What Time Is It There? (2001)
Directed by Tsai Ming-liang
A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.
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Soon to embark on a string of captivating films that would further hone his minimalist style (“Vive L’Amour,” “The Hole,” “What Time Is It There?”), Tsai, with “Rebels,” joined Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien as one of the leading lights of the Taiwanese New Wave.
Rebels was his first feature, made in 1992 but never previously released in U.S. theaters (it’s been restored as part of a traveling Tsai retrospective), and almost every preoccupation that will dominate subsequent films like The River , What Time Is It There? , and last year’s Stray Dogs appears here in embryonic form.
Over the past few decades, Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang has made some of the strangest and most fascinating films in the world, including The River (1997), What Time Is It There?
It will strike fans of the director's disciplined, enigmatic classics "What Time Is It There?" and "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" as both accessible outlier and charged testing ground.
Lee and Dean's encounter here, like Lee's tender engagement in What Time Is It There?—through the conduit of a TV screen, with Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows—belies Tsai's ambitions as an international chronicler of the downcast, arranging secret commiseration between the beautiful mopers—hard-pressed to make basic human connections—across cities, continents, and decades.
The Malaysia-bred Taiwanese director’s subsequent (and increasingly eccentric) movies, which include “What Time Is It There?” and “Vive l’Amour,” made him an international film-fest star.