DAVID LEVINSON files an appreciation of Tsai “Ming-liang's What Time is it There?”.

I MISSED What Time is it There? when it screened at the International Film Festival two years ago – mostly due to lack of familiarity with the director – but was thankfully able to see it a year later on DVD. To date, it stands as the only Tsai Ming-liang that I have seen – yet, common mention suggests that it operates as the fulfilment of a style that has been flourishing across the breadth of his oeuvre.

'Minimalism' is a somewhat apt, but also unstable term that comes to mind: he uses no camera movement, long takes (in fact, I can only recall three or so instances where he cuts within a scene), sparse dialogue, and an emotional stoicism from his troupe of recurring actors. And yet it can hardly account for his heavily saturated visual style – interiors sustained as a balance between tones that seem to have bled off the pages of The National Geographic, while exteriors stray towards a similar urbanised aesthetic, the film alternating between the illusive sheen of Taipei and Paris. And like fellow Taiwanese filmmaker, Edward Yang, Tsai seems to understand how these locations and surfaces and environments can simultaneously be so obviously beautiful, yet achieve a suffocating intensity for those who inhabit him, as most of the characters shift through the frame as if aware that they're being watched, never quite sure how to act.

The film opens which a shot of a middle-aged man standing in a kitchen. Over a period of five or so minutes, he seats himself at a table in the foreground, stands so that he may momentarily make his way towards a room, into which he calls out his son's name, returns to the table, before making his way outside. The juxtaposition of this with the scene that follows is jarring not only in the contrasting mise-en-scene, which shifts from stasis to motion, but the abruptness of the transition from life to death, as a young man consoles a container of ashes upon his lap whilst in a moving car. The young man in question is Hsiao-kang, a watch salesman. His mother, struggling to come to terms with her husband's death, engages in various religious rituals in the hope that he may return, and the obsessive fervour with which these are performed is a perfect encompassment of the way in which the film remains ever poised on the brink between absurdity and heartbreak, the line often indistinguishable. Meanwhile, this compulsive nature spills over into her son, who, upon selling a watch to a woman leaving for Paris, sets out on an excursion to change the time of every clock in Taipei to that of Paris. The film's final thread concerns the young woman's time spent in Paris – largely strung together as a series of moments of disconnect, overshadowed by the threat of losing oneself, of being reduced to an abstract shape within a composition.

As implied by the film's title, the underlying conceit here is Time and the transcendence of Time, towards which each character pushes in the hope of some form of connection, yet collapses in frustration: it's there in the way Hsiao-kang tries to breach the temporal division between Paris and Taipei; in the film's suppression of death (as even a radio announcer tiptoes around the ill-fate of a dog stranded on a highway); or in the relationship between cinema, life and memory, pitting limpid mortality against the throbbing immortality of our screen representations, as Jean-Pierre Léaud appears on a park bench outside a graveyard, while Hsiao-kang consoles himself by watching The 400 Blows. And, finally, it's there in the sexual release into which the final suddenly climaxes, where the hope of connection gradually disintegrates under momentary gratification, hollowly resounding through the empty departures that follow.

Admittedly, it's difficult to know what to make of the film's final moments. There's a clear allusion to the cycle of life and death, as a Ferris wheel gouges the horizon, and perhaps its continual flow stands as our only assuror, within a film that so obstinately refuses closure. And then there's Shiang-Chyi (the young woman) resting alongside a Parisian river, graced by the mysterious appearance of the spirit of Hsiao-kang's father, possibly forging that final life-death connection through the symmetrical bookending of the father and his spirit's appearances. Forget about what I don't know, however. What I do know is that stasis has never been this moving.