The Wayward Cloud (2005)

A Tsai film is a Tsai film. You know what you're going to get, for the most part. I personally love his work, find it very beautiful and often moving. As similar as this might be to his earlier movies (though it's a sequel to What Time Is It There?, it more frequently brings The Hole to mind), this is his most daring production. Of all things, it sexualizes watermelons. I won't go too much into that stuff. Tsai does it mostly for the images that it brings him, with which I'm fine. The story has Lee Kang-sheng (that guy who's in all of Tsai's films), now working as a porn star (as seen in the short film The Skyway Is Gone), and Chen Shiang-chyi, back from Paris, meeting up once again. They met briefly in What Time Is It There?, but separated abruptly, only to find desperate and painfully meaningless connections to other lovers in the film's erotic tripartite climax (the third prong, if you remember, being Lee's mother). I think what makes The Wayward Cloud particularly wonderful is that, alone among Tsai's films, two people actually find each other and connect, in the middle of the film (unlike, say, The Hole, where the connection is made only at the very end of the picture). The loneliness that is Tsai's signature is gloriously broken. In sequences of intense joy and eroticism, Lee and Chen fall in love, and it's real. It's as tactile as anything in the world of cinema. One particularly memorable sequence Lee climbs under Chen's dinner table and plays around with her feet (the film is heaven for foot fetishists). Another has Chen lustily attack Lee among racks of porno DVDs. The best sequence in the film is the one in which the two meet again for the first time. Up until that sequence, the movie never announces itself as connected to What Time Is It There? Lee has starred in all of Tsai's movies, and Chen has appeared in other Tsai movies, as well. As far as we know, they're just the same actors as before. It takes nearly a third of the film before they meet up, and the scene develops in Tsai's signature, glacial pace. Chen finds him sleeping on a swing in the park. She steals some of his water, but catches a glimpse of his face before she runs off. She slowly approaches the swing (one of those large, two-seat dealies) and quietly sits on the opposite side. For a long time, there is silence as she sits and stares, possibly napping herself. Lee slowly wakes up, looks over at her and sits up, staring. Soon, a tiny grin appears over his face. She simply says, "Still selling watches?" I mean, no other director would have the finesse to pull that off as beautifully as Tsai. It was the palpable love that hooked me to The Wayward Cloud. Of course, that love is contrasted harshly with Lee's work, which is filmed in a way that makes it feel cheap and mechanical. Well, basically, it's filmed like real porn in that way, except even worse because it's pulled back to reveal the camera, the lights and the guy who constantly pours water all over the woman. Of course, the conflict in the film is what will happen when Chen finds out what Lee has been doing for a living. And then there's this final sequence where, well, yeah. I don't want to describe it. I'll admit, it's hard to defend. Maybe impossible. Definitely exploitative. However, I will say that the strength of the emotions the film made me feel earlier, I did find the climax of the film to be quite emotionally devastating. And I didn't even mention that it's a musical, a la The Hole. Actually, the musical elements aren't quite as strong as they were in The Hole, although there are a couple of absolutely exquisite numbers (like the previous film, lip-synced). I can't pretend the film doesn't have its share of flaws. I will, however, happily declare it to be a masterpiece, of the flawed but still tremendous variety.

