Stranger Eyes (Mò shì lù)

 

Writer/director Yeo Siew Hua

director on the set with Lee Kang-sheng

STRANGER EYES (Mò shì lù)                     B                                                              Singapore  Taiwan  France  USA  (126 mi)  2024  d: Yeo Siew Hua

You just have to watch someone close enough and keep your eyes on him.  At some point, even if he’s not a criminal, he will turn into one.                                                                                  —Officer Zheng (Pete Teo)

If you love peering through windows, then this is a film for you, using Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954) scenario, but embellishing it in the modern age, becoming a moody, atmospheric psychological thriller that starts out as a conventional missing-child narrative to become a cerebral meditation on voyeurism, privacy, and digital surveillance in modern Singapore, emphasizing a theme that there is always someone watching.  Featuring legendary Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, who broke onto the scene in Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shao nian nuo zha) (1992), but was last seen in Days (Rizi) (2020), where the strength of his near-silent career in acting is in body language and in the power of his gaze, bringing an enigmatic quality and depth through silence, making him uniquely qualified to play a silent voyeur, typically viewed as the most interesting character precisely because he says the least.  Yet he actually speaks here, but just barely, bringing a rare interest to the film, as he’s literally grown up before our eyes in his screen roles, connecting him to a certain style of minimalist arthouse films, kind of an Asian version of French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud who did exactly the same during the 60’s and 70’s, both happening to meet onscreen in Tsai’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001).  Referencing other surveillance thrillers like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden) (2005), the abduction of an infant child is a gripping starting point for a mystery that explores societal isolation and loneliness as much as any police procedural investigation, where we might think Lee Kang-sheng is inhabiting the Peter Lorre role in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), but this unravels in multi-layered complexities that reveal themselves in surveillance footage.  After China, Singapore is the third most surveilled city in the world (Surveillance, 'Big Brother' government made Singapore ...), where the government also has access to the emails, telephone calls, and internet search histories of all its citizens, which might sound a bit spooky, but Singapore is also renowned for being one of the strictest and safest countries in the world, with zero tolerance for both violent and petty crimes, where its legal system relies on severe penalties, widespread surveillance, and swift enforcement to maintain one of the lowest crime rates globally.  This is the world that Singapore director Yeo Siew Hua, who curiously resides in Buenos Aires, chooses to explore, examining multiple secret lives among a group of interconnected characters, using a mostly Taiwanese cast, with extensive CCTV surveillance coverage becoming a central focus, shot by cinematographer Hideho Urata who beautifully captures the sterility of the screen.   

The first draft of this film dates back to 2012, but the filmmaker was unable to secure financing, shelving the project until he could return to it at a later date, recalling episode six of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), which was later expanded to A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), where the discourse surrounding surveillance has changed drastically over time.  Living in a densely populated area, it is now commonplace for neighbors in high rise buildings to be peering into the windows of other neighbors, becoming familiar with their schedules and routines, all part of a normal day, while at the same time the numerous government surveillance cameras are watching them as well, so they’re all part of a vicious circle.  At the heart of the film is a young couple, Junyang (Wu Jian-Ho) and his wife Peiying (Anicca Panna), along with his mother (Vera Chen), who grow distraught when their infant daughter disappears from a public playground right in front of the father’s distracted eyes, which only grows more mysterious when strange DVD video recordings of the family’s daily activities, both before and after the kidnapping, start appearing at their doorstep, including months-old surveillance footage from a visit to the supermarket, Stranger Eyes new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2024 - ½ YouTube (1:51).  The film makes smart use of the song “Endless Love” by Tsai Chin from the Shaw Brothers movie LOVE WITHOUT END (1961), one of the foundational classics in Chinese cinema, Tsai Chin/Cai Qin-Endless Love/Love Without End/Bu Liao ... YouTube (3:19), initially heard in romanticized supermarket surveillance footage, repeating later in the picture with devastating results.  Reporting the crime to the police, Officer Zheng (Pete Teo) is a calm counterbalance, trusting established police procedures, exuding patience and calm, immediately installing a camera outside their door to capture whoever’s leaving these recordings, which leads them to a suspicious middle-aged neighbor living in an adjacent tower, Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), who they begin following with an obsessive curiosity.  The protagonists and antagonists often exchange roles, like mirror images of one another, which begins a strange journey to uncover the truth, growing more and more layered and complex, as Wu’s identity is more complicated than it seems, where it’s often difficult to find one’s bearings in this unraveling web of differing intentions from each character.  This pattern only grows more ominous, trying the patience of viewers who are searching for relevant clues, as nothing jumps out at you, but becomes part of a long series of watching footage, sometimes at home, sometimes in the presence of the police, where the original score written by Thomas Foguenne only adds to the intrigue, offering a percussive Tindersticks-style (with a gamelan) undercurrent of restless contemplation. 

