The 400 Blow Jobs

Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald

But The Wayward Cloud was not yet over. Just like Chantal Akerman’s statement that, after the climactic murder which concludes the plot of Jeanne Dielman (1975), there are still 'eight strong minutes' left, Tsai gives us a portrait-shot of Shiang-chyi, a cock in her mouth and a tear slowly rolling down her face, which lasts over ninety seconds. And then one final golden-oldie song, straddling the final shot and the blackness of the credits ...

What is going on in this final scene of The Wayward Cloud? It is not enough to say that the scene is dark and shocking, and that the film is thus an accusation of pornography, an exposé of sexual alienation and commodification (Shiang-chyi transformed into a compliant porn body-double). Nor is it accurate to charge Tsai with misogyny, or a wholesale contempt for human sexuality. For, on one level, Tsai’s cinema has always been, in a crucial sense, matter-of-factly pornographic, showing (in a less heightened register) many of the same actions we see here: masturbation (often extravagantly inventive), quickie sex with prostitutes in cars, anonymous gay bathhouse encounters (all the way to the father-son clinch in The River [1997]). A general air of muckiness and a fix on ‘making do’ with small, furtive possibilities for sexual communion (frequently perverse and indirect) are central to his work – indeed, they provide the ground for a very particular kind of Romanticism which marks him as a modern artist.

So one must grasp and experience the ambiguous ‘fusion’ of Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang in The Wayward Cloud in the context of the entire film, the entire series formed by this film, What Time Is It There? and the short The Skywalk is Gone (2003), and even within the entire œuvre of Tsai. We will consider the final twenty-one shots (approximately fourteen minutes), comprising the final chapter of the Taiwanese DVD release. It is important to bear in mind what Nicole Brenez has called, in reference to Godard, the volumetric nature of the succession of images: ‘each image is called on by others, every image prefigures others, every image makes way for or obstructs the passage of others.’ (1) This ‘volumetrics of the shot’ occurs in Godard across a montage of many different kinds of images (film, video, archival, stills, fiction, documentary, etc), but Tsai – like Antonioni or Akerman – creates the same complexity within the deceptively singular frame of his mise en scène.

Shot 1 is through the grill that will become the pivot of the scene; we see Hsiao-kang and the crew getting to work on the porno shoot, manipulating Sumomo Yozakura’s body. (There is a visual rhyme between this crew and the road workers that Shiang-chyi encounters earlier.) The figure of the grill restates both the distance of separation and the possibility of being an observer of such a scene – the two indispensable, paradoxically interconnected preconditions of Tsai’s cinema. An earlier appearance of a grill appears during Lu Yi-ching’s musical number, where it stands for the romantic longing induced by separation and distance.

Shot 2 is the most formally dramatic moment of the film, the only shot containing a slow, deliberate camera movement not tied to the motion of a character – like De Oliveira, Tsai frequently holds back an essential element of his cinematic syntax for maximum effect. This camera movement announces to us that something very heavy is about to happen – and that Shiang-chyi, eventually entering the frame from the side, will witness it.

Shot 3 shows the crew at work. This is the ‘real’ counterpart to the sex scene that (after the opening carpark shot) begins the film. In that earlier scene, a certain surrealism rules: there is no crew visible or alluded to in any way, even though the sex-act is clearly a ‘performed’, porno one (complete with doctor and nurse costumes).

Shot 4, the shortest and most functional of the scene, offers a side-on view of Shiang-chyi looking through the grill. But notice – it is important for what occurs stylistically later – how Tsai’s normal practice is to eschew repeated set-ups, and almost always (as here) to compose a different angle to reiterate an action, even as it remains static or unchanging.

Shot 5 offers a diagram of the scene’s mounting sense of drama. Shiang-chyi is framed in the background but in focus, while Sumomo Yozakura’s head rolls about, in blurred focus, in the foreground. When the crew move for another angle, Hsiao-kang’s humping body is comically shoved off-screen. Shiang-chyi turns away from the window. This action invites a simple psychological reading (she turns away in disgust), but The Wayward Cloud is not a psychologically-driven narrative film in any conventional sense. More than in Tsai’s previous works, there is a basic sketch of intersubjective positions – Shiang-chyi’s and Hsiao-kang’s growing feeling for each other, his sexual impotence or discomfort outside of the porno-shoot situation – set within a sequence of actions that obeys the logic both of a rigorously poetic surrealism (watermelons in the river, bubbles from the tap, transformation of food substances in a wok, a key in concrete that, once pried free, releases a pool of water) and of a certain kind of ‘performance art’ (Shiang-chyi’s pretend-pregnancy, Hsiao-kang’s gymnastics up the walls). The fact that Shiang-chyi’s turning-away action is not psychologically transparent is crucial in laying the ground for what she is to do later in the scene.

2. Cf. Adrian Martin, ‘Musical Mutations’, in Martin & J. Rosenbaum (eds.), Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 94-108.

