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Three films by Tsai Ming-liang

Andrew Heskins — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:30:58 +0000

An introduction to the work of director Tsai Ming-liang, both beautiful and confrontational. We look at I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, The Wayward Cloud and Goodbye Dragon Inn. Just don’t expect a lot of dialogue…

From it’s opening scene, I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone is typically a Tsai Ming-liang film, only more so…

A ghettoblaster plays opera, while a paralysed man can only listen. The camera lingers for an uncomfortable amount of time, Tsai trademark style, forcing you to stare at this poor man. And stare. And stare. And unlike in real life, you can’t turn away. It’s the sort of confrontation with his audience that Tsai seems to enjoy.

There’s a disconnection, a distance between you and his creations that echoes the same disconnection his lead characters often have within their own worlds and lives. Little is ever said. In fact, that again is typically Tsai.

A poetical film, I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone shows us two men, both played by frequent collaborator Lee Kang-Sheng. One the son of a coffee shop owner, completely paralysed and looked after by his beleaguered carer Chyi (Chen Siang Chyi), the other Hsiao-Kang, an immigrant who is beaten and left for dead on the streets.

The implication is that one is dreaming the other. The beaten man is found and nursed back to health by another immigrant, Rawang (Norman Bin Atun) who still returns to the shell of a building he was involved in constructing, despite the work having been long abandoned. Kang soon falls for Chyi, unaware that his own carer Rawang has begun to develop feelings for him.

The directors’ characteristic lack of dialogue -which underlines his own ongoing agenda to compel his audience to ‘watch’ his movies, rather than be told their plotline -finds new meaning in a world where his protagonists are unable to communicate in words to each other. In a fast cut world, Tsai enjoys a leasiurely pace all but unheard of now.

It’s well known that Tsai Ming-liang toned down some of his initial ideas when he cast a Muslim in the role of Rawang, but the resulting fact subjectivity only adds power and tension to that attraction.

With a masterly eye for composition, giving an impression of control both over his cast and their environment, and how he wants his audience to fell. It’s ironic, then, that the most iconic scene in the film, where the butterfly lands on the lead characters shoulder, then flies off again, used a real and quite unpredictable butterfly. (After a long day filming hundreds of live butterflies!) The result is quite the most beautiful scene you might see in cinema this year.

It also features one of the funniest sex scenes you might see , as Chyi and Kang attempt to make out against the smog filled streets of Malaysia, their only vaguely protective surgical masks becoming obvious obstacles to their goal.

But then Tsai seems to find a lot of humour in the act of sex itself, even though he never shies away from candid, controversial and often quite explicit scenes – and The Wayward Cloud is one heck of a good example of that.

With Taiwan in the midst of a water shortage, the public are told to drink watermelon juice. Shiang-Chyi is secretly bottling water from public toilets in plastic bottles. Quite by chance she meets Hsiao-Kang, who she once bought a watch from when he was a street vendor, and a romance – of a sort – blossoms between them.

What she doesn’t realise is that he has quite a successful career now as a porn star, working in an apartment upstairs from her.

Despite its relatively explicit sex scenes, Wayward Cloud is perhaps one of Tsai’s most accessible movies. It’s a great introduction to his work, with the narrative interjected by fun lip synced dance routines to Taiwanese pop songs from the 50s and 60s, their innocent lyrics given new meanings.

Some of the biggest laughs in the movie come from the sex scenes from the porn movies filmed upstairs: from the first scene featuring a watermelon, to a shower scene faked due to the draught with bottled water (and then when they run out, who knows where it came from?), to Japanese porn actress who ‘losing’ a bottle cap.

Yet this tone dramatically changes when Chyi finds the Japanese actress unconscious in a lift, ultimately exposing Kang’s career. Having tried unsuccessfully to wake her, the Adult filmmakers decide they should get ‘back to work’, whether the actress is conscious or not. Their attitude is shown as grotesque, literally treating another human being like a piece of meat.

Tsai film is a eulogy for love in the 21st century, when anything can be bought, but strangely Kang cannot share the same sexual intimacy with Chyi as he does with his on film partners. Are love and sex truly different things, he asks?

Sexual relations also take a twisted form in Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, about the final performance at a cinema frequented by gay cruisers and ghosts. The box office girl pines for the projectionist, once again both leading seemingly solitary existences – a common thread to Tsai’s work.

Against the backdrop of an old wuxia movie – King Hu’s Dragon Inn – the director pays tribute to a dying for communal theatre going, and the sort of films that where once seen there.

