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If I'm dedicating a large part of my life to cinema, trying to make it and getting addicted to constant viewings, it's mainly thanks to two authors who have accompanied me until today: Kim Ki-Duk and Tsai Ming Liang. Although it's cool to destroy the first one after supporting him for a decade, I've always defended him sincerely, until he managed to disappoint even me, with an unwatchable accidental comedy ("Moebius"), the second, on the other hand, after a series of masterpieces, decided to leave the seventh art forever.
Understand me. I know you will find my melancholy childish, but please understand me.
Although there are plenty of contemporary authors I admire and can blindly trust (Haneke, Von Trier, Béla Tarr, Ulrich Seidl...) I feel like I've been abandoned by those who were the two pillars of my love for cinema. Especially by Ming Liang. Because if there's always hope that Kim will make another masterpiece, with Tsai this is vain. A farewell confirmed by the swan song "Stray Dogs", awarded with the Jury Prize at the latest Venice Film Festival.
A shock that broke my heart.
Because I don't see Tsai as a director, but almost like a friend, a master with whom to share kindred reflections on humanity through the concept of watching a film.
But let's be systematic, because I don't want to digress too much.
A couple of years ago, I already talked to you about one of my absolute favorite films: "Vive L'Amour", how it touched me and shook me to the core, but I didn’t mention that the entire filmography of the Malaysian filmmaker should be read as a single mega-film. An atypical coming-of-age story that revolves around the body of the fetish actor Lee Kang-Sheng and his character/alter ego Hsiao Kang.
A confused character with a philosophy of nullification towards a reality that does not belong to him. Starting as a rebellious student in "Rebels Of The Neon God" (1992) and arriving as a father of a dysfunctional family in the latest "Stray Dogs" (2013). A journey through which Hsiao Kang has discovered love for men, women, for cinema, for his family. He has experienced the drama of death, existence, and the inability to communicate, without ever managing to fully complete himself.
Having said this, I would like to focus on what is Tsai's most extreme and brazen film: the extraordinary "The Wayward Cloud" (2005), also distributed in Italy, where it's billed as "a sexy and fruity comedy" (text taken directly from the poster), to entice those slightly blasé viewers hoping to enjoy a transgressive and carefree film with the exoticism of the Orient. And I would say: poor them.
Because it's a crucial, seminal and at times disturbing film. Where the author's poetics remain, but at the same time are reversed: if in previous (and subsequent) films the characters were ghosts looking for support, nameless specters wandering through metropolitan streets without hope, now they are naked bodies, walking corpses. Tsai throws at you the human emptiness, slapping you with exposed flesh, often risking the thin line with pornography.
If before there were storms and floods surrounding the solitudes of his cinema, now one finds oneself in a dystopian drama devoid of water, where drought (of feelings?) destroys the characters, reducing them to the obsessive search for the body and all that involves: contact, but also loneliness and misunderstanding.
Everything revolves around the symbol of the watermelon, a leitmotif of his filmography presented here in a predominant and decisive way. This fruit, from a semiotic point of view, symbolizes "female fertility" or "a healthy and stable relationship based on love and understanding". At the same time, however, I discovered that in Chinese the saying "Crack a watermelon" vulgarly means "Deflower".
There. Just like the featured fruit of the work, the film should be read in this way: a little being with a heart of gold, but at the same time proud of being obscene.
An unpleasant investigation into how these empty bodies act in the face of the tragedy of existence, of this intrinsic impossibility to bond and love, of this perpetual struggle between carnal desire and spiritual connection. A struggle confirmed stylistically by the continuous shift between the director's usual style (cold and detached long takes, often with a fixed camera) and explosions of colors in musical interludes (already experimented in "The Hole" and revisited in "Visage") deliberately trash, kitsch and vulgar. True popular Chinese love songs in correlation with choreographies of sexual temerity (unforgettable the one in the public bath, a festival of toilet paper where an army of vulva-women assault a clumsy penis-man).
For Ming Liang, sex is the ephemeral means through which one can combat the spleen that unconsciously grips the human being. The sexual act, then, according to the director must never leave indifference. It must either excite, or frighten and disgust, or even make one laugh.
Symbolic, in this sense, is the opening scene, a manual of eros, where a passionate coitus is ironically interrupted by a sliced watermelon: we touch each other, we make love, but we still don't know each other, even while seeking each other.
An alienating tragedy dressed luxuriously in moans, colors and sequins.
An ascending climax towards the core of man, the impulse, reaching its peak in an unforgettable long finale. Where first we're scared, then we laugh and then, perhaps, we burst into tears.
And so, can we find out who the hell we are?
Luckily there's no answer.
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