o hand in hand

the hole is the second film i've seen by taiwanese director tsai ming liang. the first was what time is it there?, which i posted about shortly after starting this blog. having loved what time..., i had high expectations going into this earlier film (1998), and i must say it lived up to them.

the hole is a kind of minimalist take on the plague/apocalypse theme that's been popular lately (in 28 days later and so on), focused around an apartment complex in taiwan. there is a never ending rainstorm in town, the water is contaminated, and, if ingested, victims become ill with a disease called "taiwan fever." this fever, revealed to us in a moment of deadpan cronenberg schlockiness, forces its victims to crawl about like human cockroaches, prior to their demise. morbid as it sounds, the subject is dealt with rather lightly. the film inhabits a periphery of b-movie morsels such as this, but is for the most part crawlingly slow-- not to mention a quasi-romantic comedy.

the slowness is perhaps not unlike that of early jim jarmusch-- in a film like stranger than paradise, for example. but it is stylistically more cut-up, and the humor is more inexplicable (note the occasional song and dance numbers that seem to pop up out of nowhere). this slowness might also be comparable to a film like wong kar wai's excellent in the mood for love, but the tone is less reverent, and the "look" of the film is as abject as mood is handsome.

**sidenote: the casting in the hole is, i think, interesting to note here. both of the central characters (yang kuei-mei and tsai-regular lee kang-sheng) have a sharp, ugly/beautiful vibe to them. lee kang-sheng especially has a similiar, ehh, "anti-aesthetic" sort of attractiveness as someone like vincent gallo. while neither are particularly unattractive in a conventional sense, they lack typical, glamourized good looks. and both are effectively sexy. perhaps the one annoying tendency in wong kar wai's films, on the other hand, is that he is reluctant to break away from a kind of fashion-magazine seduction in his characters. this is perhaps the only attribute within his films that strikes me as "conventional."**

like what time is it there?, the hole is essentially a romance about two people who only briefly meet. if this "distant love affair" theme is the director's over-arching pre-occupation, it is certainly a refreshing addition to the cinematic landscape of madonnas and whores and vigilante retribution and so on. in this film, the relationship is maintained by (fittingly) a hole in the floor of the male lead's apartment, leading down into the female lead's. a plumber creates this hole at the start of the film while trying to determine if their pipeline has been infected. as the film progresses, we watch as the contaminated rain eats away at the apartments themselves. what unites the two characters, i suppose, is their mutual stubborn-ness in not abandoning their homes. the motivation for this conviction is a complete mystery. unless i missed something. heh heh.

the evolving, deteriorating environment in which the almost-love-affair is set has a wonderful physicality to it. the building becomes a kind of gross-out third party to the two central characters. tsai gets great mileage out of the logistics of his premise-- as the environment grows increasingly contaminated, the building itself moves to the forefront as an instrument of yucky erotic expression. you sense this, in a perverted sort of way, as the man pees into the sink rather than the toilet (my guess is because he assumes the toilet's plumbing is more likely to drip into the woman's apartment), or as the woman sprays an aerosol can into the eyes of the man while she suspects he is watching her. as slimy and stinky as all of this sounds, it somehow evokes the goofball warmth of an old chaplin silent. the merging of seemingly unrelated ingredients here is really quite brilliant.

i could go on and on about all of this, and i already have. one final thought is that part of the film's unique-ness is its distinctly sweet handling of the hip philosophical pre-occupation known as "the abject." there is none of the foreboding analysis of, for example, a mike kelley stuffed animal sculpture. and the eroticism is distinctly different from that of georges bataille or what have you. and yet, the effect is not superficial. as an examination of such a theme, it holds up as something of significance. and it sure as hell holds up as a movie, too.