In Rebels of the Neon God, Ah-Tze (Chao-jung Chen) enters a barely furnished room, takes off his shirt, smells it, lights a cigarette, and lies down in bed the camera stays with him, in a static shot, as he masturbates while listening to his brother making love through the thin walls of his room. The core of Tsai Ming-liang's poetics of reality is significantly rooted in this spontaneous-apparently anecdotal-smelling gesture of his characters framed within the pervading duration of the long take. Only in solitude, characters completely strip off their social personae and behave as they are. Invariably, in Tsai's world, they turn to their bodies as the only site where they can shelter their emotive imbalance.

Tsai's recurrent use of the establishing shot/long take epitomizes his programmatic attempt to show the reality of his characters' lives as inserted in the spaces where they coexist. He structures his films through the shifting immediacy of the moment that unsutures the conventional narrative. It extends through time and is only limited by the very linearity of film itself. Tsai distinguishes four phases in his filmmaking career. First, he centered on the observation of people. This stage became, unsuccessful, however, since he claims to have failed in getting “under the skin of his characters.” Second, he studied the observation of collective behaviors, a stage in which, he admits that “something was missing.” Third, he focused on the observation of his actors-people he knows well and who change (age) from film to film-and his ultimate attempt to get “under their skin.” This third phase led into the fourth, the observation of himself, of how the environment changes him.

In the closing scene of What Time Is It There?, the dead patriarch-who also plays the father role in The River and Rebels of the Neon God-reappears unexpectedly in the empty streets of Paris. This narrative move stands as an unprecedented and dramaticgesture in Tsai's filmmaking. For Tsai's project, based to a great extent in leaving any dramatic-artificial-sign out of his narratives and the persistent attempt to “show reality,” resorts, suddenly, to the supernatural-a dead Taiwanese man appears alive on the other side of the world. The ghostly father figure the contingent law of affective (dis)encounters that shapes the story. Whereas the supernatural had been previously used in vacuous attempts by the individual to come to terms with the perverted nature of his/her self-isolation-the mother trying to use spiritual healers to bring back her husband in What Time Is It There? or Lee Kang-sheng visiting healing temples in The River-it is uncharacteristically offered here to the spectator as one of the many scenarios in which the monad adrift is figured. The female lead sleeps in a bench near the Louvre in Paris, after her anti-climatic failure to engage sexually with her Hong-Kong acquaintance, her luggage floating in a fountain, lost in its quiet waters. The dead father reappears, takes her luggage out of the water, only to throw it back. Then he observes her in silence and walks away.

In Tsai's narratives, characters intersect but they never truly interact and exchange. Their affections never match. As a result, they turn toward themselves and their body in a final cry of desperation. Lin, the female broker in the concluding scene of Vive L'Amour, walks away from the city into a desolate construction field and sits in the empty stands of a stadium, crying alone, lighting a cigarette, and resuming her crying as the camera lingers in her helplessness, making the spectator a privileged witness to a moment that's bound to continue. Likewise, Lee Kang-sheng, in The River, gets up after having sex with his father the night before in the separating darkness of a room in a gay bath house, and exits to the balcony of his hotel room, to walk back and forth, from side to side, caged in the grotesque fiasco of his body, unable to bear the burden of the mysterious neck pain that cannot be resolved. The dead father's observation of the sleeping woman becomes particularly significant in this context. He aims to meet the other although he fails ultimately and leaves. In this sense, this glimpse of communicative hope rhymes with the final gesture of reciprocity -tainted with the certainty of death-of the upstairs neighbor to the female downstairs in The Hole. They finally meet. However, the mutual acknowledgement of the other only occurs when their death is figured as inevitable.

Tsai's undertaking is rooted in the stripping off of social masks in the moment where the individual, facing the asynchronicity of affection between the other and the self, can only turn to his/her body-pissing, masturbating, smoking a cigarette, taking a bath-locked in the four walls of a room. It is then when Tsai's camera finds its way “under their skin,” remaining static in front of the individual, framing him/her as inserted in the space in which he/she belongs. For, in Tsai's world, characters' emotions do not exist in the dramatic gesture of the close-up or the seamless invisibility of the conventional shot/reverse shot structure. Likewise, his stories are not anchored in the rhetorical move of the establishing shot that identifies a certain scenario through which the characters would move, interact and then zooms in to come to a resolution of a specific conflict. On the contrary, scenario and characters are components of a continuum that encompasses as well the time of their existences. Tsai plants his camera in a certain space, rolls the film and waits for events to happen, for things to constantly change, for the unexpected nature of the uncontrollable reality he/she encounters to unravel in its defining imprecision.

In Tsai's world, the dichotomy inside/outside is rendered senseless; the aesthetic gesture zoom in/out becomes-both technically and metaphorically-unreal. The fast-paced continuity editing of the conventional narrative is absent. Moreover, it is figured-by its absence-as the duping mechanism that leaves out precisely what Tsai aims to capture as the kernel of his reality. Those moments in which characters, left out in isolation, can be true to themselves and to their bodies.