There’s more than a slight comparison to be made with fellow Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. Lee may have catapulted himself into the US mainstream with Jane Austin and Marvel comic adaptations (indeed his output was always mainstream, even when dealing with tricky subject matter), but has used this to give hive him greater freedom in his other work, especially his latest film Lust, Caution. But perhaps the nearest similarity is with Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, whose repeating of themes and characters mirror that of Tsai.

Tsai’s work demands much from its audience. He deliberately makes his films sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes confrontational, but often funny and always rewarding. And with the recent season at the BFI Southbank, he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves in the UK.

Lust, Caution: a preview and Q & A with Ang Lee

Andrew Heskins — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:30:57 +0000

A special preview of Ang Lee’s latest film, Lust, Caution, followed by a conversation with the director himself…

After six tragedies it would be nice to make a comedy again, admits Ang Lee. But then perhaps he should stop making such a good job of them?
The prestigious director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm, Eat Drink Man Woman, Ride With the Devil and Brokeback Mountain, which rightfully won best director at the Oscars in 2006 (even if he did lose out on best picture to the contrived Crash) is at The Gate cinema, Notting Hill, London to discuss his latest movie, the superb and controversial Lust, Caution. (What is it with those commas, Mr. Lee?)

But first the audience are treated to a preview showing of the film itself. The film tells of a young student, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) who has come to Hong Kong from China in 1938. Their bourgeois existence seems a world away from the Japanese occupied China she has left behind. Joining a drama society run by a fellow Chinese expatriate, Kuang (Wang Lee-hom) they put on a show to broadcast the fate of their fellows under Japanese rule.

Abandoned by her father, who has left her behind to escape to London, finds her true calling as an actress, able to move audiences by her performances. But Kuang wants the society to take a more active role in the Chinese resistance. He sets them on an ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr Yee (Tony Leung), with Wong as the hook to seduce him away from his bodyguards. She befriends his wife (Joan Chen) and soon becomes a trusted member of the family, with Yee becoming more attracted to her. Until disaster blows fatally their plan apart and Wong flees back to China.

Three years later, Hong Kong has fallen to the Japanese and Wong is in Shanghai. Kuang finds her again, now a member of the real resistance. Asking her to resume her role to ensnare Mr Yee and finish their plan to assassinate him. She must put on the performance of her life. But as Yee falls further for her, is she too falling for him, and if so what must come first – her love or country?

It’s a sumptuous recreation of 40s Hong Kong and China, painstakingly researched and quite believable, that adds substance to Ang Lee’s tale. There’s a deliberate nod to Hitchcock, particularly Notorious, where Cary Grant sets Ingrid Bergman on a course to uncover Nazi spy secrets at any cost, by showing first Ingrid in footage form Intermezzo, and then Cary in Penny Serenade. (He later admits that showing Notorious itself would have been too obvious.)

Tony Leung bringing humanity to a role that so easy could have been devoid of sympathy, with Tang Wei making a serious impression in her first major acting role. And then there are those scenes, the ones everyone has been talking about – the sex. Is it real? Well, it’s not as explicit as you might have thought, but it sure looks realistic.

Lust, Caution sees Ang Lee making a welcome return to his Chinese roots once again to create his most personal, and what could be one of his finest moments. It looks set to be one of the movie highlights for 2008 (it’s released in the UK in January).

(Warning, the following contains spoilers – see the film first!)

As with Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has once again taken a short story as his source material and ‘filled it out’, as he puts it. Eileen Chang’s work was originally just 28 pages, but the process of bringing it to the screen became almost like a detective novel, taking a combination of what she wrote, and what she may have originally intended.

She’d become successful very young, with the majority of her most famous work published before she turned 25. Yet this story caused her no end of problems, she worked and reworked it, publishing it many years later. In conversation after the film, An Lee revealed at first he was quite shocked. The tone is unlike any of her other books, resembling more soft pornography. But it wasn’t just that, it’s the choice her lead makes: a diamond above patriotism? Love even? Not in China, he teases.

He suspects that she her whole career writing about what she knew, and that this story is actually about her self. He found it terrifying as nowhere before or since had he ever read in Chinese literature what women get from sex. (He still doesn’t know, he jokingly adds). Not only is she writing it about that, but pitting it against patriotism, and worse the Japanese war, perhaps the most sensitive in China’s history. How dare she?

In many senses he feels she was having the same problem with the story as him. Indeed, the parallels in this story with her life are plain to see. Her relationship with her quite abusive father, her first marriage to a man who was not only already married, but was also labelled a collaborator with the Japanese, and her a traitor because of her age. He feels she became a very bitter person in the process. That was her motive for making the lead an actress, so that it would not be her.

