What Time Is It There?
Director: Tsai Ming-Liang
Year Released: 2001
Rating: 4.0
Haunting film from director Tsai, who is making a serious case for himself as being one of the greatest living filmmakers; here, he uses his typically offbeat, slowed-down technique to explore the pain of losing a loved one (in particular, the loss of one's father, whose spectral appearance haunts two particular scenes). It's so painstaking and heartfelt some may laugh - a few scenes are funny, but in a pitiable kind-of way - and the end result is something of a philosophical dissertation on time itself, how it separates people both physically and spiritually, how it ages us (Jean-Pierre Leaud has a cameo as both an old man and as the young man he was in The 400 Blows) and how it is unalterable. Profound.
