A Review of Playtime’s Movie of the Month Discussion

This month’s film was The Wayward Cloud (2005), a controversial feature directed by Taiwanese Second New Wave director Tsai Ming-liang. Set in Taipei, it is a controversial meditation on sex and modern Chinese culture, mixing camp musical numbers, slow-paced, dialogue-free scenes and hardcore pornography.

The group were deeply divided on the merits of the film: while a couple of Playtimers thought it was a masterpiece, others were alienated by its deliberative pace, or horrified by the rape scene and its implications for the viewer.

Next month’s film is Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). Everyone is welcome to join the discussion – click on ‘Forums’ > ‘Playtime Discussion’ and jump into our ‘Movie of the Month’ thread.

Melons, melons and more melons…

Playtimers disagreed on the merits of the film’s style. Some found the slow, long takes unwatchably dull, others argued that they represented a deliberately frustrating attempt to create a stylistic analogue for the disconnected characters onscreen. And what is the significance of all those melons?

Alex: I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot and what’s irritating to me is that I simply can’t get any kind of a hold on it. I wasn’t interested enough or entertained enough to enjoy it, to want to watch more Ming-Liang or to go away and read up on the film, but I wasn’t bored enough to turn it off in a rage either… There’s a wilful obtuseness here – I think the director sees himself as the ultimate arthouse prima donna, linking images, ideas and silence in seemingly incoherent but presumably thematically consistent ways. He’s certainly trying to alienate, rather than entertain his audiences and it seems to me to be the type of cinema in which you have to be committed into entering into the director’s game in order to glean anything meaningful from it.

Kiera: One of Tsai Ming-liang’s great strengths is his architectural shooting. The urban environment in his films isn’t a backdrop; it’s thoroughly integrated with the material he is exploring in thematic terms. In the Wayward Cloud, the city becomes the analogue of the bodies onscreen: humid and claustrophobic, frigid yet desirous, lacking in lubrication. From the first take, an impossibly wideangle shot of a fallopian subway tunnel to the contrastingly phallic skyscrapers stretching into empty sky, his Taiwan is a place of dislocation and separation, its physical geographies reflecting the emotional and sexual imbalances of its inhabitants. Economically, Ming-liang’s Taiwan is a place of odd scarcities and abundances: a drought means that the taps of the city are dry, and water is available only from clinical looking, blue-tinged bottles. Consequently, the city is awash with physicality, as the inhabitants desperately try to clean themselves in shallow pools, while the enervating heat and dirt mean that anything beyond the most furtive of sexual encounters is exhausting. In place of water, the city is experiencing a glut of watermelons, their sticky red juice substituting for bodily fluids. One piece of context that I found interesting was that the abundance and scarcity are causally related: melon farming is highly water-intensive, and this is often cited as one of the reasons for the Penghu region running dry in hot years. So the substitution of watermelons for water is more than just an absurdist touch: it’s seems to me like an indicator of some satirical intent on the part of the director.

Hardcore Pornography with Jazz Hands

A film that mixes musical number and hardcore porn- what’s that all about? How do those two things relate? And what is Ming-Liang trying to say about sex in this film?

Matt: I felt that final scene was meant as a wry take on, not just the industry’s attitude to women, but the porn viewer’s attitude as well. The idea that this women is flat out cold (was she dead, or just collapsed from heatstroke and exhaustion? I’m not sure. ) That they are content to shoot the scene regardless says something somewhat condemnatory about the people they expect to be watching this movie. On a metaphorical level I think it says that these porn movies are somewhat lifeless and passionless with regards to the sex on screen. The women may as well be lifeless corpses for all that it matters… the guy just continues pumping away even though he can’t really continue…what the hell is his role?

Kiera: If we have melons substituting for water (and bodily fluids), a similar substitution lies at the heart of the movie’s unvarnished and disturbing exploration of sexuality. At a basic level, the Taiwan of this film is awash with sex experienced at one remove, most notably in the form of pornography, but seriously lacking in engaged sexual encounters. We watch a couple having sex with a fetishized melon substituting for the woman’s vagina, a melon standing in for a pregnant stomach, and a melon taken as a head to be kissed. We watch a film crew capturing the antics of porn stars in a dry bath, where bottled water substitutes for mains water from the shower. And then we watch a couple having an inconclusive sexual encounter over the end product: pornographic DVDs, seen from the detached perspective of a CCTV camera. Voyeurism plays a crucial role in this mix, but the movie is not about the act of watching so much as the play of substitution that is occurring. The crucial thing about porn is its detachment: image is swapped for reality at point both of production and consumption. The presence of the camera makes the couple having sex every bit as detached from each other as the viewer of the DVD is removed from the actual experience being depicted. In both cases, engaged sexual experience is lacking, and mediated encounters are substituted.

Matt: One thing… that occurred to me is the possible association of porn’s disconnected fantasy with the disconnected musical numbers. Another link that I thought of is that the musical numbers take place in conspicuously public places (even that weird one in the abandoned factory or whatever it was, with the flames), and all the porn (and most of the character interaction) takes place in the privacy of the apartment building. Even though the musical numbers supposedly convey feelings the characters have bottled up inside, the musical sequences participate more in the public architecture than the restrained scenes that are ostensibly more intimate, yet feature more repression and emotional distance.

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