Similarly in the process of filmmaking, Ang Lee himself assumes the identities of others, and that distance actually allows you to get a lot closer to the truth. He believes she spent an afternoon writing that 28 pages, and 25 years trying to come to terms with it and cover it up. But the way in which she did so he found interesting. In adapting it he found himself trying to trace it back to the truth, really trying to figure out what she had wanted to write, and not be fooled by the brilliant manner in which so.

When adapting the story into a full-length feature, he realised he was making two movies. The first is a melodrama, the melodrama he grew up with in his culture, built around patriotism. There’s a certain innocence, that you’re supposed to sacrifice yourself for your cause. The acting is melodramatic too, all youthful exuberance and innocence, exaggerated. As are the colours, which reflect those used throughout Hong Kong and southern China, lots of red, green and white, and plaster, in that English colonial fashion. It’s a south east Asia sort of tropical look. Lots of sweat.

The second half is more of an old-fashioned film noir like that of the 40s, dark, romantic mysterious, but with very little colour. He realised he needed something between them to make that transition, and that’s when the stabbing scene became necessary.

Lee tells us that the idea first came from James Schamus, who has written or rewritten all of his films to date and also produces his work. We would never do something like that to Eileen Chang’s work, he jokes, it takes an American to do that. Lee refers to it as a ‘bar mitzvah’ scene, a coming of age for the students involved. The character of Wong has just lost her virginity, and now the male characters must become men, so for Ang this became a sort of ritual. And that became reflected in how he filmed it.

The performances from the actors are about much more than what is said. Ang Lee likes to imply the subtext, the real meaning to what the characters are saying, which could be completely contradictory. From Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on, he realised there was much more to a scene than simply getting coaching an actress to cry. There has to be thought behind it to make it moving.

Actors can do vain things, make big gestures that mean nothing, but he wants it to actually mean something. So he tells them what they should be thinking, and changes it to help keep it fresh. For instance, people keep asking him what is Tang Wei thinking when she takes the pill out, he explains. He doesn’t remember. He knows it was take 13, but not what he said. That’s been his process for his last few movies. Fortunately for him, he admits, most of the actors he works with are top notch.

On to the Lust part of the movie, Ang revealed how he kept the crew to a minimum to shoot the sex scenes. There were only four members of the crew and the actors themselves. He acted as continuity, recording, hair, make-up, chores, everything, as well as directing, then it was just the cameraman, assistant cameraman and boom operator. Everyone else was sent out, not just off the set, but out of the shooting stage. In all, those three scenes took 12 days to shoot.

The most difficult to shoot? The Mahjong scenes around the table. The continuity had to be spot on, and the women had to practise and practise for weeks to get it right. It was important to Ang that the actresses showed much more about what was going on than simply the game, hew wanted them to be telling us something about the war outside.

That was in a sense what attracted him most, that the story sees the war from a women’s point of view. You get a lot of information form their chatting, he tries to hint at how much Mrs Yee knows about her husband and his relationship. In some ways, he’s treating it like a war scene itself.

The casting of the Wong Chia Chi role was particularly difficult. Shortly after deciding to proceed with the project he realised no actress could play this part, so held an open call in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In total he interviewed more than 10,000 actresses to get to Tang Wei. But when she walked in, that was it. He admitted he usually decides on a leading cast member in seconds.

Tang was perfect for the role. She belongs to the story, you could believe it happened to her. A lot of people were talented, good looking, even famous, but you just couldn’t believe that this crazy story happened to them. Tang had the same disposition of his parents, classy, rare and very difficult to find in modern China and Hong Kong.

Most of all, she reminded him of himself. He identifies with the character, wants to be the one that goes through the story, and he felt like when she walked in she was the female side of him. Usually the male leads are personifications of their directors, but on this occasion it is female role of Tang Wei that Lee connects with. He admits to being a little confused.

Lust, Caution is easily his most personal film to date. Well, it doesn’t get much more personal than lust. For Ang Lee, his goals are to keep making movies as good as he can. He acknowledges the freedom the success of Brokeback Mountain has given him (and the fact that his friend James is now the head of Focus) but awards aren’t really his ambition. He’d just like to make a comedy again. It was how he started, four very successful comedies in a row. He has two aims, ones which could be combined. One to make a comedy, the other, to make a film that doesn’t mean anything – that would be a very pure form of art for him.
Lust, Caution is released in cinemas around the UK on 4 January 2008

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Three films by Tsai Ming-liang

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Lust, Caution: a preview and Q & A with Ang Lee

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