Stray Dogs

With Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, it takes no less than three shots and maybe two edits before you know – for absolute cer­tain – that you’re in the close com­pa­ny of a mas­ter film­mak­er, an artist who is in com­plete con­trol of every detail of every frame he cre­ates. The open­ing shot is of a woman sat along­side two sleep­ing chil­dren, one boy and one girl. She is comb­ing her hair in front of her eyes in what looks to be some kind of semi-con­scious tor­por. The room has black, water-dam­aged walls – as if ​“the house has been cry­ing,” she lat­er comments.

The long take con­tin­ues. The sole move­ment com­pris­es of the children’s cosy noc­tur­nal shifts. There’s so much tex­ture and infor­ma­tion in this stun­ning tableau: the fact that the woman is sit­ting beside the chil­dren sug­gests a strained rela­tion­ship; the decrepi­tude of the domi­cile infers that these peo­ple could live below the pover­ty line; yet, the sound­ness of the children’s sleep says that what­ev­er their lot in life, they’re con­tent with it.

Then bam, the first cut. And it takes us from dark­ness to light, inte­ri­or to exte­ri­or, from man-made to organ­ic, from the urban to the rur­al, from sleep to wake. It’s a hard, intense cut that gains even fur­ther impact from the length and qui­etude of the pre­vi­ous shot. We see the tan­gled roots of a giant tree as the chil­dren – for­ag­ing? play­ing? trav­el­ling? escap­ing? – wan­der by. Every cut in the film offers a tonal jolt fol­lowed by some kind of visual/​aural sur­prise. Tsai takes plea­sure in this sim­ple act of abrupt transportation.

A hag­gard father figure/​guardian is lat­er intro­duced, played by Tsai reg­u­lar and muse, Lee Kang-sheng (who also, inci­den­tal­ly, is behind the cal­lig­ra­phy used for the main title card). His sad-eyed per­for­mance here is canon-wor­thy, the burn­ing human force which com­ple­ments Tsai’s extra­or­di­nary long takes. With­in sin­gle shots, he is often moved to tears, gains com­po­sure, then is moved to tears again. Tech­ni­cal­ly, it defies belief.

Though eas­i­ly chalked up as a tough, obtuse art movie which pun­ish­es its audi­ence with a refusal to con­form to tra­di­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic gram­mar, Stray Dogs is in fact sim­plic­i­ty itself. As the title plain­ly puts it, this is a film which address­es the gru­elling dai­ly trails of the Tai­wanese under­class by pre­sent­ing them as a pack of rov­ing mutts, scav­eng­ing for food, blithe­ly blur­ring the line between pri­vate and pub­lic spaces, exist­ing on the fringes, indif­fer­ent to the ele­ments, ignored by every­one. The film is the direct artic­u­la­tion of that idea.

There are explo­sions of vio­lence, too, as even though these ​“dogs” drift through their unfor­tu­nate lives with qui­et impuni­ty, they are bur­dened with a sense of regret, cog­nisant of the lives of plen­ty they are being denied by the eco­nom­ic shack­les of the state. Cin­e­ma often focus­es on food and mate­r­i­al deca­dence, but rarely does it focus on the phys­i­cal act of eat­ing. There are two jaw-drop­ping scenes in Stray Dogs which see Lee devour­ing food in a vio­lent­ly vora­cious man­ner, reject­ing all com­mon eti­quette in a trag­ic acknowl­edge­ment of his sta­tus as a social out­sider. First, he hur­ried­ly sucks the gris­tle off a chick­en bone, and then lat­er, in a sin­gle take, he weeps while tear­ing at a raw cab­bage with his teeth.

The lat­ter scene is par­tic­u­lar­ly remark­able, as the cab­bage was, up to this point, being used as a head for a make-shift female pup­pet named Miss Big Boobs which the girl had cre­at­ed as a sleep­ing com­pan­ion. The act of eat­ing the cab­bage is in itself an intense spec­ta­cle, but the fact that it was being used as a human head makes the scene at once hor­ri­fy­ing, har­row­ing and strange­ly erotic.

With its con­stant focus on drip­ping faucets, leaky hous­es and dri­ving rain, this is unmis­tak­ably a Tsai Ming-liang joint. Here, the water that sur­rounds the char­ac­ters at every turn – rough weath­er, bogs, drains, build­ings, pub­lic restrooms – takes on an almost bib­li­cal pres­ence, as if even the inan­i­mate ele­ments bear a grudge against their mod­est existence.

Though Stray Dogs boasts that rare qual­i­ty of being unlike any­thing else out there, the film it bares clos­est com­par­i­son to is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalk­er. The sim­i­lar­i­ties only begin to reveal them­selves in the cli­mac­tic stages where the film takes a turn for the poet­i­cal­ly exis­ten­tial. The char­ac­ters appear to have been nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tat­ing towards their own iter­a­tion of The Zone, that unusu­al space which, once inside, pro­fess­es to offer answers to pro­found spir­i­tu­al conundrums.

It’s unclear whether the man and woman in Stray Dogs find solace and accep­tance dur­ing their time in the ​‘Zone’, as Tsai leaves the nature of their onward jour­ney open to spec­u­la­tion. Every shot in this film instant­ly etch­es itself on the mem­o­ry, but you’ll have to find a spe­cial place for the last three which are some of the most extra­or­di­nary ever com­mit­ted to film.