The Round, the Flat, and the Impossible:
"The Wayward Cloud"
By Chris Fujiwara

A major concern of The Wayward Cloud, Tsai Ming-liang's latest film, is vision's structuring of the world. In the first shot, the camera waits at the convergence of two underground walkways. The very wide lens distorts the space, emphasizing the curves of the walls. The clicking of heels on a hard surface precedes the emergence of Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi) via the screen-right walkway, in the far distance of the wide-angle field. As she approaches us, a second woman appears at the back of the screen-left walkway and walks briskly toward the camera.

The second woman (Japanese AV actress Sumomo Yozakura) is dressed in a nurse's uniform and carries a watermelon in both arms. Continuing straight along her walkway, Yozakura goes off screen right, while Shiang-chyi turns onto the left walkway and disappears around the corner at the back of it.

The choice to begin the shot on a depopulated space and make us wait for the people to enter it, is, of course, characteristic of Tsai. But note also the concision and economy of this emblematic moment. It sets forth the major themes of the film and introduces the two central female characters. Their next meeting in the film — Shiang-chyi's discovery of the comatose Yozakura in the apartment-building elevator — will lead to the crisis/revelation/disaster/apotheosis at the end of the film, when Shiang-chyi will function as Yozakura's voice and take her place­­ — just as Yozakura will already have taken Shiang-chyi's desired place as the lover of Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng). Hence, the two women's crossing paths at the beginning of the film is filled with significance.

The second shot is a high-angle shot of Yozakura lying on her back on a bed. Her bare legs are spread apart and bent at the knees. Between her thighs is a half-watermelon, its open red face parallel to the camera plane. After a few seconds, a white-sleeved male forearm slides across the bed into the shot, reaching toward Yozakura's left leg. Next, the other arm, then the body of Hsiao-kang appear. A stethoscope sticks out of the pocket of his white lab coat. He crouches over the woman on the bed, looking down first at her face, then at her watermelon.

Since the eye is drawn at once to Yozakura's partial nudity and to the watermelon that gapes at the center of the image, it may take a moment or two for the viewer to discover that the shot does not provide a direct view of the bed: the rectangular frame around it and the curtains at the sides of the frame prove that the camera is shooting through a window (or, less likely, into a mirror). This window is the first of the series of explicit embodiments of specularity that will circulate through The Wayward Cloud.

The first two shots are built on the same contradiction between round and flat: the curvature imparted to the space by the lens vs. the straightness of the walkways; the voluptuousness of Yozakura's body vs. the flat plane of wall and glass that frames her; the plane exposed by the watermelon's bisection vs. the roundness of the watermelon. Throughout The Wayward Cloud, roundness is the sign of a magical coming to life: water welling up from the hole left in the tar of the street after Hsiao-kang digs up Shiang-chyi's closet key; a plateful of noodles stirring and twisting, as if alive, at contact with a sauté of prawns and clams; water bubbles that float down onto the sleeping Shiang-chyi, like transparent eyes watching over her; the roundness of her belly, pregnant with a watermelon.

At the risk of flattening, schematizing the film, I might say that flatness, on the other hand, is on the side of the image and representation: the cardboard cutout of the two China Airlines stewardesses, for example, that stands (with Shiang-chyi) outside the room in which Hsiao-kang, in his role as porn star, fucks the lifeless Yozakura in the final sequence. The flat image can also become round, like the porn-video image that Shiang-chyi watches in her apartment. More than watches — she stares at it in rapt wonder, circles round in front of it with her face, body, and eyes, as though she were responding to the surface of the screen as a three-dimensional thing that is itself in motion, even as the round belly of the TV screen responds to the roundness of her eyes.

Another aspect of the first two shots of The Wayward Cloud deserves comment. The wide angle in the first shot — both aggressive and bland, like a phrase that offers itself as a statement of fact but describes something imaginary — is striking enough that it confronts us at the beginning of the film with a basic question. Who has seen this space before us, who chose this view of it and this way of projecting its volumes and depths onto a flat surface? The director and the cameraman, obviously... but it is a question less of naming the agents than of knowing them and characterizing them, understanding their motives, intentions, and language. The ultra-wide angle might be read as connoting surveillance (like the round convenience-store mirror in which Hsiao-kang is viewed in a scene in Vive l'amour), and the fleeting encounter between Shiang-chyi and Yozakura as emblematic of the anonymous and unacknowledged jostlings characteristic of modern urban life. The first shot would, then, by seen as if by no one — by a subjectivity that disavows itself. At the same time, however, the shot suggests a certain unreality: the real space of the tunnels, because dislocated and unidentified, assumes an allegorical importance (and is assimilated to the real/unreal spaces where the film's musical sequences will take place) that hints at fantasy.

