The Wheel of Life is a reel with film Cai Mingliang and Li Kangsheng are inseparable creative tandem – and more. 13 joint films (not counting other projects), more than thirty years of acquaintance and, in fact, a symbiosis of director and actor. If this connection were in utero, then Tsai would probably already be there to remove his alter ego with all its quirks. From Afternoon, a spontaneous conversation between Tsai and Li, you can learn a lot about the relationship between these two strange people. For example, every time a director goes abroad, he calls his friend in the evening to see if he’s okay. No less sweet is Tsai's promise that his cooking will improve once he quits the movie. In the same conversation, Tsai admits that he wanted to make a film (“What time do you have?”) to distract Lee from grieving for his deceased father – and involved him in an everyday and at the same time poetic plot about death.
Kangsheng in this conversation looks identical to Xiao-Kang, the hero he plays from film to film, or rather: lives another chapter in the epic of a lonely outsider. It would seem that each new role requires the actor to reincarnate, but Kansheng, karmically speaking, remains true to his incarnation. In many ways, this biographical approach is inspired by François Truffaut’s five films about the life of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leo), a homeless teenager whose adventures begin with “Four Clashes” and last for two decades – and most likely would have lasted even longer if it were not for Truffaut’s premature death.
There is a joy of recognition when from film to film you see the same impenetrable Xiao-Kang, but in some other life constellation. The frame room and the staticity of the shooting remain unchanged, the same constant in the Tsai method as the participation of Li Kangsheng. The frame room is a bearing structure for a person who has entrenched himself in privacy and loneliness; the frame room is a sensitive surface, the characters muddy and disturb this surface with their strange actions, gestures that diverge like circles on the water, and become waves that bathe the beholder who waited for a spectacle like a sea of weather – and received contact with these waves, perfectly conducting emotions.
Aura of grief and contact search
Attention is paid to the ratio of lighting and darkness in the frames of the film. For example, when, against the background of pitch darkness, only a bed with Xiao-Kang lying on it is visible; after he wakes up and sits on the edge of the bed, only his presence is guessed from the outline of the body; Xiao-Kang’s just-lit face, a moment later immersed in semi-darkness. It recalls the key Oedipal scene in The River, where the characters barely emerge from the ontological darkness; and the atmosphere of The Dragon's Vault as a whole, as a metaphor film for the elusive and tedious search for the object of desire. Most often, however, the darkness in Xiao-Kang's room is dissected by the cool light from the lamp on the table or an equally cool TV screen when Xiao-Kang watches "Four hundred beats." Dark lighting (predominantly dark blue and gray) is an aura of mourning and vigils. Next door, Xiao-Kang's mother lives her grief, distinguished by a warm candle flame and two red lanterns on the shelf. It feels a very different range of feelings than her son – longing and passion for her deceased husband, which found a touching and touched expression in the scene of a romantic dinner with the deceased, as well as in the scene where the mother masturbates in front of the photo of her husband.
In another scene, there is a “family portrait” – a compositional triangle from Xiao-Khan, mother and catfish (conditionally father), which triggers a game of imagination in search of an answer to the question, where did the father’s spirit enter? This fantastic interpretation follows the storyline of the death of his father and his further fate, set by the everyday mysticism of Taiwan and karmic overtones. In the appearance of the father’s spirit against the background of the Ferris wheel, symbolizing the “wheel of samsara”, I see not only the Buddhist consolation, according to which everything is in an eternal cycle, but also the humor of Tsai. His father behaved like a smart tourist, saving money on the ticket and, contrary to popular expression, first died, and only then saw Paris. The wheel appears repeatedly, including in a scene where Xiao-Kang watches an episode from The Four Hits, in which Antoine rides the ride, a horizontal wheel that accelerates at breakneck speed. This is also a cycle of life, but nauseating and resonating with the depression of Xiao-Kang.
The double-time watch that Xiao-Kang sells Shiang-Zhi serves as an escapist doubling of time, a link to an imaginary Paris to which one can escape, if only by watching French films. It's also a connection to Shiang-ji. Tsai does not encroach on the panorama of meta-time, as it is, for example, shown with Hollywood-like gigantomania in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia or Cloud Atlas. For this, Tsai is too minimalist, he has enough double time as leads to the imagination, not to weave fates, but only to bring them closer. The time difference between Taipei and Paris is like a hole in the wall of loneliness through which you can stretch your thoughts and peek. Here it is not superfluous to recall the film “Hole”: there Xiao-Kang literally drilled a hole in the floor, after which an unusual communication with a neighbor from below began. The marvelous and inscrutable ways in which people are and are separated, the difficulty of entering into relationships and torpor (increased by the way Shiang-Zhi’s trip to Paris is shown, where she does not want to initiate contact with anyone), – the leitmotif of Tsai Minlian.
Watching Xiao-Kang is a contemplative, strange and very modern process. Sometimes it seems to me that life in Tsai’s view is an abandoned building with a dilapidated neon sign “Arthouse”, which was populated like squatters, strange people who did not pass the selection on reality TV and were left without funds for existence. As a result, it turned out to be an installation under close video surveillance: an unflappable rectangle for demonstrating everyday things and meeting pressing needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, coping with small need, which in Tsai’s poetics, perhaps, is already philosophically important. The more you watch the Taiwanese director's films, the more Xiao-Kang's urination feels like a calming stream of time. In the fixation of Tsai on his irreplaceable actor, there is more than just documentary interest - it is a sensual study of the anonymity of a person in the urban and apartment environment, who either waddles with his loneliness, then puts up with him for a while. It is as if the director once pushed Lee Kangsheng into the frame to live in it, and immediately began to watch him, as he occasionally makes eccentric pirouettes. Perhaps such a contemplation is the default view of another (the director) on his favorite object. And Lee Kangsheng, being a nasty duckling in terms of non-standard acting, does not even think to turn into a swan.