Tsai is back with his alter ego, the pretty-boy punk, Lee Kang-sheng, who this time has stopped selling watches and become a small time porn actor (I guess). The girl who wanted him, Chen Shiang-chyi, is back too and this time, they get together in the end (sort of).Avantgardist filmblogger Adam Balz writes," The Wayward Cloud, a film by Tsai Ming-liang, is a profound glimpse into the sheltered world of pornography." Actually, Tsai can't really be trying to represent pornography accurately. His "pornography" shooting scenes are monotonous rabbit-style hump jobs by Lee Kang-sheng with real Japanese porn actress Sumomo Yazakura. The whole film is very impressionistic and surreal. The "world of pornography" is "represented" by nothing but lengthy shots of the boy, the girl, a cameraman and a light man, none of whom talk.Balz admiringly continues with a question that without him we might not have thought of asking: "Who else would open a movie with a lengthy shot of an empty parking ramp, only to shift to a woman clad in a nurse's uniform lying on a bed with a half-watermelon placed over her genitalia? That style of unabashed risk-taking is something we'll never find in mainstream Hollywood, not for a long time." Mainstream Hollywood will not be jealous of the accomplishment of a lengthy shot of an empty parking ramp. The lady with the watermelon is hardly a breakthrough either. Unabashed risk-taking? Tsai is simply setting a mood, or more accurately declaring that this is a Tsai film. But this beginning really might be the work of any pretentious film school student.What is arresting and way beyond film school are the lip-synced musical sequences of a chorus of women brandishing pink umbrellas and Lee Kang-sheng gyrating jauntily and gamely (the actor is nothing if not game) in a yellow raincoat, and he in a public men's room costumed as a giant penis with the women's chorus this time wearing orange cones jutting from their breasts and singing a song which can be interpreted as referring to lost erections. These sequences are a mixture of the comical and the purely bizarre that is truly jaw-dropping and might be very effective if incorporated into a satirical story, but Tsai was never made to work this way. His method is to hint and suggest. These sequences are simply interludes that liven up a depressing set of other scenes about lost people in a big apartment building in a city that's so low on water in summertime that people are requested to switch to watermelon juice. Yes, the girl is the one who met the boy when he was selling watches. In fact very early on she actually asks him, after a long mute sequence where they just stare at each other wordlessly, "Do you still sell watches?" He gives her a look as if to say, "You must be kidding!" What he's doing of course is acting in porno movies. Or he's supposed to be. As I said, his rabbit-style hump jobs are unlikely to be usable in even the most rudimentary kind of real porno movie; it's just a sketched-in way of saying, "This guy is a porn actor now." But what else is there? A final scene in which the porn actress is found by the girl in the elevator naked and seemingly passed out. Shiang-chyi drags her back to her apartment. It's a slow process, I can tell you. Eventually the porn filmmakers find her again, and decide that despite her apparently being unconscious or dead, she'll do to shoot another scene. So they drag Ms.Yazakura down to the other end of the hallway. That's a long process too. It was more fun sitting in the kitchen staring at nothing in What Time Is It There? or watching people watch a movie in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. If this film is so "audacious," why is it so often boring? The following sequence, which caused observers to walk out of the festival theater in sophisticated Berlin, and wherein the boy humps the corpse, or unconscious woman, while shot by the maniacal but wholly unsubtle filmmakers, watched by the girl through a large keyhole window right over the bed, till the boy has a big orgasm and gives it to the girl on the face, ends the movie.Balz begins, "In the first chapter of his 1979 book Seduction, French semiologist Jean Baudrillard discerned the spheres of sex in relation to pornography: "Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude." I guess that makes this a cool movie, for him. I'm afraid I found it a tremendous disappointment. The River was pretty and haunting in its desolate urban melancholy, and What Time Is It There? is a delicate depiction of loneliness and separation that playfully alludes to Truffaut. Tsai is playing around in Wayward Cloud in another sort of way, but it's one that this time comes dangerously close to complete solipsism. Rent a real musical or a real porno film, you'll be better off. Note: the French title of this film is "The Taste of Watermelon." But that's another story

This comment is not coming from a film buff, but rather from a college-age girl who likes to watch weird stuff on a big screen. So I've seen my fair share of "original" movies, and this one was quite possibly the most original of them. A lot of other comments have given meaning to the film; I'm glad, because I walked out of the theater desperately in need of meaning to justify the scenes that I watched (both in their violence and in their confusion). If anything, I'll say that the film had value in creating ideas that wouldn't have come to anyone's mind otherwise. It's also fascinating in the sense that, although it shows porn, it's decidedly not porn, and the distinction is one that I wouldn't have pondered on my own. As for a final meaning, I'd say that it's one of those films that's either completely brilliant or completely ridiculous - either way, it's not coming to me. But maybe it's better that way... Anyway, brilliance aside, get ready to cover your eyes during the last scene...

This is a movie about pornography, romantic love, isolation and watermelons. In some unspecified city, a man and a woman fall in love. She does not know it, but he is a porn actor. There is a drought going on, and people are using watermelons for water, and some other, sexier, activities.It is sad and hilarious. It is slow, and then there are some weird and funny music videos I cannot quite understand, but worth very much the while. There are images that are worthy enough to be photography as art, just turn them into posters. It does feel dreamy, whether you find it gloomy or absurdly ridiculous, or both. And the last scene will stay with you, even if you laugh.