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Pretty Good

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The sex scene is disgusting? Yes it meant to be disgusting. The truth is that porn industry exploits sex and porn stars. It is reality. reality not only bites but can also be very annoying. Unlike what we see in porn movies they acted as if they enjoyed the sex. What we see in porn movies isn't real and therefore we can be turned on. Through the camera a lot of things can be hid. But this film was supposed to reveal the truth behind the camera of porn movies. The final scene (sex of love) is the contrast with porn sex. Yes, I felt disturbed at the scene of the woman unconscious. But that's how Tsai emphasizes the dehumanization of the porn industry. You never know the feeling of heartbreak until you see the actors in the porn you rent are people you know or even care about. Before that you might be doing whatever to yourself... Finally, Wayward Cloud is not only artistic-and-that's-all, basically it's a movie full of sensitivity, compassion and love. I don't see why people described it as nonsense or bullshit. BTW, is it a bias that a commentator from US actually believed Taiwanese people have sex with watermelon?

Tsai is back with his alter ego, the pretty-boy punk, Lee Kang-sheng, who this time has stopped selling watches and become a small time porn actor (I guess). The girl who wanted him, Chen Shiang-chyi, is back too and this time, they get together in the end (sort of).Avantgardist filmblogger Adam Balz writes," The Wayward Cloud, a film by Tsai Ming-liang, is a profound glimpse into the sheltered world of pornography." Actually, Tsai can't really be trying to represent pornography accurately. His "pornography" shooting scenes are monotonous rabbit-style hump jobs by Lee Kang-sheng with real Japanese porn actress Sumomo Yazakura. The whole film is very impressionistic and surreal. The "world of pornography" is "represented" by nothing but lengthy shots of the boy, the girl, a cameraman and a light man, none of whom talk.Balz admiringly continues with a question that without him we might not have thought of asking: "Who else would open a movie with a lengthy shot of an empty parking ramp, only to shift to a woman clad in a nurse's uniform lying on a bed with a half-watermelon placed over her genitalia? That style of unabashed risk-taking is something we'll never find in mainstream Hollywood, not for a long time." Mainstream Hollywood will not be jealous of the accomplishment of a lengthy shot of an empty parking ramp. The lady with the watermelon is hardly a breakthrough either. Unabashed risk-taking? Tsai is simply setting a mood, or more accurately declaring that this is a Tsai film. But this beginning really might be the work of any pretentious film school student.What is arresting and way beyond film school are the lip-synced musical sequences of a chorus of women brandishing pink umbrellas and Lee Kang-sheng gyrating jauntily and gamely (the actor is nothing if not game) in a yellow raincoat, and he in a public men's room costumed as a giant penis with the women's chorus this time wearing orange cones jutting from their breasts and singing a song which can be interpreted as referring to lost erections. These sequences are a mixture of the comical and the purely bizarre that is truly jaw-dropping and might be very effective if incorporated into a satirical story, but Tsai was never made to work this way. His method is to hint and suggest. These sequences are simply interludes that liven up a depressing set of other scenes about lost people in a big apartment building in a city that's so low on water in summertime that people are requested to switch to watermelon juice. Yes, the girl is the one who met the boy when he was selling watches. In fact very early on she actually asks him, after a long mute sequence where they just stare at each other wordlessly, "Do you still sell watches?" He gives her a look as if to say, "You must be kidding!" What he's doing of course is acting in porno movies. Or he's supposed to be. As I said, his rabbit-style hump jobs are unlikely to be usable in even the most rudimentary kind of real porno movie; it's just a sketched-in way of saying, "This guy is a porn actor now." But what else is there? A final scene in which the porn actress is found by the girl in the elevator naked and seemingly passed out. Shiang-chyi drags her back to her apartment. It's a slow process, I can tell you. Eventually the porn filmmakers find her again, and decide that despite her apparently being unconscious or dead, she'll do to shoot another scene. So they drag Ms.Yazakura down to the other end of the hallway. That's a long process too. It was more fun sitting in the kitchen staring at nothing in What Time Is It There? or watching people watch a movie in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. If this film is so "audacious," why is it so often boring? The following sequence, which caused observers to walk out of the festival theater in sophisticated Berlin, and wherein the boy humps the corpse, or unconscious woman, while shot by the maniacal but wholly unsubtle filmmakers, watched by the girl through a large keyhole window right over the bed, till the boy has a big orgasm and gives it to the girl on the face, ends the movie.Balz begins, "In the first chapter of his 1979 book Seduction, French semiologist Jean Baudrillard discerned the spheres of sex in relation to pornography: "Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude." I guess that makes this a cool movie, for him. I'm afraid I found it a tremendous disappointment. The River was pretty and haunting in its desolate urban melancholy, and What Time Is It There? is a delicate depiction of loneliness and separation that playfully alludes to Truffaut. Tsai is playing around in Wayward Cloud in another sort of way, but it's one that this time comes dangerously close to complete solipsism. Rent a real musical or a real porno film, you'll be better off. Note: the French title of this film is "The Taste of Watermelon." But that's another story

Tsai's Wayward Cloud offers a brilliant analysis of pornography and its place as a medium-cum-barrier to human love. His use of water vs. watermelon motif, which parallels the love vs. alienated sex paradigm, conveys a poignant and yet powerful metaphor of the drought we suffer from in our soul. The last scene where the male protagonist's penis is violently inserted into the female protagonist's mouth beautifully sublimates the vulgar titillation we seek from mechanized sex and porns, while restoring the true beauty of human physical unity. The use of musicals interwoven with the main narrative was also meticulously executed, altering the audience to the film's structural and thematic chasm that the director deliberately employed to separate love from lust, life force from libido, and fulfillment from satisfaction. Overall, a compelling analysis/critique of porn and its place in our social psychic and structure: much more sophisticated and profound than any other feminist! critics have offered.

I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it was the most memorable film of the fest--more so than other great films screening like Capote or Brokeback Mountain and for sure, your run of the mill, Hollywood films like Elizabethtown, In her Shoes, Walk the Line, etc. Wayward Cloud is a daring film about love, sex and isolation, and it's set in an almost apocolyptic time when watermelon has become the source of water, food and fetish! The film is amazingly original.Definitely, the "real time" shots which are often utilized in Taiwanese film, can try your patience, but indeed there is a "zone" for Tsai Ming Liang's films and once you get there, all the images are mesmerizing--watching a woman walk up a flight of stairs, etc. And the sex scenes (which are plenty b/c the film deals with porn) further highlights our voyeuristic "mesmerization" reflected in the style of the film.Short of writing a spoiler, please please see this film (if it is distributed in your area)...the last shot is the most disgusting and most beautiful thing ever...you'll have to see for yourself.