This July we get reacquainted with Tsai Ming-liang, a director long championed and appreciated by this festival and its patrons alike. The Wayward Cloud is the latest from the great Taiwanese filmmaker, and might just be his boldest and most challenging work to date. MUBARAK ALI finds out.


(Warning: contains possible spoilers)

SOMEWHERE in the middle of Tsai Ming-liang's second feature, Vive l'amour, Lee Kang-sheng, the recurring leading man in all his films so far, caresses and kisses a watermelon in an empty Taipei apartment, which he has stealthily acquired access to. Later, he will try on the clothes of the woman who actually lives there, dance, strip, and act all crazy. The camera observes him in these seemingly mundane moments when he's by himself, being himself, and this has become one of the most distinctive characteristics of a Tsai Ming-liang film. There is also the Keaton- and Tati-influenced perfectly-timed, impassive humour which builds up slowly as situations are constructed out of nothingness in extended static takes, there is the Antonioni-esque ineffable longing, isolation, and disturbed communication associated with an increasingly distant modern (and at times, apocalyptic) world that is almost always confined to Taipei. There is the Buddhist calmness to the camera's gaze, the obsessive fascination with water (a flooded apartment in Rebels of the Neon God; non-stop rain in nearly all of his subsequent films), the near-metaphysical sadness of his space that is embodied by ghosts (last seen in his most rigorous film to date, Goodbye, Dragon Inn), then of course, there are the long, familiar corridors. Sometimes there is even hope (as in the ending of Rebels of the Neon God, when doors are left open, or the sublime final shot of The Hole when two lonely people are united through a hole in an apartment ceiling/floor), but most of the time his vision is obsessively pessimistic. His latest film, the near-silent, The Wayward Cloud, continues in these stated realms of expression, but also goes somewhere forbiddingly new and subversive that will possibly even alienate some of his admirers.

Set in a seemingly empty urban apartment complex in modern Taipei, the film traces the reunion of two characters from Tsai's 2001 feature, What Time Is It There?: Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), who is now a porn star, and Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), who has returned from Paris, and manages an adult video library whenever she is not trying to force open her suitcase or filling up her countless water bottles with water she steals from public toilets. The two meet quite by accident in a park, and the film is at its most tender in these early scenes when they're immersed in gentle discovery of each other. Things soon get more complicated when it comes to sex though – Lee refuses to sleep with Shiang-chyi (he keeps his new profession a secret from her) and this causes a gradual and increasingly pronounced sexual distance between them. Meanwhile, Taipei is in the midst of a serious drought (a reversal of the constant rain of his earlier films) and watermelon juice has become a cheaper and recommended alternative to water. The ubiquity of watermelons (surely a symbol for desire if there ever was one) in the film is one of its lighter touches: consider the queasy hilarity of the porn film-shoot of the opening scene, when Lee Kang-sheng licks, fingers and fists a halved, red watermelon that has been placed between the naked thighs of a moaning woman (Japanese porn actress, Sumomo Yozakura).

As in The Hole, the film incorporates campy, bizarre musical numbers (there are five here, all vintage Chinese songs) within the non-action and long stretches of familiar silences. Each is delightful in its own way, and all are loosely connected to the narrative – the first song externalises Lee's loneliness, the second is an infectious number about reunited love, the third is an aging porn star's confession, the fourth is an uproarious Umbrellas of Cherbourg-meets-Sylvia Scarlett cross-dressing insanity, and the hysterical fifth number (featuring Tsai regular, Yang Kwei-mei) could easily be a theme song for anyone single and sexually frustrated. The surreal abandonment of the songs, combined with the absurdist comedy of the porn-shoot scenes (one of which is a wicked micro-reference to Nagisa Oshima's In The Realm of the Senses), makes the eventual tonal shift all the more necessarily jarring. The aforementioned sexual tension between the two leads eventually culminates in the shocking and genuinely emotive final scene when Shiang-chyi discovers Lee raping his unconscious co-star while the camera is rolling. The underlying emotional violence in the scene is what makes it unforgettable, and Tsai's unusual and unnerving use of the close-up at a particular point leaves us nowhere else to look, mercilessly trapping us within the film's aesthetic-slash-emotional release. This ending (perhaps accidentally) recalls the chilling final scene of Nicholas Roeg's Bad Timing, and to an extent, those of more recent films like Twentynine Palms and Irréversible, but Tsai has really been working towards this ending his entire career, especially since he went to similar extremes with his equally bleak masterpiece, The River, which casually freewheeled into an inflammatory defacement of the modern nuclear family. Now, his characters are pushed to the extreme of a disconnected existence, where self-pleasure and pornography are given partiality to any form of romantic encounter or meaningful intimacy.

When the film won three prizes at the Berlin Film Festival this year (including the Alfred Bauer award "for taking the art of film in a new direction"), Tsai swore he would not release the film in his native Taiwan if censors removed a single frame. The film was released uncut, to much confusion and controversy over all the sex. Before disparaging the film however, it must be understood that Tsai's newfound, somewhat explicit presentation of sex stems from his interest in 'bodies' and how they are constantly abused, and his camera mourns for this invisible physical malady. The quasi-apocalyptic elements of his earlier films have been extrapolated and taken into more immediately disturbing territory – ostensibly the end of sexuality-as-we-know-it itself – and while this doesn't particularly make for an uplifting viewing experience, it brings about, quite possibly, a landmark film for one of the most significant filmmakers in the world today.