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What Time Is It There? poster

What Time Is It There?

2001 · Tsai Ming-liang

For a quiet, contemplative night when you're feeling a little lonely and want a film that keeps you company in it rather than cheering you up. A challenge for the restless, a balm for anyone willing to slow down.

What it's about

After his father dies, a Taipei street vendor who sells watches becomes fixated on a young woman who bought one from him before leaving for Paris — and starts compulsively resetting every clock he can reach to Paris time. The film follows him, his grieving mother, and the woman adrift in France, three lonely lives ticking along in time zones that never quite line up.

The experience

Slow, still, and nearly wordless — and then, unexpectedly, very funny, a deadpan comedy of ritual and compulsion where the absurdity circles back around to heartbreak. It asks for patience and repays it with a mood that lingers for days.

Performances

Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai Ming-liang's lifelong on-screen alter ego, does almost everything with stillness — a face that barely moves yet carries whole weather systems of grief and longing.

The craft

Tsai's method is unmistakable: fixed camera, long unbroken takes, almost no dialogue, every frame composed so precisely that a small gesture reads like an event. Its love of cinema is woven right in — the vendor watches a bootleg VHS of a French classic — and its hushed, held images are worth watching without distractions.

Why it matters

A defining work of Taiwan's second great cinematic wave and one of the films that fixed Tsai Ming-liang's reputation as world cinema's poet of urban loneliness.

Reception & legacy: how What Time Is It There? was received, argued over, and remembered →

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