| Details | “The musical numbers are weapons that I use to confront the environment at the end of the millennium. Because I think that toward the end of the century a lot of qualities—such as passionate desire, naïve simplicity—have been suppressed. The musicals contain those qualities. It’s something that I use psychologically to confront the world.” —Tsai Ming-liang Commissioned in the late 1990s to make a film about the upcoming millennium, Tsai came up with this offbeat, slyly humorous musical fable. In the final days of 1999, a mysterious virus sweeps rain-soaked Taipei and turns people into human cockroaches. After a plumber leaves a hole in his apartment floor and never returns to fix it, a young man (Lee Kang-sheng) can see into the apartment of his neighbor (Yang Kuei-mei, another Tsai regular). The musical numbers—the weirdest this side of David Lynch—eventually unite these two characters in a surreal fantasy of bliss. “The most distilled, droll, and deftly realized allegory yet by this talented Taiwanese filmmaker” (J. Hoberman). (Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1998, 95 min., 35mm, Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles) 35mm collection print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. |
|---|