The wayward critics
Aug. 9th, 2007 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSometimes I'll see a couple of films by a director and find them interesting, even intriguing, but not really click onto his style, his voice. I won't even remember his name. Then suddenly I'll see a third film and it'll all fall into place. I'll decide he's one of the greats. I'll seek out his other work. I'll endorse him on Click Opera.
It happened last night when I watched Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's film The Wayward Cloud. Here's the French trailer (it was partly financed by the French) and further down you can find a YouTube clip of one of the dance numbers, in which a giant penis is bullied by a red bucket-hatted chorus line in a public lavatory.
I found the film amazingly bold, visually striking, and appealingly schizoid and irresponsible. Rather than a film with a plot and characters, Wayward Cloud is a sort of ultra-alienated romantic comedy set in a world of scummy porn production and projected into a sci-fi Taiwan suffering from drought and a watermelon glut. Its look and feel -- and the fact that it dispenses almost entirely with dialogue and plot -- made me think of early Wong Kar-Wai films. Before he blanded out, that is, "filmed frocks" and fell out with Chris Doyle -- whose shabby apartments, low angles and wide shots are echoed and bettered in the Taiwanese film. The incongruous musical numbers reminded me of Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark -- but without the annoyingly manipulative melodrama they bisect.
At the Edinburgh Festival in 1998 I saw my first Tsai Ming-Liang film, and raved on my website about "The Hole, a great film from Taiwan about a man who spies on the woman in the apartment downstairs when the plumber drills a hole in his floor. It's raining heavily throughout the film, and the man puts first just his eye to the hole, but then later sticks his arm and his leg through, and eventually widens it and pulls the woman out. They both catch a virus which turns people into insects, making them scuttle under sacks of rice and avoid the light, so I suppose it was a tragedy."
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After that -- in New York -- I saw What Time Is It There?, which I was less impressed by. Perhaps it was too dark and slow. But Wayward Cloud has really won me over. It simply felt very daring and very fresh. I loved how the characters didn't speak, but communicated through choreographies either of affectless sex or languid apathy. It made me feel as if... well, as if the art film tradition is alive and well in Asia, even if proper auteurist directors in Europe are dropping like flies.
In an interview with Yale University's Wake magazine, TML makes it very clear that he's opposed to Hollywood and formulaic genre films:
"I was determined to detach myself from commercial filmmaking. I think it's important for us to realize where our values lie, only if you understand your own work very clearly can you understand where you are... I'm trying very hard to combat [the mainstream], otherwise we will only have Hollywood and McDonald's in this world. Otherwise we'd only have genre films; film would only be one thing."
Hollywood feels the same way about TML; its Bible, Variety, recommends Wayward Cloud to "gay auds in search of campy exotica... there's not much of a silver lining for anyone else in this painfully jokey paean to social alienation and frantic masturbation, jazzed up with a handful of musical numbers. Largely ditching his moody, ultra-contemplative style in favor of shock sexual content, pic spins a slight story between a young porno actor and neurotic museum attendant into an initially entertaining but finally tiresome hymn to self-absorption and misogyny."
"This is the least American film imagineable," I thought as I watched Wayward Cloud. I wondered how US critics would find ways to dismiss it; "misogyny" seems to be the preferred method, though when that's coupled with "campy" it's clearly code for "too gay". Is the film against women? I don't get that impression at all. Is it informed by homo-vision? Maybe. TML is probably gay ("openly", says his Wikipedia entry). Certainly the hetero sex is made to look foolish and futile, and TML tells Wake "I want to express the failure of erotic desire to be realized in contemporary urban space". I suspect that the Variety critic is attempting to pass off his own dislike of women and gay people as, somehow, progressive; something of an Anglo vice, that.
But although the film -- heavily decorated, like all TML films, with gongs at the Venice and Berlin film festivals -- remains unreleased on the commercial circuit in the US, some Americans appreciated it. The Brooklyn Rail, for instance, wrote an intelligent appreciation. Just across the East River, though, the Village Voice was disgusted: "Wayward Cloud fails as allegory, human story, anti-porn screed, postmodern musical, and even formal delight... Tsai's emptied-out aesthetic has never felt so empty, his mannerisms so pointlessly mannered".
