What Time Is It There?

Hsiao-kang, who sells watches in Taipei, loses his father. Soon afterwards a woman about to leave for Paris buys a dual time zone watch from him. Once she is gone he starts setting every clock in the city to Paris time: his own, the ones at home, on the street, at the bus terminal. The film is not interested in love. It is interested in a strange method of grieving: having lost his father, he tries to control time, and all he really does is escape into the time zone of a woman he does not know. His mother, meanwhile, believes her husband's spirit will return home and rearranges the flat accordingly. The form is Tsai Ming-liang's usual: long static takes, almost no dialogue, very little music. Even the comedy comes out of that silence. In the Paris section Jean-Pierre Léaud appears in a cemetery. That is no accident: in Taipei, Hsiao-kang watches Truffaut's The 400 Blows over and over, and the film puts the boy from that film on screen decades later, tying the two cinemas directly together. Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi star, with Miao Tien, one of Tsai's regulars, as the father. Who it is for: viewers who like slow cinema and quiet films about grief. Who it is not for: anyone looking for dialogue and event. The film says almost nothing, on purpose.