In the second shot of the film, as in the first, there again arises the question of who chooses (but the real question is not who, but what: what is the logic of the choice?). The shot has been framed so that we are unaware of Hsiao-kang's presence in the room until his hand moves into the shot. Moreover, the framing has it that the emergence of Hsiao-kang's arm is doubly an emergence from out of frame: both the frame of the shot and that of the window.

The raising of this question, who chooses, who sees, underlines the fact that someone has chosen, someone has seen, that the shot is an instance of vision, that what is represented in the film is vision itself. This double insistence — on the role of vision in structuring reality, on vision's responsibility for the profilmic — undermines the narrative's claim (which it can be held to make at least to the extent that any narrative makes it) to represent an autonomous, coherent reality. This claim is, to be sure, more compelling in some parts of the film than in others. When Shiang-chyi, meeting Hsiao-kang in a park, asks, "Are you still selling watches?", she alludes to a fictional reality that stretches outside the film to its predecessors, What Time Is It There? (in which Shiang-chyi first meets Hsiao-kang and buys his watch from him) and the short "The Skywalk Is Gone" (in which she tries to return to the site of their encounter, a pedestrian bridge over a busy avenue, to find that it has been torn down) — an allusion that, at least for viewers familiar with the earlier films, strengthens the verisimilitude of The Wayward Cloud.

But this verisimilitude is part of a lure that The Wayward Cloud constructs only after having already dismantled it in advance. The third shot of the film is a closer shot of Hsiao-kang and Yozakura on the bed. The shot is taken from the same side of the room as the previous shot, but the camera is now lower, only slightly above the level of the bed, and the window frame no longer mediates between the actors and the viewer. We are now, then, seeing for ourselves, without explicit mediation. But this seeing for ourselves falls, of course, under the heading of an "as if." The cut from outside the room (the couple, and the bed, seen within a frame) to inside (the same couple, the same bed, but the frame has disappeared) allows us to enter the space of the film. But this participation is illusory, a solidifying of the fantasmatic bond between the viewer and the camera. We enter the fictional space only because we want to forget the camera.

Tsai continues to insist on undoing this process (of entering and forgetting) by making it visible. As Hsiao-kang licks the surface of the watermelon, then repeatedly pokes his finger into it, Yozakura produces signs of pleasure: breathing hard, gasping, moving her splayed arm spasmodically, moaning, licking her lips. Her performance of pleasure is a further invitation of the viewer into the film; that this is so is confirmed by the cut to the fourth shot, a closer shot taken from the head of the bed, behind the actress's face, which is out of focus in the foreground: the shot peers down over her body (her nurse's smock tantalizingly half-open) toward Hsiao-kang and the watermelon. Even as the progression of the shots makes the actress's pleasure more and more "real" (because less and less displaced), Tsai never lets us forget that a watermelon, not her genitals, is being "pleasured," that the depiction of sexual pleasure in the scene is built on a flagrant deception, or metaphor (one foregrounded in the fifth shot, a high-angle close shot of the watermelon, Hsiao-kang's fingers poking it relentlessly).

The reality status of the lovemaking scene with Hsiao-kang and Yozakura is thrown into question not only by the obsessional image of the watermelon but also by the absence of references to a filmmaking situation. In later sex scenes in the film (which establish that both Hsiao-kang and Yozakura are professional porn actors), the crew and the camcorder are usually visible, a convention that places the sexual acts within a narrative context about the production of pornographic videos. The only exception is the scene in which Hsiao-kang masturbates in front of a mirror as he watches Yozakura sitting on a kitchen counter and masturbating. That scene is decontextualized: Hsiao-kang is portrayed as a peeping Tom, and it is unclear whether he is playing a character in a film within the film, while Yozakura seems, characteristically, oblivious both to his presence and to that of a possible offscreen camera crew.