Britain was only marginally less hostile. "This is a striking film in which the director demonstrates great technical accomplishment, but it is disconcerting to see him abandon the gentleness and charm of his previous films for the cul-de-sac of hardcore porn, to which the movie's attitude seems, in any case, affectless and blank. It may be nothing more than a virtuoso exercise in provocation and style," said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.
Britain's DVD Times was even more disparaging: "Tsai Ming-Liang will surely continue to make his little experimental films about the human condition and all that jazz. If he feels that melons really are the only way he can express things without actually saying it then great. There’s no denying that he has a great visual eye and strong sense of composition and colour, it just seems a shame to waste that in favour of more pretentious oversights that only make the film buckle under its own pressure. Yet I find myself frustrated in the end because a part of me actually liked what I saw; I chuckled along with some of the gags, I loved its visual display and the main characters were very likeable. If it had just taken a different route instead of poncing about then I may have had a whole lot more nice things to say about it."
Ah, poncing about! Right you are, guv! (No wonder Britain has fewer and fewer art screens and almost no subtitled films on network TV any more. It's all "poncing about", innit? Channel fogbound, world isolated.)
But a director's true worth is often measured by his influence on younger filmmakers rather than on critics. "You know, I bet Joji Koyama really loves Tsai's films," I remarked to Hisae as the closing titles rolled. "Actually," she said, "we watched a DVD of his the day before we started shooting From Nose To Mouth."
It happened last night when I watched Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's film The Wayward Cloud. Here's the French trailer (it was partly financed by the French) and further down you can find a YouTube clip of one of the dance numbers, in which a giant penis is bullied by a red bucket-hatted chorus line in a public lavatory.I found the film amazingly bold, visually striking, and appealingly schizoid and irresponsible. Rather than a film with a plot and characters, Wayward Cloud is a sort of ultra-alienated romantic comedy set in a world of scummy porn production and projected into a sci-fi Taiwan suffering from drought and a watermelon glut. Its look and feel -- and the fact that it dispenses almost entirely with dialogue and plot -- made me think of early Wong Kar-Wai films. Before he blanded out, that is, "filmed frocks" and fell out with Chris Doyle -- whose shabby apartments, low angles and wide shots are echoed and bettered in the Taiwanese film. The incongruous musical numbers reminded me of Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark -- but without the annoyingly manipulative melodrama they bisect.
At the Edinburgh Festival in 1998 I saw my first Tsai Ming-Liang film, and raved on my website about "The Hole, a great film from Taiwan about a man who spies on the woman in the apartment downstairs when the plumber drills a hole in his floor. It's raining heavily throughout the film, and the man puts first just his eye to the hole, but then later sticks his arm and his leg through, and eventually widens it and pulls the woman out. They both catch a virus which turns people into insects, making them scuttle under sacks of rice and avoid the light, so I suppose it was a tragedy."
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After that -- in New York -- I saw What Time Is It There?, which I was less impressed by. Perhaps it was too dark and slow. But Wayward Cloud has really won me over. It simply felt very daring and very fresh. I loved how the characters didn't speak, but communicated through choreographies either of affectless sex or languid apathy. It made me feel as if... well, as if the art film tradition is alive and well in Asia, even if proper auteurist directors in Europe are dropping like flies.
In an interview with Yale University's Wake magazine, TML makes it very clear that he's opposed to Hollywood and formulaic genre films:
"I was determined to detach myself from commercial filmmaking. I think it's important for us to realize where our values lie, only if you understand your own work very clearly can you understand where you are... I'm trying very hard to combat [the mainstream], otherwise we will only have Hollywood and McDonald's in this world. Otherwise we'd only have genre films; film would only be one thing."
Hollywood feels the same way about TML; its Bible, Variety, recommends Wayward Cloud to "gay auds in search of campy exotica... there's not much of a silver lining for anyone else in this painfully jokey paean to social alienation and frantic masturbation, jazzed up with a handful of musical numbers. Largely ditching his moody, ultra-contemplative style in favor of shock sexual content, pic spins a slight story between a young porno actor and neurotic museum attendant into an initially entertaining but finally tiresome hymn to self-absorption and misogyny."
"This is the least American film imagineable," I thought as I watched Wayward Cloud. I wondered how US critics would find ways to dismiss it; "misogyny" seems to be the preferred method, though when that's coupled with "campy" it's clearly code for "too gay". Is the film against women? I don't get that impression at all. Is it informed by homo-vision? Maybe. TML is probably gay ("openly", says his Wikipedia entry). Certainly the hetero sex is made to look foolish and futile, and TML tells Wake "I want to express the failure of erotic desire to be realized in contemporary urban space". I suspect that the Variety critic is attempting to pass off his own dislike of women and gay people as, somehow, progressive; something of an Anglo vice, that.
