What Time Is It There?
With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-ching, Miao Tien, Cecilia Yip, and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
I’m thinking in particular of two French filmmakers who are quite distinct in most other respects: Jacques Rivette and Jacques Tati. Rivette is the more obvious reference point because all of his films from 1968 through 1974 (far and away his richest and most exciting period to date)–the roughly four-hour feature L’amour fou (1968), the 13-hour serial Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971), the four-hour feature Out 1: Spectre (1972), and the three-hour feature Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)–are constructed as elaborate two-part inventions, oscillating back and forth between the members of a couple, 35- and 16-millimeter footage, theater and life, sanity and madness (L’amour fou); between various pairs of improvising actors, city and country, conspiracy and chaos (both versions of Out 1, which also move between theater and life, sanity and madness); and between two alternating stories, two heroines, and many rhyming shots and situations (Celine and Julie Go Boating).
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I won’t give away the film’s beautiful and mystical conclusion except to remark that what it accomplishes formally is the most unexpected yet appropriate visual rhyme of all, bringing us all the way back to the beginning of the film. It’s a rhyme, like so many others here, that we can feel emotionally before we start to process it intellectually–which helps explain why both times I’ve seen this film projected in 35-millimeter, first with a large festival audience and then at a well-attended press screening, you could have heard a pin drop. Though the film avoids a strong linear narrative in favor of an overall episodic focus on everyday activities, it has an uncanny capacity to make everything it shows seem important. And the absence of music only helps to accentuate the impact of individual sound effects, which are as pronounced as in any Tati film.
There’s no such scene of synthesis or coming together on the part of the son and young woman in What Time Is It There?–not necessarily because Tsai is less hopeful than Fejos, but because he realizes that the synthesis that matters the most is the one that Tati was aiming for: the one taking place inside each spectator, not the one that appears on-screen. It’s his own way of thinking globally, of finding hope in the midst of despair, of seeing a profound connectedness in the midst of alienation, and it carries a lift that could enlighten us all.
