When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.

Review from DVDBeaver:
Tsai Ming-Liang follows his trademark ‘pondering static camera’ (“Rebels of the Neon God”, “The River”, “The Hole” and “Vive L’Amour” ) with his fifth feature film, “What Time is it There?”. His unconventional style will deter many cinema goers who might envisage something more easily penetrable, perhaps requiring less speculation. In a pure minimalist vein, Tsai uses no music (aside from “The 400 Blows” theme played sparingly). There is no cinematographic panning shots… no camera movement for each take. Each scene is a single static shot. There are almost no close-ups. There are extremely long stretches without any dialogue. Hopefully, this does not send you running in the other direction because it is indeed a wonderful viewing experience touching upon many important modern emotional themes.

The major plot focuses on a watch-selling street vendor named Hsiao-Kang played by Kang-Sheng Lee who has appeared in all Tsai Ming-Liang’s feature films (NOTE: Hsiao-Kang is also his real-life nickname). In the film his father has passed away and he and his Mother (Lu Yi-Ching) have amusing difficulty in accepting this, coping in their own unusual fashion. Hsaio-Kang has just sold his own watch to a beautiful girl, Shiang-Chyi Chen, who is now in Paris. His longing for her manifests itself in his desire to watch French films (Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” ), drink wine, and set every clock and watch within his grasp to Parisian time.

Because of Kang’s obsessive time piece adjustments, which is misconstrued by his Mother as a sign of her deceased husband’s reincarnation, the three major characters of the film become somehow synchronized. Shiang-Chyi Che co-incidentally meets the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, star of 1959’s “The 400 Blows”, on a park bench in a cemetery (actually right across from Léaud’s real-life home in Paris). All three major characters eat at the same moment and Kang, his Mother and Shiang each have a meaningless sexual escapade simultaneously. Shiang beds a friendly female she meets whilst vomiting in a restaurant toilet, Kang has sex with a thieving prostitute in the backseat of his car and the Mother masturbates with what looks like a whicker basket, to a photo of her deceased husband close by.

Tsai has a magnificent eye his shots are wonderfully abstract and refreshing. Most often he does not allowing the focus of activity to be in the center of the frame, lending itself slightly to an aura of realism. Tsai and his films have been compared to great directors of the past including Antonioni, Bresson and even Keaton. Michelangelo Antonioni for his use of sparse dialogue and recurrent theme of personal isolation. Buster Keaton for Kang’s comedic dead-pan sense of natural timing. Regardless, Tsai’s films all work from their own level of eccentricity in both the tone and examination of prevalent motifs.

Pointing out life’s absurdities in an honest and dour spirit, Tsai recounts previous film themes such as lack of communication, self-imposed solitary depression, indiscriminant sexual acts predicated on overflowing desire and new for this film; coping with death. He both exposes and pokes fun at his own Buddhist religious conventions while maintaining an arm’s length respect. It is all at once humorous, honest and sad. Photographed with style and beauty, this aspect of Tsai’s work has matured enormously. It is hard not to refer back to many scenes of his past films, if you have been lucky enough to view them. I strongly recommend this film, but suggest that first-time viewers may garner more from a gradual transition to Tsai’s work, perhaps seeing them in chronological order. To state simply that I loved this would be an understatement. I am so enamored with it and feeling pretty eccentric myself these days so I just set my computer clock to Parisian time… and urge you to do the same.

	
What Time is it There.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 55 min
Size: 	1.60 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	702x552 ~> 981x552
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 800 kb/s
BPP: 	0.194
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/99E866AD75097FF/What_Time_is_it_There.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, French, Min Nan, English
Subtitles:English

The post Ming-liang Tsai – Ni na bian ji dian AKA What Time is it There? (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Hsiao-Kang, now working as a pornographic actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.

Extras:
● Tony Rayns – (2007) Interview with Director Ming-liang Tsai

1.69GB | 1h 49mn | 1021×552 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/D745DDBA6719F9B/Ming-liang_Tsai_-_%282005%29_The_Wayward_Cloud.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/4C0B7B9F27AA06F/Tony_Rayns_-_%282007%29_Interview_with_Director_Ming-liang_Tsai.mkv

Language:Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Ming-liang Tsai – Tian bian yi duo yun AKA The Wayward Cloud [+Extras] (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
An unemployed young man named Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) passes idle time at a local Taipei mall when he encounters an old friend (Chen Shiang-chyi) on the opposite escalator. With time on his hands, he agrees to accompany her back to the location shoot where she is working as a production assistant for a film. At the site, the director is displeased with the unrealistic appearance of a mannequin intended to represent a dead body floating on the river, and asks the aimless Hsiao-Kang to act as a stand-in for the shot. Despite his reservations, Hsiao-Kang acquiesces to float, face down, in the malodorous, contaminated waters of the river for the film. After the shoot, he checks into a nearby hotel in order to bathe and change his clothes, but soon realizes that the pollution does not easily wash away. Later in the day, his friend returns, and the two share a brief moment of intimacy before eventually parting to their separate ways. The film then cuts to the image of a middle-aged man (Tien Miao) at a bath house soliciting a somnolent patron in the dark, before being unequivocally rebuffed by the stranger. The film then shifts back to Hsiao-Kang, who begins to experience a sharp pain on the side of his neck, causing him to tilt his head sideways, and consequently lose his balance. He passes by the middle-aged man on his motorcycle, and only after his crash does it become apparent that the two people know each other. Later, it is shown that the man is his father. The film again shifts focus to an attractive middle-aged woman (Lu Hsiao-Ling) as she operates a commercial elevator, passes out discount coupons, takes home some leftovers from the kitchen, and meets her lover. The woman dines alone, then retires to her bedroom, and Hsiao-Kang’s polite knock on her door and inquiry for medication for his sore neck reveals that she is his mother. And so the austere portrait of Hsiao-Kang’s profoundly isolated homelife and emotional abandonment gradually emerges in The River, as his crippling affliction becomes a hopeless and desperate cause that binds together his splintered family.

The River is a bleak and austere portrait of urban alienation and emotional isolation. Through the recurrent imagery of water as a metaphoric medium for the process of human interaction, Tsai Ming-liang illustrates the societal malaise and impersonal nature of modern existence: the father’s frequent search for anonymous liaisons at a public bath house; the exposure to the polluted river manifests in a painful, physical malady for Hsiao-Kang; the persistent roof leak in the father’s bedroom that exacerbates as a result of inaction and deferred repair. Similar to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Hsiao-Kang’s sickness of the soul manifests as an environmental aberration that, in turn, results in a physical paralysis. Inevitably, like Hsiao-Kang’s mysterious, indefinable ailment, what emerges is a self-perpetuating cycle of incurable alienation and agonizing personal despair.

2.16GB | 1h 55mn | 1024×560 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/9D2904C49261517/Ming-liang_Tsai_-_%281997%29_The_River.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/9ECBCAA97284516/Ming-liang_Tsai_-_%281997%29_The_River.part2.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/0B736848BA3D209/Ming-liang_Tsai_-_%281997%29_The_River.part3.rar

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Ming-liang Tsai – He liu AKA The River (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.