Cycle index

The Wayward Cloud

Tian bian yi duo yun

dir. Tsai Ming-Liang / France, Tajwan 2005 / 114’

subtitles: Polish and English

retrospective: Tsai Ming-Liang A Conversation with God, All the Corners of the World, Boys, Face, Give Me a Home, Good Bye, Dragon Inn, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Moonlight on the River, My New Friends, My Stinking Kid, Rebels of the Neon God, The Hole, The River, The Skywalk Is Gone, The Wayward Cloud, Vive l’amour, What Time Is It There? Section index

Cast

Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-chin, Yang Kuei-Mei, Sumomo Yozakura

Film description

In no other film Tsai's characters were so close to each other. For the first time Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi (The Wayward Cloud is a sequel to What Time is it There? and The Skywalk is Gone, as well) develop together some tender intimacy which soon evolves in pulsating eroticism, striving for fulfilment. But in no other film does the director treat a feeling so brutally either. Hsiao-kang does not sell watches any more - he is a porn actor now and by coincidence he makes films in the same building where the unaware Shiang-chyi lives.

At the beginning it seems that Tsai is playing with spectators and that he disguises the real sex in a funny costume. But the closer the characters get to love, the more naturalist and painful the almost pornographic scenes become (which are gradually voided of any eroticism). The Wayward Cloud is a merciless vivisection of relations between love, sexuality and pornography. The director's ironical and shrewd commentary is expressed in musical scenes (reference to the strategy used in The Hole) made in a camp, colourful style.

In Tsai's earlier films the world was flooded with water. Here, the deserted city suffers from a drought. It would be hard to find a more poignant symbol.

Karolina Kosińska