Stray Dogs

A man stands at a junction in Taipei holding an advertisement for property; a few hours a day, in the wind, alone. He has two children, they sleep in empty buildings at night and eat from the free sample counter at the supermarket. Tsai Ming-liang builds it almost entirely from long static shots, some running past ten minutes, and explains nothing. Lee Kang-sheng plays the man, and a scene in which he eats a doll made from a cabbage is the film's most discussed passage. It presents poverty not as event but as duration: watching becomes difficult, and the difficulty is deliberate. It took the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. Tsai stepped away from fiction for a long stretch afterwards. Who it is for: viewers who like slow cinema and formal radicalism. Who it is not for: anyone without patience for duration and pace.