Unlike Wong Kar-wai's narratives, in which characters confront the fading immediacy of their intimate sharing through interior monologue, Tsai's follow their characters' futile attempts to communicate with the contiguous other into the non-verbal loneliness of bedroom space or the deserted landscape. They never articulate their anguish. In What Time Is It There?, the mother, after persistently trying to bring back the spirit of her husband unsuccessfully, masturbates in her bedroom only to end up crying, staring at the empty space he has left and which will never be refilled. Likewise, in Rebels of the Neon God, after Kang observes from a bare hotel room how his plans to avenge Ah-Tze's attack of her father's taxi have succeeded, he jumps on the bed in joy until he hits the ceiling and sits down mournfully, not knowing what to do next. Or, in Vive L'Amour, Hsiao-kang, after masturbating under the bed while the real estate agent and the street peddler make love, crawls into the bed after she has left and kisses the peddler, only to face the fact that the other would never respond to his love, and leaves.

If Tsai's characters turn toward themselves in order to bear the frightening reality of their affective mismatches, his narratives highlight the contradiction between the horizontal mobility of his characters within the limits of the cityscape-the teenagers riding their motorcycles in Rebels of the Neon God, the real estate agent driving from location to location in Vive L'Amour, or Lee Kang-sheng and his father driving around Taipei to cure Kang's neck pain in The River-and the verticality of their leaking apartments. For instance, in Rebels of the Neon God, every time it rains, Ah-Tze's apartment is flooded; or in The River, each attempt to stop the leaking water from the upstairs apartment is rendered fruitless. However, The Hole epitomizes literally and metaphorically Tsai's leaking leit-motif.

In the seven days before the millennium, Taipei has been hit by a mysterious, fatal epidemic. When prompted to leave their households by the state officials-since the water supply is going to be cut and they won't be able to survive by staying-many residents express, in voiceover, desperation and unwillingness to move. They have lived all their lives in the same place and they cannot understand or imagine being somewhere else. The Hole departs from a scenario-an immediate living experience-that problematizes the all-encompassing concept of the global; where imagination-the driving force of Appadurai's positive take on globalization in Modernity at Large as the contact zone of distant individuals and communities-can only exist once the familiarity of the immediate space of survival is guaranteed.

Facing that scenario, two tenants, a woman and her male upstairs neighbor, choose to remain where they live, as the rain persists and a bad plumbing job leaves a hole in the upstairs living room, connecting the two apartments. As the water keeps leaking, the woman's apartment begins to fall apart; as the symptoms of the millennium virus start affecting her body, she fails to acknowledge the blunt reality of such condition and chooses to remain in isolation inside the four walls of her apartment. Meanwhile, the male upstairs neighbor continues his daily routine-smoking constantly, drinking innumerable cans of beers, opening his little shop in a deserted market.

The communicating hole between the two apartments does not function as a fracture in the alienating materiality of the apartment complex that might channel reciprocity between two isolated neighbors. Conversely, it activates a voyeuristic drive in the man that she instantaneously reads as a threat to her intimacy, prompting her to close the hole time after time. However, all her attempts are rendered futile. Either he reopens the hole driven by his voyeuristic interest or the leaking water-that eventually floods her apartment-denies her wish to regain intimacy. In the end, when he realizes that the “Taiwan virus” has infected her, he encounters the desperation of complete loneliness and bursts out in tears, breaking his aseptic lack of emotion. For the first time he realizes that his monadic, self-isolating existence is inscribed in the relational. For only the presence of the other establishes a human being as such. In a final dramatic gesture, he extends his hand down to her apartment to offer her a glass of water as he hears her crawling-the unmistakable symptom of the virus. She drinks the water and looks up, seeing him as a human being for the first time. He takes the glass of water and offers her his hand once more, lifting her out of her flooded apartment. The gap between the two has been canceled. However, he has only been able to relate to her once he has realized that the fatality of her condition is irreversible. By taking her hand, he also seals his imminent death since, by touching her, the life-ending virus will infect him. Tsai frames this scene with a single establishing shot set in her living room. The upstairs neighbor's hand enters the top of the frame as it reaches for her. Significantly enough, when his hand lifts her over to his apartment, Tsai's camera remains static as she disappears through the upper limit of the frame. Their final sharing occurs outside the bleak space of isolation that Tsai's mise-en-scène depicts throughout, in one of the interpolated musical numbers that stop the narrative flow and reshape the corridors and elevators of the apartment building as spaces of fantasy.