Ambiguous to the core, perhaps the biggest surprise is not a whodunit revelation, but the makings of a fractured marriage, where the strains of a kidnapped child and the endless hours of watched footage, revealing things they definitely would have preferred to remain hidden, where it’s not long before deeper secrets from their personal lives emerge and the foundation of their relationship completely disintegrates.  We follow Junyang’s strange, stalker-ish behavior, especially as he follows Wu, Stranger Eyes new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2024 - 2/2 YouTube (1:11), observed by his wife Peiying offering her own commentary, seemingly having her own connection to the stalker, yet we’re not initially sure who she’s speaking about, and how it is connected, which only adds to the mystery.  Each character seems to harbor their own secrets, with Wu developing a voyeuristic fixation on cameras and his own surveillance videos, while he spends just as much time simply watching and observing others, perhaps because he has no life of his own, so he lives vicariously through the lives of others.  Junyang mirrors his unorthodox behavior by following the parents of the children who were in the park on the day of the kidnapping, seeing how close he can come to abducting their children, desperately trying to enter the psychological mindset of the perpetrator, as in this way maybe he can better understand exactly what happened.  We also learn that Wu had started chatting shamelessly with Peiying long before the child disappeared, as she has a public persona she adopts as a live-streaming DJ.  By shifting the focus away from the police, however, and into the tangled lives of the affected family, we also get an understanding of what the kidnapper might have been thinking, like why they were targeted in the first place, as we hear the repeated phrase, “Some people aren’t meant to be parents.”  Rather than find answers, there are lengthy scenes that ruminate on each respective character’s existential loneliness, suggesting with newfound technology, we are all drifting apart into social isolation.   What’s unique about the film is the slow pace and how abstract concepts replace any standard narrative, with a meandering storyline with shifting perspectives and viewpoints, where viewers often wonder why a certain character is being watched or studied, but the filmmaker has his own agenda about shifting the tone of the movie from the mother’s manic desperation to a more contemplative examination of the interiority of the characters.  The father is shown to be frequently distracted, unfaithful, and even reckless in his parenting duties before the incident, but the later scenes show a transformed man, aware of his shortcomings and how it may have led to unintended consequences, where the act of watching others is fundamentally linked to self-discovery, ending on a surprisingly tender and more reflective note, which may be the biggest reveal in the entire film.  The missing child scenario is simply a framework to examine how modern society, technology, and constant surveillance alienate us from human connection, while highlighting themes of forgiveness and redemption.    

Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shao nian nuo zha)

 

Director Tsai Ming-liang

Lee Kang-shen with the director

REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (Qing shao nian nuo zha)              B+                                         Taiwan  (109 mi)  1992  d:  Tsai Ming-liang

Do you have nothing better to do with yourself?     —Mother (Lu Hsiao-ling)