3. Cf. Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

Shot 6 reprises a central visual motif of the film: a separation of two spaces that are split down the middle. This motif receives a fulsome comedy treatment in an earlier apartment scene between Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang. Across this divide, there is the spark of connection between the two characters: he looks at her, she turns her body back towards the window. Physical separation, and barriers that create such distance, are a standard metaphor for interpersonal alienation in Tsai’s work. In The Wayward Cloud, however, the analysis of this alienation is considerably deepened. What brings us to this final scene is an entire ‘alienated economy’ of capital and psyche springing from a simple but brilliant subtraction: a world without water. Previously in Tsai’s films, water richly served a triple function: all at once natural (rain, rivers), social (bathrooms, bottled water) and corporeal (in and out of orifices). In this city deprived of water, both it and its substitute (watermelon juice) accrue fetishistic value as forbidden or ‘unnatural’ conduits to human contact. (Television broadcasts humourously inform us of the latest teen dating rituals involving watermelon gifts.) In fact, The Wayward Cloud brilliantly demonstrates the startling analogy that Paul Willemen once suggested between sex scenes in porno flicks and the song-and-dance numbers in musicals: both offer (in the terms of Richard Dyer’s famous analysis of musicals) the spectacle of a fantasised abundance in place of a real, material scarcity. (The link with porno extends the work already done by Tsai on the meaning of the musical genre in The Hole [1998].) (2)

Shots 7-15. Shot 7 begins a pattern that is highly unusual in a Tsai film, because it is seemingly familiar and conventional: shot/reverse-shot alternation. Beginning on him, the back-and-forth volley continues until shot 15 – with the sole variation (again reasonably conventional) of a close-up angle on him from shot 12 onwards. Does Tsai simply use this arrangement as the simplest and best way to maintain the tension of the mounting ‘mutual’ orgasm? (Note the genius of the post-dubbed sound design in these shots and, indeed, throughout the film: the way Shiang-chyi’s orgasmic moans fade up from silence and seem to not quite belong to her body – at first, one might imagine they are the death-rattle of Sumomo Yozakura.) In fact, this alternation of shots is the ‘closing bracket’ of the overarching structure that shapes the entire film. In its opening minutes, Tsai uses a pattern of scene-alternation that is also unusual in his work: the doctor-and-nurse scene is intercut, three times over, with the scene of Shiang-chyi watching television in her apartment (with the filmmaker’s rhyming/matching imagination in overdrive: watermelon between legs/ottoman between legs, juice on body/juice in pitcher, etc – as well as the introduction of the flower motif that will later become dominant in its circulation between fantasy and reality realms). From that point, Tsai rigorously alternates between scenes involving Shiang-chyi and scenes involving Hsiao-kang (with a diversion for secondary character of Lu Yi-ching and her musical interlude). Tsai’s work in general, and this film in particular, give renewed vitality to the structures of alternation and repetition that Raymond Bellour analysed in the 1970s. (3) And Tsai returns to the very same ‘motor’ of that cinematic machine which Bellour identified: the introduction, separation and reunion/fusion of the couple. In its ‘open’ (i.e., unclosed) form, the alternation between these two characters and their separate narrative threads structures both What Time Is It There? and The Skywalk is Gone – with the pay-off that, precisely, there is no pay-off, no encounter between them, no resolution of yearning or fulfilment of desire. What marks the radical novelty of The Wayward Cloud and its significance in Tsai’s artistic evolution is the fact that – one way or another – this contact is going to occur.

Shots 16-21. Shot 16 – recording Hsiao-kang’s momentous ‘breach’ of the distance held firm in the previous short-alternation – marks a complete ‘redrawing’ of the scene’s co-ordinates and elements. From this moment, the porno crew and its equipment completely disappear from the images, never to reappear in the final minutes of the film. How easy it would have been for Tsai to include the satirical and blackly comic gag of a microphone or camera lens shoving into this transgressive action! But this is not a return to the ‘seamless’ porno of the doctor-nurse scene; it is the veritable opening up of another world within the real world. (Even in the way the découpage carves out and defines the spatiality of the scene, this is so: the shot of hands-on-head at the grill, the low angle on Hsiao-kang near the ceiling, the images of buttocks and tears already described, and the final wide-angle shot create a zone markedly different to the one we have previously seen constructed.) This scene has to be experienced as an absolutely historic event in the Tsai œuvre: an overturning, in a single stroke, of the alienated distance that has hitherto determined the melancholic ‘sentimental destinies’ of every one of his narratives.

We have now looped back to the images (and sounds!) that caused such consternation at the Brisbane screening. Afterwards, in the foyer, a moviegoer could be heard cynically asking: ‘Is that ending meant to be the triumph of amour fou?’ But it is not as simple as that; rather than some moment of pure transgression, in the final scene elements from previous scenes (for example, the fellatio recalls the stuffing of Sumomo Yozakura’s mouth with watermelon in the first porn scene) are reformulated into an imperfect, impure scenario which nonetheless contains a moment of connection (Hsiao-kang’s buttocks ‘cry’, as well as Shiang-chyi’s eyes, signalling the breaking drought, water from the body). Tsai has said that he is ‘pro-sex, but anti-pornography’ yet when Shiang-chyi and the cut-outs of China Airlines stewardesses mirror Hsiao-kang and the porn crew, we are close to realising that to maintain this credo requires some extreme or all-too-human action. The coming together of Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang may be within a strange and compromised world but it is also, within the entire context of Tsai’s œuvre, ecstatic: it is the expression of love they arrive at, and we (as spectators) bear witness to its power.