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Master Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang directs this look at three
people looking for human connection. Hsiao-kang (Tsai regular Lee
Kang-sheng) is a young man who sells watches from a briefcase in front
of Taipei's train station. When his father (Mio Tien) suddenly dies at
the beginning of the film, it sends Hsiao-kang and his mother, Lu, on
two radically different trajectories. His grieving mother becomes
obsessed with the return of her dead husband's spirit. Hsiao-kang starts
to urinate into plastic bags and bottles rather than risk bumping into
his father's ghost in the middle of the night. Around that same time,
Hsiao-kang encounters an aggressive, though beautiful, lass named
Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi) who is travelling in a couple of days to
Paris. Entranced by the girl, he reluctantly sells her his own watch
even though he believes that item has some connection to his father. The
encounter leaves with Hsiao-kang with a fixation that Paris is in
another time. Soon, he is changing each and every clock he can find back
seven hours to Parisian time, forging an obscure connection to
Shiang-chyi. Shiang-chyi herself finds Paris to be little different from
Taipei in terms of alienation and isolation. Though she has run ins
with several people, including an irate Frenchman in the middle of a
lover's tiff and none other than Jean-Pierre Leaud in a cemetery, she
only finds some comfort when she meets a woman from Hong Kong (Cecila
Yip) who generously shares her hotel room with her. This film was
screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival.