In the eighties and early nineties Taiwan witnessed an unprecedented cinematic portrayal of the contemporary urban sensibility, perhaps best reflected by Edward Yang’s modernist exploration of the alienation of the individual in the barren urban landscape of contemporary society, with his films emphasizing psychological complexity, That Day, On the Beach (Hai tan de yi tian) (1983), Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma) (1985), The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986), and A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), or the adolescent street gangs of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s autobiographical A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), yet also the hauntingly quiet poetry of Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986).  At the time, government film grants allowed budding directors like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien to get their start, creating the Taiwan New Wave, breaking away from locally made melodramas or kung fu movies in favor of location shooting, long takes, and deliberate editing to reflect the rapidly changing world around them.  Born in Malaysia, having moved around from school to school, typically the kid nobody wanted to talk to, finding it difficult to make new friends, Tsai moved to Taiwan in 1977 at the age of 20 to discover an emerging generation in the thrall of Western values, where the soaring high- tech economic growth drove people to the cities, creating a society filled with contradictions in a clash between the old and the new, enrolling in Taipei’s Chinese Culture University, majoring in Dramatic Art, where he was exposed to European art cinema, including the aesthetics of Truffaut, Antonioni, Bresson, and Fassbinder.  After writing and directing several plays, Tsai went on to work in television, where it was during the making of The Kid, a 1991 TV film, when he was scouting for an actor that he encountered Lee Kang-sheng, who would eventually star in every single one of his feature films.  Writing his own scripts, Tsai’s characters are trapped in the banality of their existence, desperately trying to overcome their loneliness and inability to connect with others, making films that are distinctive in capturing the absurd frustrations and numbness of urban alienation, using long silences and almost no camera movement, eloquently shot by Liao Pen-jung, Tsai’s longtime collaborator, where his aesthetic is essentially minimalist and existentialist to the core.  In a strange twist of fate, this film was not released in America until 23 years after it was made, digitally restored as part of a traveling retrospective assembled only after the critical success of Stray Dogs (Jiao you) (2013).  The words Tsai Ming-liang and realistic action adventure wouldn’t usually be found in the same sentence, much less the same movie, instead we’d expect to see melancholic actor Lee Kang-sheng barely uttering a word, along with deluges of rain, a love for old style movie theaters, an uncommon interest in sex, the inside of the exact same apartments featuring a familiar rice pot on the table, in this case either his own or his sister’s apartment, and plenty of long slow takes, occasionally leading to an offbeat punch line, most often expressed through Tati or Chaplinesque silent film era sight gags.  Unlike his Taiwanese compatriots Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang who thrive on narrative detachment, Tsai’s films possess near perfect comic timing, not afraid to spend minutes setting up a single laugh.  This film actually foreshadows by a decade Jia Zhang-ke’s UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002), as both are unflinching looks at alienated youth, one in Datong, a large city in the northern Shanxi province in China, almost to Inner Mongolia, the other in the bustling city of Taipei, both shot in near documentary form, featuring plenty of long tracking shots of excitable kids on motorbikes frenetically exploring their individual freedom only to discover their own restless energy turning against themselves, as there’s little hope for the future.  

After an amusing opening that oddly enough involves a mathematics compass and a cockroach, REBELS follows the exploits of two petty criminals Ah-tze and Ah-ping, Chen Chao-jung and Jen Chang-ben, who are seen expertly looting the cash boxes from several telephone booths before spending their idle time in a video arcade where Lee Kang-sheng by chance happens to notice them.  This is ironic, as that’s exactly how Tsai met Lee Kang-sheng, the phenomenally gifted non-professional actor who would not only become the camera’s focus for the rest of his career, but he would come to define Tsai’s work in the same way Jean-Pierre Léaud was associated with the work of Truffaut in the 60’s and early 70’s.  What immediately stands out is the depiction of urban malaise, where globalization has created small cracks for those living on the fringes of society, where we see parked scooters bordering the busy streets, and narrow lanes jam-packed with food stalls and hawkers selling their wares, with giant billboards advertising various products, as people must compete within this congestion for every little ounce of space.  Shot in the Southwest section of the city known as the West Gate District, the seedy neighborhood where Tsai lived as a student when he came to Taipei, so it has some personal significance, as it was known as a teenage district, the center of Taiwan cinema, with as many as 37 theaters clustered into the compact neighborhood in the early 90’s, becoming the neighborhood where he was introduced to world cinema.  At the time of the shoot, it was an old, run down, and crowded neighborhood under construction that has now been transformed into a worldwide shopping district, attracting more than 3 million shoppers per month, turned into a pedestrian area where vehicles are prohibited on weekends and holidays, where the film is an homage to the neighborhood’s nostalgic history.  Focusing on the details of daily habits, offering insight into the lives of listless young men in crumbling inner cities, Tsai’s characters are often engaged in trivial jobs that hold little meaning, giving rise to petty thieves who prey on the periphery.  Not only are there several quick cuts of bored teenagers dangling cigarettes out of their mouths, also (drawing from Hollywood) an image of Lee standing in front of an iconic movie poster of James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) which looms above him at the video arcade (though his character is more akin to Sal Mineo’s Plato), but there’s a pulsating, bass heavy musical soundtrack by Huang Shu-jun, the only canned music in any of his films, used quite effectively here as it matches the portrait of Taipei as a dingy, neon-lit wasteland, Tsai Ming-liang - Rebels of the Neon God 1992 YouTube (1:19), where disconnected relationships are short-lived and pointless, and meaningless violence can erupt at any minute over the least provocation.  Of course there’s a girl, Ah-kuei (Wang Yu-wen), the bored, yet hot to trot, short-skirted, roller rink attendant who tightens skates with a few pounds of a hammer, who flirtatiously tries to interest Ah-tze, but nothing holds his attention for long as his mind wanders with that typical male urban syndrome common in video arcades known as attention deficit disorder.  It’s amazing the girl gives these creeps the time of day, but she keeps coming back for more.  Lee Kang-sheng as Hsiao-kang hatches his own interest in them after witnessing Ah-tze brazenly destroy his father’s outside cab mirror with a tire iron, a senseless act that does get to the heart of what this film is about, a lifetime of a neverending series of senseless acts.   

