This 2013 Venice Grand Jury prizewinner from Tsai Ming-Liang requires a tolerance for extended shots of people looking, sleeping, eating and suffering – both physically and existentially – which will exhaust all but the director’s most earnest fans (Tsai has helpfully declared that he does not “expect the patronage of cinema audiences”). For those with patience, however, this portrait of life on the margins of Taipei exerts a devastating hypnotic power as it follows Lee Kang-sheng’s bedraggled human billboard and his two surprisingly resilient children through a rainscape of unremitting hardship that seems on occasion to drift into hallucinatory maternal fantasia. Those who have previously been tickled by Tsai’s off-kilter humour will be disappointed: there’s absolutely nothing funny about a 10-minute scene in which our abandoned antihero attempts to suffocate and soothe a cabbage, and the tears of the painfully extended finale appear utterly genuine. Yet the images are breathtaking, from incantatory close-ups of Lee’s ravaged face, through sepulchral landscapes of concrete and vegetation, to weeping buildings haunted by shadowy ghosts.
