While “The Hole” might appear to be a film about the COVID-19 pandemic, it was actually first released in 1998. Strangely, its prophetic message delivers a cinematic déjà vu some two decades before the real disease changed our world.
As a rapidly spreading virus invades their city during a violent monsoon, two unfriendly neighbors refuse to evacuate their squalid apartments. Instead, the nameless man who lives upstairs (actor Lee Kang-sheng) is prone to excessive drinking to the point of blacking out. And, the nameless woman who lives downstairs (actor Yang Kuei-mei) obsesses over toilet paper—stockpiling it until it infiltrates her living space.
During an incessant rain that causes extensive flooding in the empty streets of Taiwan, and inside the dilapidated building where the two nameless neighbors reside, a leak springs inside the man’s unit.
A plumber arrives to repair the pipes, but leaves a gaping hole in the male tenant’s floor that goes right through the female tenant’s ceiling below. Before long, the man takes advantage of this opportunity to indulge his voyeuristic urges by spying on the woman.
According to the television news that the woman anxiously watches, the so called “Taiwan Fever” or “Taiwan Virus” causes victims to live in darkness and crawl on all fours like cockroaches. As newscasters screech about real cockroaches spreading the virus through their feces, the woman liberally sprays insect repellant. Meanwhile, the man endures fumigation at his workplace.
In panic mode, the government suspends all garbage collection. Frantically, the woman continues purchasing multiple packages of toilet paper and tissue for her runny nose, blanketing her apartment with trash bags.
Eventually, the two hostile neighbors can’t keep their eyes from peering through the hole. While one gazes up, the other looks down, and soon the once disagreeable pair become inexplicably drawn to each other.
Director Tsai Ming-liang, known for his arthouse films, spares no artistic technique in this newly re-released film. Just as the melodramatic narrative begins to unfold between the two pugnacious neighbors, the woman breaks out from an elevator singing a jazzy calypso number while dancing in an enticing red dress.
And, so it goes throughout this quirky film where every 15 minutes another song and dance number materializes. Otherwise, nearly every scene is interminably long with static shots that linger over an often inert actor.
Sounds of wetness are amplified and grow in significance — from the splashing water wrung from wet towels, to the pitter patter of constantly falling rain, to the annoying spurts of water dripping from a kitchen spigot.
Some scenes are exquisite, like the woman painstakingly making and applying a raw egg facial before the man’s ceiling suddenly rains (pun intended) plaster all over her face.
Other scenes seem deliberately disgusting. The man’s projectile vomiting, his urinating outdoors, or his clipping of his overgrown toenails. Yet, they all rival the woman doing her business while seated on a toilet.
A total of five musical numbers act as interludes between the storytelling. All are quite entertaining, if not a bit jarring, featuring cute choreography, brilliant ballads and colorful costumes.
However, except for the musical scenes, the characters are scantily dressed in briefs, bras, panties, slips and other undergarments reflecting the humidity of rainy-season Taiwan.
To describe director Tsai Ming-liang as eccentric is more accurate than exaggerated, and there’s no doubt that he is uniquely creative.
Born in Malaysia in 1957 to Hakka Chinese farmers, Tsai was raised by his grandparents in Kuching Sarawak (aka Cat City). The family lived in a seven story public housing building and owned a noodle stand which they operated at night.
From the age of three, Tsai was taken twice a day to either one of two different neighborhood theaters to watch movies. During the day, his grandmother would
accompany him, while his grandfather escorted him at night. Because of this arrangement, Tsai would sometimes end up watching the same movie twice on the same day. This early exposure to film set the stage for his lifelong love affair with it.
In 1977, when he was 20, Tsai moved to Taiwan and studied at the Chinese Culture University. By then, he had sadly learned that most movie theaters in his old neighborhood had been closed or demolished. That impelled him to include scenes of old venues in his films. Theaters like The Odeon, that he patronized with his grandparents, featured Hong Kong Cantonese and Mandarin Taiwanese movies, while their community’s other theater — The Cathay Cinema — screened Hollywood movies.