In preparation to taking the standardized college entrance exams, Lee drops out of cram school and pockets the refunded tuition money, leaving his parents who paid for it outraged, knowing where reckless irresponsible acts will lead him, especially when his mother, invoking her folk beliefs, thinks he’s been infected by an evil spirit, describing him as the “reincarnation of the Neon God.”  About the same age as Ah-tze, Lee is drawn to him, shadowing his every move, as their lives mirror one another, often seen paired together in parallel shots making identical gestures, and while they lead very different lives, it’s clear the aimlessness and uncertainty of their futures are connected in this study of disaffected Taipei youth, offering insight into the lives of lost young men living in urban wastelands.  While Lee is physically and psychologically confined to a tiny room in his parent’s home, subject to their rules and jurisdiction, Ah-tze has apparent mobility and freedom to go where he pleases, yet it’s largely symbolic, as both move in restricted space that can feel suffocating.  The audiences in Tsai’s films are able to see things the characters can’t, as they’re too busy occupying the cramped space they live in, while viewers sitting at a distance who have the opportunity to observe what happens within that space.  Using an anti-narrative technique, feeling more like various slices of life episodes strewn together, the film explores how Lee attempts to push the boundaries of his physical constrictions, using a carefully choreographed visual design where the paths of two characters are constantly crisscrossing, Rebels of the Neon God (1992) - MEETING YouTube (1:39).  Ah-tze’s apartment continually floods with sewage water backing up from the drain, one of Tsai’s most common themes, where throughout the film he amusingly sloshes his way through the water which has a mirror-like reflection on the ceiling.  When he does a good deed, the water mysteriously flows back down the drain, but don’t expect that condition to last long.  The kinetic energy in this film is highly unusual for Tsai, a style he’s never returned to, instead becoming enamored with extended takes, but really the movie is a mysterious interconnection of several different Taipei-based storylines, the two goofs and a girl, rounds of casual sex, an elevator that always stops on the wrong floor, a dysfunctional family unit that never once feels like home, and Lee Kang-sheng slowly exacting his revenge, trashing Ah-tze’s scooter, cutting the seat and tires, spray painting AIDS on the side, while pouring glue into the ignition switch, which brings him a moment of temporary ecstasy, but ultimately a profound sadness at the realization of just how aloof and isolated he is from anyone else’s life, which is the true nature of any Lee Kang-sheng character.  The real irony here is that the two goofs have a love interest, someone who actually wants to love them, but their hedonistic, self-centered lives leave them no place for love, so they casually throw it all away as if it were worthless, replaceable parts.  This single act of throwing away what is most meaningful in life is similarly reflected back in all the less significant instances when they’ve done exactly the same thing, where the totality of arrogant disregard and nonchalance leaves them with no meaningful connections in the future.     

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