Director: Tsai Ming-Liang
Year Released: 2013
Rating: 2.5
A homeless drifter (Tsai stand-in Lee Kang-Sheng) strolls around Taipei with his two children and works as a 'sign holder' - they sleep in what appears to be part of an abandoned warehouse - but when a scent-obsessed grocery store clerk notices the kids in her store, she takes them to live with her (with the drifter following along). Normally I'm on Team Tsai and his methodical approach to filmmaking (in my opinion he made some of the best films of the aughts), but I don't feel this one leads anywhere revelatory: deprived of his sometimes devilish sense of humor, this continued exploration of loneliness and isolation (recurring themes in his work) ends up at a literal dead-end, with a protracted scene of Lee and the clerk staring off into ... oblivion? It takes a strange turn when Tsai, no stranger to transgressive moments, has Lee chew the head of a cabbage (with a crude drawing of a woman's face on it): it's an asinine moment that breaks up the rhythm of the movie.