But although the film -- heavily decorated, like all TML films, with gongs at the Venice and Berlin film festivals -- remains unreleased on the commercial circuit in the US, some Americans appreciated it. The Brooklyn Rail, for instance, wrote an intelligent appreciation. Just across the East River, though, the Village Voice was disgusted: "Wayward Cloud fails as allegory, human story, anti-porn screed, postmodern musical, and even formal delight... Tsai's emptied-out aesthetic has never felt so empty, his mannerisms so pointlessly mannered".
Britain was only marginally less hostile. "This is a striking film in which the director demonstrates great technical accomplishment, but it is disconcerting to see him abandon the gentleness and charm of his previous films for the cul-de-sac of hardcore porn, to which the movie's attitude seems, in any case, affectless and blank. It may be nothing more than a virtuoso exercise in provocation and style," said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.
Britain's DVD Times was even more disparaging: "Tsai Ming-Liang will surely continue to make his little experimental films about the human condition and all that jazz. If he feels that melons really are the only way he can express things without actually saying it then great. There’s no denying that he has a great visual eye and strong sense of composition and colour, it just seems a shame to waste that in favour of more pretentious oversights that only make the film buckle under its own pressure. Yet I find myself frustrated in the end because a part of me actually liked what I saw; I chuckled along with some of the gags, I loved its visual display and the main characters were very likeable. If it had just taken a different route instead of poncing about then I may have had a whole lot more nice things to say about it."
Ah, poncing about! Right you are, guv! (No wonder Britain has fewer and fewer art screens and almost no subtitled films on network TV any more. It's all "poncing about", innit? Channel fogbound, world isolated.)
But a director's true worth is often measured by his influence on younger filmmakers rather than on critics. "You know, I bet Joji Koyama really loves Tsai's films," I remarked to Hisae as the closing titles rolled. "Actually," she said, "we watched a DVD of his the day before we started shooting From Nose To Mouth."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 12:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 12:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 12:40 pm (UTC)I'm probably as fascinated by that polarising quality as by the film itself. I feel that great art ought to polarize, though I don't feel that everything that polarizes is great art.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 12:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 02:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 04:40 pm (UTC)What I mean to say is, the film isn't really a strictly Christian allegory. But of course, you know that.
tsai ming liang
Date: 2007-08-09 01:42 pm (UTC)Thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 01:53 pm (UTC)i love him
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 03:09 pm (UTC)As far as wildly imaginative cinema goes, it sounds like Asia's becoming the master. But it's strange - in other media, this style has become passe (American literature, for example ... do we really need -more- WaCky HiJinkS?). Cinema's more naturally conservative (maybe for money considerations), so these types of film are rrrrrrefreshign .
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 04:40 pm (UTC)tsai
Date: 2007-08-09 04:36 pm (UTC)You must see Tsai Ming-liang's "The River", a film a bit less sexually bold, visually, but just as radical structurally. I should add that I'm thrilled that you like his work.
ML
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 05:18 pm (UTC)Also I feel it should be mentioned that Tsai's work would not be what it is without the actors Kang-sheng Lee and Shiang-chyi Chen. They amaze me in every film. Kang-sheng Lee was Tsai's longtime boyfriend (I guess they recently split) and I think he acts very much as a collaborator.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 06:47 pm (UTC)Tsai Ming Liang is an American art house fave, so maybe it's the extreme disillusionment, cynicism and pessimism of Wayward Cloud that took critics off guard? It can't be the inability to connect, since Antonioni and Bergman covered that ground ages ago. It can't be the cold and beautiful cruelty, since Fassbinder and many others have done that ages ago.
My friend who is a massive Ming Liang fan still doesn't know what she thinks about it.
Ming Liang severely degraded the characters from What Time is It There?, and basically remade The Hole in the darkest way possible. The end of The Hole has beautiful transcendence, even though it's false and doesn't "really" happen. The end of Wayward Cloud, on the other hand, has a purely physical release and is utterly violent and sad. He comes through the hole into her world, but there is no sense that they will carry on with a relationship - it is only a brief respite and a nasty one, at that. Also, the musical interludes in The Hole were about longing and dreams, but they're mindless escapism in Wayward Cloud.
