direction of non-actors.
- A City of Sadness (1989) — Taiwanese New Wave stasis: wide static tableaux with crucial action pushed off-screen or into deep space, the long-take grammar Tsai inherited and stripped further.
- A Brighter Summer Day (1991) — Sibling Taiwanese New Wave method — patient distanced framing of youth alienation rooted in a precisely observed Taipei, sharing the movement's refusal of coverage-style cutting.
- Vive L'Amour (1994) — Same craft system rehearsed: near-wordless Lee Kang-sheng, empty apartments as stages, culminating in the notorious static long-take of unexplained weeping.
- The Hole (1998) — Fixed-camera study of two isolated apartment-dwellers separated by architecture — the vertical/adjacent-space loneliness Tsai reworks into Taipei-vs-Paris separation.
- Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) — Extends WTIIT's cinephilia motif into a dying movie palace, holding long static takes of a near-empty auditorium watching an old film — the projected-image-as-mourning device pushed to feature length.
- Café Lumière (2003) — A parallel homage-film built on trains, temporal displacement and Ozu emulation — sibling exercise in citing a master through static framing and quiet duration.
- Platform (2000) — Contemporary slow-cinema in Chinese: static wide long takes registering temporal drift and modernization, sharing Tsai's distance-and-duration approach to characters dwarfed by space.
- Blissfully Yours (2002) — Durational stillness, minimal dialogue and a bifurcated structure that lets landscape/time absorb narrative — the post-Tsai Asian slow-cinema idiom of the held, unhurried take.
- Sátántangó (1994) — The extended long take promoted to the governing formal unit; a fellow pillar of international slow cinema privileging duration and real time over cutting.
- Colossal Youth (2006) — Fixed-frame durational portraiture of marginal urban figures in emptied rooms — the composed-tableau-as-mourning-space that Tsai's empty-room grammar helped license.
- Stray Dogs (2013) — Late-Tsai pushes the held long take to durational extreme (the minutes-long staring shots) with Lee Kang-sheng again, the logical endpoint of WTIIT's stillness.