Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole is one of the great… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole is one of the great films about liv­ing in isolation

22 Mar 2020

Words by Ruairi McCann

Image shows a young woman sitting on the floor wearing a white vest top and looking directly at the camera.
Image shows a young woman sitting on the floor wearing a white vest top and looking directly at the camera.
The director’s slow cin­e­ma musi­cal from 1998 sees a mys­te­ri­ous epi­dem­ic send Taipei into lockdown.

Tai­wanese film­mak­er Tsai Ming-liang’s con­cep­tion of urban life is a lone­ly one, starved of direct phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al con­nec­tion. He express­es this through cin­e­mat­ic sting oper­a­tions; patient­ly observed, and often fun­ny, obser­va­tions of lives lived in iso­la­tion. Where time is killed by fix­at­ing on the often-uncom­fort­able real­i­ties of being crea­tures of mis­be­hav­ing flesh with an ingrained depen­dence on rou­tine. Tsai’s is a cin­e­ma that already seems to be under quarantine.

Released in 1998, Tsai’s fourth the­atri­cal fea­ture, The Hole, makes this metaphor lit­er­al. Begin­ning with a rare burst of explic­it nar­ra­tive con­text. Over a black screen the direc­tor lays down the chat­ter of news­read­ers and vox pops, explain­ing that on the eve of the year 2000 Taipei has been immo­bilised by a mys­te­ri­ous epi­dem­ic. As a result the city is in a lock­down, with every­one either long gone or stuck. The film then avoids the grand scale of a city-wide dis­as­ter in lieu of sub­mer­gence in a sin­gle locale; a tow­er block and then specif­i­cal­ly, two flats.

One is occu­pied by Hsiao-kang, the peren­ni­al moniker of Tsai’s muse Lee Kang-sheng, who brings again his strange­ly mechan­i­cal yet nat­u­ral­is­tic pres­ence. A Buster Keaton-esque daw­dle and a fer­tile blank­ness as he either inscrutable mopes around his quar­ters or main­tains a bode­ga where he spends more time dot­ing on local cats than ply­ing his wares. Mean­while, in the apart­ment direct­ly below Hsiao-kang’s, lives an unnamed woman (played by anoth­er Tsai reg­u­lar, Yang Kuei-mei). Her char­ac­ter and Yang’s per­for­mance con­veys lone­li­ness with rel­a­tive­ly more ver­biage and neu­roses, as she copes with the iso­la­tion and her apartment’s decay by home­spun care reg­i­men of egg yolk face wash, mas­tur­ba­tion and the hoard­ing of water and paper towels.

Their exis­tences would have remained only dis­crete, infringed only super­fi­cial­ly, if it were not for a breach. A hole that a plumber care­less­ly makes in Hsiao-kang’s apart­ment floor and there­fore the woman’s ceil­ing. It is this incon­ve­nience that brings them togeth­er, ini­tial­ly under the dynam­ic of a slap­stick duo with him, the addled nui­sance and her, the exas­per­at­ed straight man. Slow­ly though con­flict gives way to attrac­tion, with the hole act­ing as match­mak­er for these two lone­ly hearts. Pro­vok­ing, for the woman espe­cial­ly, a sex­u­al­i­ty that was pre­vi­ous­ly latent but now gains form in an inter­ject­ing series of fan­ta­sy sequences. Song and dance num­bers where she lip-syncs tunes of lust and love – crooned by Can­to pop icon Grace Chang – at her object of desire, Hsiao-kang.

These sequences shed light on an often-over­looked aspect of Tsai’s cin­e­ma. It is easy to sim­ply box him in as a min­i­mal­ist; not­ing how his pref­er­ence for long takes and a lack of clear nar­ra­tive cause and effect posi­tions him as one of the prog­en­i­tors of slow cin­e­ma’. Yet The Hole indulges a con­trary qual­i­ty. A covert max­i­mal­ist ten­den­cy that, apart from dis­play­ing a deep affec­tion for the the­atrics and direct­ness of both pop and musi­cals, exem­pli­fies how his films artic­u­late the dif­fi­cul­ty in find­ing out­er expres­sion for inner quan­daries through what Tsai dubs the coun­ter­point” between real­ist depic­tion and non-real­ist elements.

Ini­tial­ly this can be seen in action with­in the same frame, with the first num­ber where the woman mimes Chang’s Calyp­so’. After being seen sub­sist­ing in casu­al wear she is now sud­den­ly dolled up in an evening dress and shim­my­ing in an open ele­va­tor which is equal­ly bedaz­zled. This yearn­ing for a bit of glam­our, as an escape from a squalid envi­ron­ment, is both rein­forced, as fan­ta­sy, and under­mined by the real­ism of the rest of the scene’s décor, a fair­ly mun­dane look­ing atri­um, remains untransformed.

Lat­er num­bers are cut more like clas­sic Hol­ly­wood and Cathay musi­cals and up the fan­ta­sy with more cos­tume changes and cho­rus girls and danc­ing suit­ors prowl­ing through impro­vised but increas­ing­ly elab­o­rate set design. The dis­junc­ture then is in how these scenes are marked­ly removed from the look and, espe­cial­ly, the sounds of the rest of the film. For to con­jure, with accu­ra­cy, the mélange of dead air and gran­u­lar detail of being alone, Tsai opts for direct nat­ur­al sound, pay­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the chaf­ing of fab­ric against skin, the slurp­ing of food and the flux of flu­ids both bod­i­ly and soon to be.

While in the musi­cal sequences the arti­fi­cial, or the imag­ined, com­plete­ly can­cels this all out, with only Grace Chang and her accom­pa­ni­ment present in the mix. That the woman’s emo­tions are trans­par­ent when chan­nel­ing Chang and that she is artic­u­late when she is not, speaks to how the inner knot of desires is not solved but suc­coured by fan­ta­sy. Feed­ing off and con­tra­ven­ing a real­i­ty, regard­less of whether it is crum­bling or not, can offer lim­it­ed satisfaction.

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