Turning Back the Clock
Written: Mar 26 '02 (Updated Mar 26 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lovely, quiet film from an important filmmaker.
Cons: I didn't understand the distracting potty humor.
The Bottom Line: It is a delight to see a Taiwanese film of such subtlety.
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| houstoncritic's Full Review: What Time is it There? |
“What Time Is It There?” a movie filmed in Taiwan and Paris, is a very subtle black comedy. Now, coming from me that might not be saying much. After all, I come from the area of the country that has produced only a Texas sized corporate failure; the home of the mad woman threatened with execution for drowning her offspring; and the land where ordinary citizens sleep with loaded firearms resting on their nightstands. So what I consider subtle may appear raucous to someone else.
Hsiao-Kang (Kang-Sheng Lee) is a Taiwanese wristwatch vendor who hawks his goods on the street. One day a young woman approaches and looks over his hundreds of watches but decides that it’s the one on his wrist that she must have. He declines, claiming that because of a recent death in his family it would be bad luck to sell it. But it is a particularly beautiful watch, she point out, with dual time zones. It’s just perfect for Taipei and Parisian times. The young woman Shiang-Chyi (Shiang-Chyi Chen) takes Hsiao-Kang’s business card. Later, she calls him to repeat her offer for the watch. In her one-sided phone conversation she again suggests that no Buddhist taboos will be broken by his selling of the watch: “But I’m a Christian,” she proclaims, “…so it doesn’t matter.” They later meet; she buys the watch, she thanks him and walks away. But she never really leaves him.
The death in Kang’s family was his father, who appears in the flesh in the opening scenes of the film. Father moves from his kitchenette in the family’s cramped apartment to place a steaming plate of food on the tiny dining table. He stops, lights a cigarette, gets up, calls to Hsiao-Kang, sits again. Then finally rises from the dinner table and walks out the back door of the flat to move a plant into the sunlight, and continue smoking his cigarette. This opening sequence, taking several minutes to unfold and succeeded by the scene where Hsiao-Kang is seen returning home with Father’s urn of ashes must simply brim with metaphor lost upon an Occidental audience. Whether Buddhist or Chinese in origin, I, as a Western viewer (né Texan), was lost to the symbolism. (As was, I believe, the sparsely populated, Anglo audience in the theater). Nevertheless, with father having passed into the next world it becomes Mother’s duty to conduct just the right religious ceremonies within her modest home to ensure Father’s reincarnation.
The question suddenly becomes: Will Father return as the kitchen floor cockroach, left un-stomped but ceremoniously dropped in the fish tank? Or will it be the truly monstrous carp that overwhelms the tank with its bulk along with its two small goldfish companions, orbiting like planetary moons? The idea of reincarnation pervades this film: Why must Mother cover the balcony with sheets, tape the windows over and cut off the electricity (threatening to suffocate the carp)? It is because she believes she must remove any distractions from Father’s path to his earthly return. Surely he must return, Mother believes; at the very least to consume the food portioned out for him at every evening meal.
In the mean time, Hsiao-Kang has become rather obsessed with his brief encounter with the young woman who has talked the watch off his wrist. For the remainder of the film he makes it a personal crusade to change whatever timepiece he can get his hands on to Parisian time: From his bulging case of wrist watches to even the timepiece in the local movie theatre (nearly causing a risqué and clock-stopping encounter in a men’s room). Perhaps the most humorous scene is when he takes a television antenna and leans over the railing of a building to move the hands on large outdoor clock. He celebrates his small victory with Peking duck washed down with a bottle of Cabernet.
And what are we to make of his other behaviors? I truly didn’t understand the importance, besides simple bathroom humor—quite literally—why his expressive choice of containers to tinkle in each night (in lieu of disturbing Mother by going downstairs to the john, we suppose) was an image so oft repeated. Even his choice of French videos viewed during nightly bouts of insomnia are grist for metaphor. The principal one is François Truffaut’s “Les Quatre cents coups” (the 400 Blows). What connection does Hsiao-Kang feel he has with Antoine, the film’s adolescent character? Does he feel he is as overlooked and abandoned as Truffaut’s alter ego feels?
In the mean time, events for Shiang-Chyi couldn’t be any worse. A lone young woman in Paris, she shops, rides the subway and sits alone in cafés . But she doesn’t really seem to do any sightseeing. Dependent upon the kindness of strangers—mostly solicitous men—Shiang-Chyi speaks a smattering of English but appears to speak little or no French. She needs help with a menu; she is jostled and packed into a subway, then follows the crowd in confusion when it is announced, unintelligibly to her, that the car must be evacuated because of an accident up the line. As she sits on a park bench in the city’s graveyard digging through her purse for a phone number, a kindly and inquiring gentleman (a cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud, the Antoine of “the 400 Blows”) hands her a scrap of paper with his own phone number instead. Terrified of the streets of Paris at night, she lingers in the doorway of a grocery until another woman comes along. She then hurries behind her unwitting escort until she has to turn around and backtrack to her modest hotel in the garment district. Her only sustained contact is with another young Chinese woman from Hong Kong who comes to her aid when a demoralized and nauseated Shiang-Chyi (too much coffee, she explains) shivers alone at her café table.
But it is her loneliness that is most disconcerting for Shiang-Chyi. She is invited to share a hotel room with the woman. And it is at this juncture in the film that we see a montage of sexual yearnings by our three principal characters happening simultaneously. In this explosion of need we see Hsiao-Kang conscript the services of a prostitute after he has slept off his wine reverie in his car; Mother capping an intimate dinner at home with the ghost of Father by engaging in autoeroticism; and Shaing-Chyi’s polite overtures to the woman with whom she shares an otherwise friendly and chaste bed. But like all desperate encounters the three of them are left alone once again, unfilled, unattached, unhappy.
“What Time Is It There?” presents more to us than just a lonely young man dwindling his days away attempting to sell watches on the street as he years for a woman whom he does not know, and with whom he shall never meet again. But haven’t we all had these same yearnings in our own lives at some time? Hasn’t there been someone we have missed desperately? Or haven’t we all fantasized over someone we’ve only met once, but would never see again? Or, haven’t we pined for someone whom we only presume exists just for us? Of course we have, the director Ming-Liang Tsai is suggesting. Despite the Oriental layering of meaning that may be lost on an Occidental audience, “What Time Is It There” contains many universal truths, and it is a fine work worthy of America’s viewing. I shall look forward to future work from this Truffaut of the Orient.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
houstoncritic
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Member: Chris Raney
Location: Houston
Reviews written: 35
Trusted by: 18 members
About Me:
Aesthetic crusader from the muddy, third coast. Championing the small but worthy.
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