The Wayward Cloud · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman keeps bottles. Plastic ones, filled, standing in rows along the walls of her apartment like a small congregation waiting to be addressed. Outside, Taipei is rationed. Public broadcasts are telling everyone to eat watermelon instead, the fruit stands are thriving, and a man named Hsiao-kang goes to work on a cheap set where a watermelon has been wedged between his co-star's legs.

Hold that. The whole film is in it.

Deleuze had a name for objects that behave like this watermelon, and it comes from a strange corner of his system. Between images that show us feeling and images that show us action he wedged a third kind: the impulse-image, whose world he called naturalism. Buñuel, Stroheim. A cinema where beneath the social surface there is nothing but appetite, and where an object stops being a prop and becomes a part-object, a fetish: torn out of the world, charged, never satisfied. Tsai's watermelon may be the purest one ever filmed. It is drunk. Carried. Cradled in bed. Cut open, penetrated, finally worn. It never becomes anything else. It is the same fruit in the public-health segment, in the pornography, and in the gore, and the film's flat refusal to grade those uses is what makes it obscene long before anything explicit happens.

The drought does the rest. The apartment block, the stairwell, the pedestrian underpass, the public toilet, the rooftop water tank: Tsai's standing repertoire of voided rooms where action doesn't occur, what Deleuze called any-space-whatever, spaces that have stopped serving as settings. Shut the water off and they show their other face. Deleuze's term is the originary world, a milieu revealed as savage. Tsai has always treated Taipei as a body with plumbing; here he drains it, and what surfaces is thirst as the city's only remaining organizing principle. Naturalism always slopes downward. This one slopes for two hours toward a scene most people who have seen it describe rather than discuss.

Now the other film. Six or so times, without warning, the drought stops and a musical number happens. Hard saturated color, mobile framing, costume, choreography, aquatic tableaux running back through Grace Chang to Busby Berkeley and the Esther Williams swim spectacle. There is no dissolve in. No sound bridge. No shot of a face going soft to tell you whose daydream this is. Tsai simply declines to say. The number arrives, and then the drought resumes.

That isn't sloppiness, and it isn't surrealism either. Deleuze's name for it is the interstice, the irrational cut: an edit that doesn't join two blocks but lays them beside each other across a gap, so the cut stops meaning "because" and starts meaning "and." Classical editing subordinates its images to a whole they both belong to. Here neither block explains the other. In its full form Deleuze called this heautonomy, sound and image each a complete self-standing thing, communicating only over the interval between them. Tsai has scaled it up to two entire films. You do the work of relating them, and nobody tells you when you've got it right.

Watch what happens inside the numbers, because this is the invention and it's crueler than it first looks. Nobody sings. The performers move their lips to Mandarin pop recordings from the fifties and sixties, other people's voices, much of it Grace Chang's. The Hong Kong musical had already made the number detachable: a star mouths a playback vocal in a decorated set while the plot waits. Singin' in the Rain built an entire comedy on the scandal of one woman's voice issuing from another's mouth. Tsai takes that gag and makes it the method. He casts non-singers and reattaches the form to bodies that never sing.

Deleuze would call that a gest: not a gesture expressing a character, but a posture that exposes a relation. What the mouthing exposes is that these people have no voice of their own, and that the only available vocabulary of feeling is rented, forty years old, from a Taiwan that has gone. He also wrote well about the musical, about how in the great numbers movement passes out of the dancer and into the world, the dance absorbing the dancer. It happens here. The world that comes to absorb them is a karaoke screen.

The pornography shoots are the other half of the same operation. Porn's aesthetic is proximity and cut. Tsai refuses both, holding a fixed wide at a distance, and what fills the frame instead is work: the crew standing around, the flat cheap light, the boredom, two bodies laboring. Bazin's case for the long take and deep focus was ultimately a moral one, that keeping the world intact in a single shot preserves its ambiguity and declines to pre-chew the viewer's judgment. Tsai runs that ethic straight into the one genre built on the opposite principle, and it produces not an exposé of pornography but an exposé of employment.

Then the ending. The River had already proved he could stage sexual taboo in a fixed source-lit wide with no reaction shot and no commentary; Vive L'Amour, with its six-minute static take of a woman weeping in an unfinished park, established the rule that duration itself carries the argument. The final sequence holds one situation so far past its dramatic function that the holding becomes the subject. Deleuze's word for those stretches is dead time, where nothing advances and time is simply what's left. His word for the condition is the pure optical situation: an image nobody, inside or outside the frame, can act on. The person stranded in it he called a seer, someone reduced to looking and enduring. Tsai's cinema is made almost entirely of seers. Here he makes one of the audience, and won't hand the shot back.

Whether that is an ethic or an assault is the film's genuinely open question. Berlin gave it three awards and people walked out of the same screenings, and I don't think two decades have settled it.

Something quieter happened to narrative too. Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi arrive already carrying a relationship from What Time Is It There? and The Skywalk Is Gone, and this film flatly declines to restate it. Their history is real narrative information stored outside the movie you are watching. Character as a thing that lives between films rather than inside one.

And against The Hole, its direct parent, the achievement is exact. There the connective architecture was plumbing that wouldn't stop, endless rain and a hole in the floor, with the Grace Chang numbers erupting the same unmarked way. Here Tsai keeps the device and takes the water out. Same pipes, running through the film as a corridor, carrying nothing. What he proved is that the musical number can function as a pure formal block rather than an expression of anyone's interior, and that slow cinema's patience is not inherently gentle: duration can be used as pressure. The traceable line forward runs first through his own work, into the still longer takes of Stray Dogs once he moved to digital and the reel stopped setting the limit.

So watch it again for this. Notice how often the frame stays after the person has walked out of it, the rooms outlasting everybody in them. Notice that the watermelon is never a metaphor, only ever a watermelon doing one more job. And notice the thing the film never says out loud: the only water anywhere in it is in the songs.