The ambiguity of this scene points to an important aspect of The Wayward Cloud. It's a stratified film that switches among several layers of experience:

1. the fictional narrative situations involving Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi, constituting, apparently, the first order of diegetic reality in the film;
2. the representation of sex in scenes staged for pornographic videos;
3. the representation of sex in scenes of which it is unclear whether they are part of a filmmaking situation (the watermelon sex scene, the mirror-masturbation scene);
4. musical sequences handled according to a conceit introduced in Tsai's The Hole, with actors lip-synching and dancing to Chinese pop recordings of the past. The musical sequences apparently represent the fantasies of Hsiao-kang, Shiang-chyi, and a porn actress (Lu Yi-ching).

A further layer, seemingly less important and insistent than the other four, is evoked in only a single sequence, though the mock-documentary dimension it inscribes will not be forgotten and provides the context of everyday reality against which the film's fantasy, melodrama, and horror take place:

5. TV news broadcast (perfectly resembling actual TV news, though staged for the film).

There are still further layers, intermediate zones. In what space is it that Shiang-chyi has her fantasy relationship with the watermelon, licking it as it sits on the refrigerator shelf, carrying it around like a fetus and giving birth to it on the stairway of her apartment building? The apartment building, by the way, is an example of a "real" space that is transformed by the actions that take place in it, and also to some extent by the decor, into a space that may be a space of fantasy — a possibility that suggests that all the scenes that can be categorized as part of Layer #1 may well be scenes of fantasy. For example, the netting in the stairwell where Hsiao-kang sleeps (a real feature of some Taiwanese buildings, incorporated, I assume, to discourage suicide attempts) represents two successive transformation/appropriations that are both adaptations to and indices of an idiosyncratic, individual, a-social use of communal space. Since the netting also carries visual associations from two of the film's musical numbers (Hsiao-kang's "The Half-Moon" and Lu Yi-ching's "To Keep My Heart True"), it becomes impossible to read it as merely a realistic detail of decor; instead, it becomes an imaginative symbol of transformation and subversion.

Finally, there is another layer, perhaps the most elusive and difficult to discuss of all, but exerting a pressure that affects the whole experience of The Wayward Cloud and that demands to be made explicit. This layer can be called that of the impossible.

The fourth shot of the film is impossible, in the sense that the previous two shots in the scene have shown that there is not enough space behind the head of the bed to place a camera. Later in the film, an even more striking example of this kind of impossible shot shows Yozakura sitting on a kitchen counter, masturbating with a plastic water bottle. After a shot from the side establishing the real setting of her action and showing that her back is against a wall, Tsai cuts to a shot taken from behind the actress and between her legs — an impossible position in terms of the established setting and staging. A different kind of impossibility surfaces in the extraordinary extreme closeup of Hsiao-kang furiously masturbating. The shot is a blur of movement that both depicts and conceals, thus both respecting and, in a strange way, violating the taboo on representation of male genitalia in world commercial cinema.

The most emotionally stunning of the film's impossible shots is that in which Hsiao-kang leaps across the space of the final porn scene to put his penis into Shiang-chyi's mouth. In their collective shot-by-shot analysis of the final sequence of The Wayward Cloud, Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, and Grant McDonald note that this shot

marks a complete 'redrawing' of the scene's co-ordinates and elements. From this moment, the porno crew and its equipment completely disappear from the images, never to reappear in the final minutes of the film. How easy it would have been for Tsai to include the satirical and blackly comic gag of a microphone or camera lens shoving into this transgressive action! But this is not a return to the 'seamless' porno of the doctor-nurse scene; it is the veritable opening up of another world within the real world. [1]

As Bandis, Martin, and McDonald suggest, what I have been calling "the impossible" can be seen as "another world" suddenly becoming visible inside the "real" one (although it should be added that The Wayward Cloud rigorously problematizes the "real" and makes it difficult to assign "reality" to any one of the film's layers).

