The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)

Synopsis

One summer in Taipei, a prolonged drought. The world revolves around a profuse amount of watermelons, consumed for their thirst-quenching function. Amid TV news reports on watermelon juice, female lone-star Shiang-chyi loses the key to her suitcase one evening on a construction site; the next day she retrieves the key and as she struggles to get her suitcase open in her apartment, down the hall pornography star Hsiao-Kang is at work in a shower-scene, having water sprinkled on him and the female co-star from a makeshift shower, a plastic water-bottle whose base is punctured with holes.

Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-Kang have met earlier, also in Taipei, in Tsai's globe-crossing What Time Is It There?, as Hsiao-Kang sells watches on the skywalk and from whom Shiang-chyi buys her watch for Paris. The Wayward Cloud is more than just a continuation of the quiet, open-ended romance--it becomes graphically and aurally loud. There are numerous musical numbers: female dancers clad in phallus-inspired costumes dancing in a bathroom, or Hsiao-Kang dressed as an amphibian wallowing in the waters of the building's water tower, or yet another trio of heavily made-up female entertainers singing about love outdoors, such interludes occur at unexpected moments in the film. These alternate with scenes from the pornography-in-progress, and from Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-Kang's intimate exchanges in a porn-video storage room.

The film climaxes at the site where a (new) porn film is made, Hsiao-Kang working at the female porn star's body and Shiang-chyi observing from outside and masturbating to the scene. Before the point of ejaculation, Hsiao-Kang leaps away from the female porn star's body, turns toward Shiang-chyi and inserts his penis into her mouth. This scene, shot with a still camera, lingers on for fifteen seconds to conclude the film.

Review

To tell the truth, the first time it may not be easy to endure Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud. At first glance, this film's stylistic elements such as costumes, choreography seem so ostentatious, the interjection of musical numbers so random, its conclusion bordering on pornography, that one wonders where the pathos and contemplative nature characteristic of Tsai's films has gone.

So how do we make sense of the wildness, or understand Tsai's intentions? What to make of the film's incoherent narrative, its sexual brazenness, and the occasional lack of subtlety? To place it within the director's oeuvre and compare it to the largely slow-moving, deliberate reflections on what goes on in both the human world (like in What Time Is It There?) and the object world (like Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and has a more melancholic undertone of loss and longing (in both examples above), is only going to show what The Wayward Cloud isn't, but not what it is. Rather, I suggest seeing the film from an intra-film point of view as a piece of cinema and a singular case of creation, focusing less on what Tsai's signature style may be like. It's a Tsai Ming-liang film, but it's also not a Tsai Ming-liang film.

A tale of romance and passion in a world of drought plus musical feats, this film functions immediately as cinema. A world all of its own, an enclosed entity, is created and reproduced on screen and can be anything it wants to be within the premises of the film: "real", evoked by the calm description of a city in drought, the mid-air shots of watermelons floating in a river in Taipei, the still cinematography showing TV reports on watermelons, or "surreal", the music and dance numbers coming grotesquely from another world, or the other way round, depending on the viewer's interpretation.

The film is also conscious of cinema's another function as the platform on which one can play with the concept of time. The storyline independent of the musical elements is rather linear--the drought as introduction, the encounter of Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-Kang, initially innocent, then budding into romance and concluding in the finale of bliss--but with the musical feats which occur at unexpected moments and have almost no coherence with the romance or with the drought, the sense of time is disrupted. Tsai is evidently creatively experimenting with cinema's potential for expressing time in personal, here frivolous, ways. The incoherent narrative is necessarily self-conscious.

The same can be said of the film's explicit depictions of sexual intercourse. The filming of pornography "directed and shot in progress" is a self-reflective device that reduces the immediacy of the sexual act being perceived and renders the viewer less of a voyeur but more an observer of a job getting done. Resorting to humour--water running out of a makeshift shower, a water bottle cap getting stuck in the female porn star's vagina after a love-making scene between the human and the object, the porn director shouting "More passion, more passion!" during filming--Tsai desexualizes the context. The final union between Hsiao-Kang and Shiang-chiyi, penis and mouth, gains meaning not only because it stays out of the pornography-making context, but also because it can be seen as the natural destination of their romance. It's a courageous shot, but the film's take on sexuality is more than just to provoke the viewer and to test his tolerance.

Whether it is real or surreal, all the actors take the film world they live in seriously and deliver convincing performances. As much as one is baffled by the accidental nature of the musical numbers, one can see that the performers do care about the "youth" and "love" they sing about and dance to; Lee Kang-sheng (Hsiao-Kang) and Chen Shiang-chyi (Shiang-chyi) can be both stoic, quite usual of Tsai's character portrayal, and indulgent.

It may be loud, mind-boggling, sometimes long-winded and finally unbelievable--but The Wayward Cloud succeeds as an experimental work with formalistic approaches to perception and time and hugely personal splashes of song and colour. A second watch is urgently recommended.