I dunno. I loved it. I can't really figure out why most Am critics hated it. (And brief side note: David, from Brooklyn Rail, is a friend, and we agree on the film.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 08:38 pm (UTC)And another (from the Hollywood Reporter) said that the director shouldn't just have shown the final scene, but made some editorial comment on it (condemnation, apparently).
And then there was the critic who said TML needed a producer to keep him in line and force him to make edits, quicken the pace, and so on!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 10:46 pm (UTC)I guess I just don't understand what makes this film different from a dark and beautiful pessimistic film like L'Avventura or In a Year of 13 Moons. Does the porn really make that much of a difference? Are those critics really that puritanical? And the TML guy is just nuts. That's like asking a Die Hard film to be a Tarkovsky.
BTW, it's my favorite new movie since Taste of Tea (and I still haven't seen Funky Forest).
Also: I brought a bunch of friends to see it at my friend's screening house/restaurant and invited two women I'm attracted to. I knew there was hard core but I wasn't expecting what I saw! I turned red a few times. But everyone loved it as much as me (except for one friend) so it worked out. (The Japanese girl and Italian girl loved it and they're the ones I liked. The princess-y American friend didn't like it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 10:59 pm (UTC)And the second comment is another thing about American critics and movies-- they just want a DVD full of extras packed in, and find excuses to give a movie a bad review just because there aren't many extras. I'm not sure they would have sat down and watched the commentary, since a lot of people these days have short attention spans. If there was an "ultra-cool" game on it, they would give it rave reviews.
The third comment:
GOD, I remember being in a film class and that was the whole course basically. I kind of made my own rules, because I'm the director and I make my own choices. I'm doing what I want to do with my movie, and if it's fast paced, so be it. As long as it fits the whole mood of the storyline (or lack thereof), then it's perfectly fine. I really don't get American critics sometimes, it's like they have boring lives and feel the need to take it out on movies. "Oh, my life is boring, here's this movie that I have to criticize. I'm just going to pick every fault in the movie and not consider the positives."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 03:01 am (UTC)Any fan of Tsai Ming Laing automatically has a long attention span, and most of the negative reviews came from critics who were also die hard fans. I don't think extra scenes had anything to do with any of reviews Momus linked to.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 03:08 am (UTC)No, I didn't say there were extra scenes, just that some American critics when reviewing a whole DVD say that they wanted more extras included. I wasn't saying that the critics mentioned wanted that, I was just generalizing the whole American critic population, which was a bad sense of judgment on my part. I just get so worked up about America today that sometimes I just generalize without realizing it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 06:23 am (UTC)Just sayin'.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 06:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-09 07:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 12:04 am (UTC)Why does you thick British voice always sound working class? You need to go back and actually read Brecht!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 06:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 06:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 01:43 am (UTC)Ciao!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 02:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 02:30 am (UTC)You can see our contrast with East Asians when we talk about music genres.
American: "Oh, this is great? What genre is it? It's like...post-punk-electro-dance or something."
East Asian: "This is great! I really like it. I feel happy when I listen to it."
One thing that troubles me about "otaku" culture is that they seem to have very specific demands in their entertainment. This cartoon has to be like this, it has to have this many fanservice bits, it has to be moé, etc."
What do you think? Don't you agree there's this wish-fulfillment, masturbation, desire to have your expectations met in mainstream American and also Japanese otaku culture? What does it mean?
PS WONG KAR-WAI FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!
I MUST TRY THIS DIRECTOR.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 03:48 am (UTC)Hell, why breathe if you don't know where the air came from! Hahaha.
About the otaku culture, it's definitely a picky picky situation.
Justin
PS FAYE WONG FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-10 06:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-12 11:38 pm (UTC)From this quote.
"I was determined to detach myself from commercial filmmaking. I think it's important for us to realize where our values lie, only if you understand your own work very clearly can you understand where you are... I'm trying very hard to combat [the mainstream], otherwise we will only have Hollywood and McDonald's in this world. Otherwise we'd only have genre films; film would only be one thing."
And with the reviews you posted I began to wonder myself - without seeing the movie - if what reviewers dislike about the movie is a lack of creative sincerity? What reviewers said about the movie doesn't seem to stray so far from what the director had to say were specifically his intentions.
- Marc.