What Time Is It There?
Tsai Ming-liang / TW, FR, 2001 / 114 min.
Young watch vendor Hsiao Kang from Taipei is infatuated with a lovely young girl. She leaves for Paris while he has to stay in Taipei to attend his father’s funeral. Tsai Ming-liang’s fifth feature film is a lightly absurdist, tragi-comic reflection on love, mourning and cinema’s function as a time machine.
To imagine himself in Paris, the lonely Hsiao Kang sets all the clocks in Taipei to Parisian time and watches François Truffaut’s debut film, the now classic Les quatre cent coups (1959). Will this bring him closer to his dream girl?
That question can scarcely be answered, however Hsiao Kang – played by Tsai's preferred actor Lee Kang-sheng – does get to know Paris through cinema. With Antoine Doinel, played by a super young Jean-Pierre Léaud, he spends a day wandering the streets of France’s capital as aimless and lost as Doinel, Truffaut’s alter ego.
Screening on 35mm from the Eye collection.
Special screenings
Details
Director
Tsai Ming-liang
Production year
2001
Country
TW, FR
Original title
Ni neibian jidian
Length
114 min.
Language
none
Subtitles
NLD
Format
35mm
Part of
2001
In its film programme 2001 – A Time Capsule, Eye Filmmuseum is marking the 25th anniversary of the year 2001 with a generous helping of nostalgia, screening 25 films that were released in 2001.
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