Tsai points to those brick and mortar theaters as influential in the creation of his 2005 film “Goodbye, Dragon Inn”, about the last day before a decrepit theater is closed for good. It was his most pleasurable film to make, he has said, because it didn’t require him to write a script.
After graduating from the Drama and Cinema Department in 1982, Tsai first worked as a theatrical producer, playwright and director. Later, he directed television shows.
Incredibly, nearly all of his productions feature actor Lee Kang-sheng whom he encountered at a video arcade in Taipei. Lee, who was not initially an actor, had been casually sitting on his motorcycle when Tsai invited him to audition for his 1991 television show “Boys” and, consequently, cast him.
A member of the “Second New Wave of Taiwanese filmmakers,” Tsai is known by critics for a genre called “Slow Cinema” because his films consist of long, lingering takes and painstakingly composed shots that emphasize stillness.
Usually portraying his characters as lonely and silent, he uses dialogue sporadically and limits words in order to focus on the actors’ facial expressions and body language. Tsai has said that verbal communication is too often open to misinterpretation.
“Language is a horrible thing,” he said during a presentation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. “That’s why I don’t put a lot of dialogue in my films.”
He also revealed that his propensity for creating scenes that practically crawl across the screen is due to the rush of modern life that tends to overwhelm him.
“The world has fast pacing and [it] developed very fast. I almost feel like I got left behind and I couldn’t follow the pace of the world,” he said during that same talk at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “That’s why I have to make very slow-paced movies.”
As an openly gay man, Tsai often includes LGBTQ+ themes in his movies. Among them are: “Rebels of the Neon God” 1992, “Vive L’Amour” 1994 (winner of the Golden Lion), “The River” 1997, “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” 2003, and “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone” 2007.
Despite having written and directed 11 feature narratives (as well as numerous documentaries, shorts and television movies), Tsai has felt the need to diversify. Although he continues to make films, he also started a career in painting.
After the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) requested a print of his 2009 film “Face,” Tsai painted wooden storage boxes with close-up scenes from the film before packing the reels inside.
Growing disenchanted with making films just for theater audiences, Tsai turned towards museum video installations where viewers could casually watch a movie and not be confined to watching it in its entirety.
“My [theater] tickets were not selling, so I went the museum route,” he said during his Chicago presentation.
In one exhibition, Tsai arranged 49 different vintage chairs around paintings of chairs. He explained that he wanted viewers to sit, sip a beverage, and slowly take in a single painting instead of rushing off to the next one.
During another gallery exhibit, he asked neighbors to bring tree branches to the museum to create a natural setting and to manipulate the lighting.
And, on another occasion, he had an entire audience spend the night in the museum in a sleepover.
In 2011, Tsai began selling roasted coffee because, according to him, he felt the need to make a living. “Director Tsai’s Cafe Galerie” was located on the fourth
floor of Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall and featured an 18-seat mini theater where Tsai screened international films. He closed it in 2014.
Acknowledging that his movies can be difficult to watch, Tsai has employed inventive tactics to get more of the public to see his films in theaters. He’s not above shameless self-promotion and has actually walked the streets of Taiwan to sell tickets to his own movies.
Perhaps his decades as a filmmaker has led him to cynicism. “Movies,” he has stated, “repeat what we have done already.”
These days, Tsai, who has never owned a home, lives on the side of a mountain in Taiwan with his favorite actor, Lee Kang-sheng, in a platonic relationship.
He’s been quoted as saying, “I feel like I’m a citizen of the world, yet there’s no single place that I can put my roots down and call home.”
Unlike the characters in “The Hole” who can’t be pried from their ramshackle apartments, Tsai remains an artistic free spirit.
The Hole (1998) is showing at SIFF Film Center on September 18.