What these writers call the "transgressive" nature of Hsiao-kang's leap across the room is highlighted by a number of factors. First, the disappearance of the crew and their equipment, noted by Bandis, Martin, and McDonald, highlights the closure of the contact between Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi — all the more because of another abrupt exclusion, that of the body of Yozakura, whose head has been bobbing up and down out of focus throughout the sequence (in alternate shots of Hsiao-kang inside the room and of Shiang-chyi as she watches from outside). A second factor is the sudden low angle — used, of course, to effect those disappearances, but also effecting its own spatial disruption by constructing a new space within the scene (as Bandis, Martin, and McDonald observe). A third factor is the noticeable change in lens size. The switch to a relatively wide-angle lens creates a visual distortion, emphasized by the contrast in scale between Hsiao-kang in the foreground and Shiang-chyi in the middle ground, framed within the round, grilled window through which she has been watching the scene. As in the first shot of the film, the wide angle constructs a fantastic space. Once again, we confront a roundness: the circle of the window rhymes with the gape of Shiang-chyi's mouth within it (first to yell, then to receive Hsiao-kang's penis). Roundness of the eye, roundness of the gaping mouth.

What is the impossible in The Wayward Cloud? The assertion of depth, expansiveness, and space, where none seems available. The denial and overcoming of flatness.

There is another kind of impossibility in The Wayward Cloud, one that Tsai has made the subject of his earlier films: the impossibility of meeting. What Time Is It There?, the first film in Tsai's adventures-of-Hsiao-kang series to introduce the Shiang-chyi character (though the actress had previously played a different role in The River), poses this impossibility of meeting as a problem of space and time. The film transposes the question "Why can't Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi meet?" into larger terms: Why is there time, why is there a there? In the second film in the Shiang-chyi series, "The Skywalk Is Gone," the disappearance of the pedestrian walkway where the couple first met testifies both to the ongoing reconfiguration of urban space that provides the context for all Tsai's narratives and to the evanescence of the moment of coinciding. Connections between people are like bridges that are magically thrown across chasms of time and space only to vanish when one is not looking.

In The Wayward Cloud, Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang are reunited on a two-seat swinging bench in a park. Tsai emphasizes the difficulty of this meeting (and the sharpness of the desire for it) by showing the stages that must be passed through before it can take place: first, Hsiao-kang is asleep, but Shiang-chyi apparently doesn't recognize him; next, she recognizes him, but he is still asleep; then, he wakes up, but now she is asleep. Here, two people who occupy the same space suffer a disjunction in biological time (or the time of awareness). Elsewhere in the film and throughout his oeuvre, Tsai typically represents the separation between people by intercutting between different space-times: the space of The Wayward Cloud is structured, like the spaces of all Tsai's films, as a complex geometry of compartments and corridors, the relationship among which becomes understandable only gradually.

As in What Time Is It There?, a bridge again functions as both a central architectural element and a site of interpersonal contact in The Wayward Cloud. Early in the film, Shiang-chyi crosses a curving walkway over a canal; later, she returns to the same walkway, locked in a tight embrace with Hsiao-kang, who, supporting her body, walks/dances with her across it. Their dance across the bridge constitutes a transitional activity between the musical fantasy sequences and the first-order, "Level 1" narrative situations. A bridge motif can be traced throughout the film: a bridge is one of the public spaces appropriated as sets for the utopian production number "What a Date!" And Hsiao-kang makes his body a bridge by wedging himself between the walls of the apartment-building corridor.

Hsiao-kang's last action in the film can be seen as again one of making his body into a bridge — connecting himself to Shiang-chyi. It is a sort of transcendence, as the sudden low angle (in the shot of Hsiao-kang crossing the room) suggests by making the ceiling visible. The presence of the ceiling in the shot is crucial, since the film has already emphasized the importance of the ceiling in Shiang-chyi's bedroom, decorated with the image of a cloud in a blue sky. Seen from the point of view of Hsiao-kang, lying alone in the bed, the flat image registers as that of a limitless space, in which the isolated cloud takes on quasi-anthropomorphic properties (reenforced by the memory of the title of the film). The cloud image also recalls the shot of the moon in the production number "The Half Moon" (another round/flat object, recalling in turn Yozakura's half-watermelon), in which Hsiao-kang appars as a marine creature singing of his sorrow and loneliness.