This horizontal/vertical motif acquires a further global dimension in What Time Is It There?. For the first time, Tsai's narrative leaves the asphalt neon of Taipei and alternates between the harassing lack of comfort-the irrational fear of the space known-of the female protagonist in Paris, and the wanderings around Taipei of the street seller-Hsiao-kang. After she buys his watch-that model out of stock, he concedes to sell his own upon her insistence-she leaves for Paris. From that moment, he anchors his existence in the hopeless need to share an affective contiguity with this random female acquaintance by changing the time of every clock and watch he encounters to Paris time. His desperate move to cancel out the time difference is not only rooted in his desire to get closer to her but also in the unconscious need to re-establish her as one of the monadic beings that share the alienating isolation of the gloomy Taipei mayhem. Had she not mentioned her trip to Paris, she would have never become the focus of his obsessive longing. What the street seller faces with her departure is the blatant realization of his own entrapment in Taipei. He confronts, suddenly, the sheer hopelessness to communicate with his immediate peers. What he longs for cannot be framed within the coordinates of the conventional “male/female love interest” but as a desire to be somewhere else, to be allowed the chance to re-discover the other in an unknown space where the communicative gap might be sewn up. However, Tsai's narrative answers Hsiao-kang's desire with a series of consecutive episodes in the streets of Paris in which her failure to meet the other is increasingly exposed. Hsiao-kang's compulsive attempts to escape the alienating isolation of Taipei become, then, sordidly futile, tinted ironically with the female's colorless lonesomeness in Paris. For, we know and he doesn't that she might have switched the hour in every watch/clock she encountered before, and once her dream to run away has been accomplished, she only confronts loneliness, fear, and failure.

The spatial distancing from Taipei caused by the female protagonist's trip to Paris allows Tsai to endow the self-isolating affective mismatch of the urban monad with a global dimension. What Time Is It There? re-evaluates the non-specificity of Tsai's recurrent Taiwanese scenario only to reinforce the transnational nature of the individual's isolation and his/her communicative collapse when faced with the other. Escapism-such a vacation in Paris-is rendered as an inane spatial move that remains inside the vortex of the affective mismatch the individual feels inside the urban space. Paris and Taipei are depicted as two geographically distant points that cannot be joined through the drawing of a straight line. Hsiao-kang and the female protagonist, as physically far as ever, are in actuality in the other's place as much as in their own. Although both spaces are marked by their own culturally and historically specific referents, the individual remains locked in an analogous affective deadlock. Global access and mobility becomes, consequently, a mechanism that reiterates the affective loop of isolation inside which human beings are trapped.

In the last scene of What Time Is It There? the three defining spatial movements of Tsai's narratives meet in the temporal dynamics of the establishing shot/long take. As the female protagonist's luggage moves adrift through water, the dead father walks away from the camera while a wheel circles in the background, looping indefinitely. Their emotional gap is never bridged. Instead the individual walks away in solitude only to face the circular invariability that will bring back the contingent opportunity to communicate with the other. A path that will never be taken. Only after death, like the dead eyes of the ghostly figure of the father in What Time Is It There?, can the individual observe and fully comprehend the other's isolating burden. Precisely when a bridging-the-gap move is impossible.

It's tempting to draw lines of comparison between the European auteurs of the Sixties or the Italian Neorealist project and Tsai's filmmaking. What Time Is It There? pays direct homage to Truffaut's 400 Blows and the urban scenarios, the affective wariness of his characters and the slow-tempo narrative structures of the Malaysian filmmaker establish multiple connecting paths with Antonioni's well-known trilogy-L'Avventura, La Notte, and The Eclipse. If “modern filmmaking” is understood in the two-fold dynamics of stylistic experimentation-i.e. giving the spectator an awareness of the very process of aesthetic construction-and the compromise to capture the changing reality of a specific historical momentum, the comparative study of Tsai's films and the highly innovative European New Waves from the Sixties and Seventies seems to be a promising arena of exploration. If, however, Tsai's films are taxonomized within the pre-programmed Eurocentric problematics of modernity and, instead of challenging such categorization, are fit into the mold of the pre-established “modern,” the thought-provoking challenge posed by Tsai's films will be dissolved in a cannibalistic miasma of Orientalist overtones.

This possible-Eurocentric-phagocytic move rhymes metaphorically with the decisive economic imbalance between the late capitalist centers of power and its satellite-colonies in the era of globalization. For, as consumption extends its tentacles over time and space, and we are all allured in the fantasy that we can get anything, anytime, anywhere through the technological instantaneity of the monstrous ever-growing communication network that erases distances and bridges time differences, the individual faces again and again the failure to fulfill what had been promised. In a final desperate move to avoid hysteria, he/she turns to him/herself, to his/her own body, again and again, duping him/herself in the immediate pleasure of the physical relief. This discharge proves to be insufficient in Tsai's world since it never seals the open wounds of the disparity between desire and reality. This physical release, when out of control, as in The River, becomes the exterior symptom of the internal nightmare the monad lives, jacketed in the realization of his/her unbridgeable separation with the other.

Andre Bazin's concept of “pure cinema”-no actors, no story, no sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is “no more cinema”-provides a stimulating framework to understand Tsai's films. His compromise to show reality is not only rooted in the use of (mostly) non-professional actors (almost the same group in all his films), the practical lack of story in his narratives, or the invariable rejection of the fabricated studio to shoot, but also in the casual intimate gesture that the individual only carries out when alone, fearless to be what he/she truly is. At times, one feels Tsai's actors forget the camera is rolling in front of them and act out their own true selves. Here is precisely where reality dwells: inside the changing subjectivity of the individual unafraid to act out the immediacy of the self and touch-or be touched by-the world around him/her. An experience that Tsai's films challenge the spectator to explore, bodily and relentlessly.