WinStar Cinema
Directed by Ming-liang Tsai
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Wellspring)
A young man selling watches on the busy streets of Taipei has a couple of brief conversations with one of his customers. He becomes obsessed with her to the point of changing every clock he sees to Paris time. Meanwhile, his mother is mourning the death of her husband and is becoming increasingly unstable. She sets a place for him at the table and later decides to turn off the power and block all sunlight into the apartment since it is preventing him from returning. In Paris, the girl of his obsession wanders around in a daze until meeting another oriental girl. The three plot lines converge when they all have very unsatisfying sexual encounters. Filmed in the usual Tsai style, which is understated with no music and a minimum of dialogue or camera movement, it is driven by imagery more than plot. I noticed recurring themes, such as eating, and locations, Tsai seems to like stark bathroom settings for some reason, but these don't seem to support any grand scheme other than the all too familiar "alienation in the big city" which has been done many times before and much more convincingly.
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