It is significant that of the three porn performers in the film, the only one who is not allowed to express an alternate identity in a musical number is Yozakura: she alone is not alienated, is pure flesh; and at the end of the film she comes to embody this condition in a radical way by becoming a lifeless object to be manipulated. (Yozakura's secondary status is confirmed in the end credits, which are inscribed with the signatures of Tsai and his regular actors — including Yang Kuei-mei, who appears only in a production number — whereas Yozakura's name is relegated to the standard-font scroll.) Her loss of consciousness is the extension of a lack of self-consciousness already exhibited early in the film, when, aboard an elevator with several strangers, she unhesitantly strips off her shirt and bra in an attempt to rid herself of the ants that are crawling on her. Whereas Yozakura does not appear to be aware that she is being seen, Hsiao-kang and Lu Yi-ching suffer from their visibility. In Lu Yi-ching's case, this predicament is signified through the loss of her false eyelashes during the shooting of a scene: a loss that affects the appearance of her face and her eyes, highlighting her dual status as a person who sees and is seen. On the other hand, Yozakura's problems always involve what can't (or can barely) be seen: the ants crawling on her body in the elevator, the bottle cap that gets lodged in her vagina.

Let's return again to the watermelon-sex scene in order to analyze further the stratification of The Wayward Cloud and the place of the impossible in the film. Through the actors' costumes, the scene incorporates a cliché of erotica: the sexualization of the medical profession. One thinks of Baudelaire: "Il y a dans l'acte de l'amour une grande ressemblance avec la torture ou avec une opération chirurgicale." [2] The scene in which Hsiao-kang fucks the comatose or dead Yozakura adds another dimension to this metaphor: the process of filming pornography is indeed shown as a kind of surgical operation (in this case, an autopsy?), in which the crew functions as the team assisting the lead surgeon, Hsiao-kang. The medical metaphor is also invoked by the earlier scene in which a crew member holds, upended, a large water bottle over Lu Yi-ching, as if she were a patient and it were an IV bottle.

The torture mentioned by Baudelaire is also present in the film. Supplying her ventriloquistic moans and cries to the final scene of necrophilia, Shiang-chyi looks anguished and agitated, rather than transported by pleasure. Orgasm in The Wayward Cloud is no release of tension but is followed by further pain and terror: see the closeups of the stricken face of Hsiao-kang, on two post-climax occasions, first after he masturbates onto the mirror, second at the end of the film after he orgasms in Shiang-chyi's mouth.

Baudelaire's phrase "the act of love" gives, by the way, another hint to the interpretation of The Wayward Cloud. The film questions the distinction, institutional in modern culture, between love and sex. This distinction is an underlying theme of the Grace Chang song "To Keep My Heart True," performed by Lu Yi-ching in one of the fantasy production numbers. The singer proclaims — in terms that can only be read as a reference to the Lu character's profession as a porn actress (the musical scene starts after a direct cut from a closeup of her semen-spattered face) — that her heart "is loving and warm," though she has been "so often betrayed by men brutal and jaded,/So often degraded." The pivotal scene in the video shop, where Hsiao-kang stops Shiang-chyi from performing fellatio on him, clearly indicates that he has a psychological need to separate sex from love (this moment, which recalls Irena refusing Oliver's kiss in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, could also be read in terms of Freud's essays on the psychology of love). This need can be seen as the central problem of the film, one that the rather paradoxical union of Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi in the final scene attempts to solve.

Crucially, Tsai does not celebrate this union as a moment of pure transcendence but lets it resonate as a deeply upsetting and shocking violation. It is a moment of the highest ambiguity, consistent with what the film has expressed about love, sex, and the dilemma of the performer.

In The Wayward Cloud, the moment of sexual congress is the moment of greatest separation. In the final, protracted sexual tableau, Hsiao-kang's face is seen against the wall above the window, while Shiang-chyi is shown in her own dark closeup, against the wall of Hsiao-kang's body. The closeup of Hsiao-kang recalls the shot of his face against the mirror before which he masturbates: an image of absolute isolation, confronted with itself — the solitude of the one who comes. (The mirror, a flat image that implies depth, is crucial to the imagery of the film. Hsiao-kang is again juxtaposed with his mirror image during "What a Date!") Hsiao-kang's solitude is represented as a loss of self and a denial of interiority.

What's most unsettling about The Wayward Cloud is that it is not a condemnation of anything (pornography, for instance, or prostitution, or, more generally, capitalist commodification of the body and of pleasure). The alienation of the porn star, here made into a metaphor for the alienation of the viewer, is not criticized. From what point of view could it be criticized, since, as Tsai shows, this alienation is only a specific instance of a general historical experience of being in the world? The last scene, as much impasse as transcendence, finds for this experience an image of extreme starkness and poignancy.

Chris Fujiwara
© FIPRESCI 2006

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