Everything is Out of Sync in Tsai’s What Time Is It There?
Editor-in-chief Adrian Ho dwells on the motif of time in Tsai Ming Liang’s What Time Is It There?, relating the film’s exploration of synchronicity (or lack thereof) to the alienation of our contemporary times.
Laughter and loneliness are the strangest of bedfellows and nowhere is that more pronounced than in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. Often, his films are populated by moments where both emotions occupy the same space and feed into each other in ways that we can only refer to as tragicomic. Sometimes, or in Tsai’s case, always assuredly, the sheer weight of these moments bubble into the absurd. In Tsai’s What Time Is It There?, the film only becomes funnier and sadder the longer it runs.
Tsai’s film begins with the sudden passing of the patriarch of a family, leaving both Hsiao-kang and his mother to deal with the aftermath of his departure. Soon after, Hsiao-kang, who sells wristwatches on the streets of Taipei, meets Shiang-chyi, a young woman on her way to Paris who insists on buying a dual-time watch right off his wrist. This interaction alone entangles the lives of these two people as Hsiao-kang develops an obsession with her and begins to set public and private clocks in Taipei to Paris time. What follows is a film about missed synchronicity as each character begins to change their habits and behaviours to keep lock-step to a rhythm that they can never belong to. Slowly, everything and everyone is out of sync in Tsai’s film.
Photo by Lin Meng Shan
For Hsiao-kang, his quixotic quest to change the collective time of a city, one clock at a time, only further highlights the temporal disconnect between people of separate timezones. An unrequited love so desperate as to be funny, but never funny without the air of tragedy. Tsai depicts a man out-of-sync, with a metaphysical body which continues to trudge along the streets of Taipei, but a heart and mind that is desperately attempting the ascension of a temporal wall, seven-hours high.
For Shiang-chyi, the problem is quite the opposite. Her mind drifts back to the streets of Taipei and her heart calls for home, but her body remains drifting amidst the crowded spaces of Paris. She finds herself a country of one, a vagabond belonging to nothing, alienated from both her home and her surroundings. Her isolation echoes his loneliness and while their stories are intertwined, they also remain temporally unsynced.
Hsiao-kang’s mother attempts a similarly impossible task – to reunite with her deceased husband in any way possible. Whether it is the search for his reincarnated soul in any living being, or the shuttering of all windows and curtains to welcome his spirit home, or syncing her life to that of a broken clock, her grief pours out in every action. Time continues marching forth, a cruel force which makes no exceptions, even for widows.
Photo by Lin Meng Shan
Tsai forces us to experience the tyranny of time, encouraging us to wander within his cinematic realm and meander alongside his characters within the long takes which make up his film. Through the process of watching, we begin to sync ourselves with the emotionality of his characters, and feel in some ways, through stillness and the passage of time, a fraction of the anguish of his leads. The many clocks and watches in Tsai’s film terrorise us with their impotence. Time is a tool to expose the urban alienation of contemporary city life. Like most of Tsai’s other films, What Time Is It There? is about the desperate ways in which lonely people attempt to reach out to one another to create meaningful, if fleeting, connections.
A connection not unlike the one we find between Hsiao who watches Truffaut’s The 400 Blows on a bootleg DVD in the confines of his home, where Jean-Pierre Leaud wanders the Paris streets, and Shiang-chyi who visits a Paris cemetery and speaks to an old man resting at a bench – a man who happens to be Jean-Pierre Leaud. Taipei and Paris are reconnected with an ephemeral thread of cinephilia and shared isolation. Cinema itself is reimagined as both time capsule and portal – where time and performance are immortalised as they are, and yet, reignited as a continuous breathing tapestry of art and performance. Like Truffaut before him, Tsai is only the latest torchbearer of loneliness and memory.
Tsai offers no permanent reprieve in his film, for either his characters or the audience. Rather, we are asked to savour the brief connection provided to us and reflect on the lyrical loneliness of our contemporary lives.
What Time Is It There? (2001) is screening at Oldham Theatre on 11th September (Friday), as part of the Asian Film Archive’s September Programme: Past Time. Get your tickets for their programme while you can!
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