March 28-April 3, 2002

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Hush

AROUND THE CLOCK: Lee Kang-Sheng in What Time Is It There?

What Time Is It There? proves there is nothing so sad as stillness.

by Sam Adams

What Time Is It There?Written and directed by Tsai Ming-Liang A New Yorker Films release Opens Friday at Ritz East

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There are few frames of film more famous than the ones that show Harold Lloyd hanging for dear life from the arms of a clock on the side of a skyscraper. Even if few can name the film (Safety Last!) or even remember who Lloyd was, the image captures something about the absurd battle against time which occupies so much of our lives -- even out of context, it still resonates. Lloyd’s farcical struggle finds a melancholy echo in the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time Is It There? when one of the film’s three protagonists, Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng), climbs to the roof of a skyscraper, unveils a crude metal extension arm and attempts, by leaning over the side, to adjust the arms of the enormous clock on the building’s side overlooking downtown Taipei. A street-corner watch vendor, Hsiao Kang has developed a fixation with adjusting clocks ever since a pretty young customer announced she was on her way to Paris. At first, it’s simply a matter of setting them forward several hours so they match the time in France, but later his monomania seems to take on a life of its own -- it doesn’t seem to matter what time he sets clocks to, as long as it’s different from his own.

Shot in long, unmoving takes with no score, What Time Is It There? is full of empty space, and so are its characters' lives. Hsiao Kang lives with his mother (Lu Yi-Ching), and both are mourning the death of his father (seen, though unidentified, in the opening shot); Shiang-Chyi (Chen Shiang-Chyi), Hsiao Kang's Paris-bound customer, finds herself in a foreign land, not speaking the language, and not knowing a soul. Though it would be simplistic to say the actors are playing themselves, Tsai clearly wants to stay away from theatrical artifice: Lu's character is identified only as "mother," and the film's other actors play characters whose names mirror their own ("Hsiao Kang" is Lee Kang-Sheng's nickname). At times, such as when Hsiao Kang's mother is at the height of her grieving-induced near-madness -- she becomes obsessed with the idea that her husband's spirit might return, and blocks up all the windows in the apartment so the light won't scare him away -- the effect is uncomfortably close to home. Benoît Delhomme's camera makes us spies, but there's no voyeuristic pleasure to be had. There is, perhaps, nothing as purely sad as stillness, which is why What Time Is It There? doesn't need to tug at heartstrings. Simply being there is enough.

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