Where (Tsai Ming-liang, 2022) (Patreon)

I mentioned Where in my Prismatic Ground wrap for Film Comment 2.0, but it seemed like it warranted a bit more discussion. Just barely eking in as a 2022 release (world premiered on December 22), Where strikes me as the most accomplished of the Walker pieces, for a couple of reasons. First, the fact that it was commissioned by the Centre Pompidou gives it a bounded, specific quality, where the others I've seen (I've missed a few) often appear to be grasping for the universal. Lee Kang-sheng's monk figure is a spatio temporal anomaly no matter where you put him, and several of the Walker films situate him in a variety of urban environments, as if he is an all-purpose avatar for spiritualism at permanent loggerheads with modernity.

Here, he is creeping around Paris, which adds an element of cultural dislocation. As some rather aggressive folks encounter Lee on the pavement, they snap non-consensual selfies or get in his face, and this gives the impression that even the "sophisticates" around the Pompidou see the monk as a street performer, a consumable emblem of Disneyland Buddhism. (The fact that Lee's movements seem more natural inside the museum, in front of artworks or when making his own, is enlightening indeed. Those of us who came of age intellectually in the era of October-style art theory have an implicit mistrust of art institutions, but now they may be our only shelter from the total administration of late capital.)

I said "a couple of reasons" a while back, and the second reason I like Where as much as I do is that it represents a quasi-sequel to Days, Tsai's last "official" feature. That film gradually built its narrative by bringing two separate diegetic worlds together, those of Lee (not a monk, just a lonely guy with health problems) and Laotian actor Anong Houngheuangsy. I found Days a bit simplistic in its construction, and I wonder whether Tsai set out to make a fiction film in the first place. And while its sentimentality is no liability per se, it felt like its construction and its affective tone were uncharacteristically soft. Where brings Lee and Anong back into one another's purview, but there is no physical or emotional connection. Rather, they hover around one another like electrons in the outer orbital. They don't address one another, but the museum offers them the chance for mutual mark-making, a collaboration that pretends to be accidental.

So Where is kind of like Days's hyper-formalist inverse. The two men, alone in the Parisian crowd, do not achieve catharsis or release. There is no music box. In a way, the primary theme of the Walker series becomes a kind of narrative in itself. Just as the monk is "out of time" with the world around him, Anong is, if not "out of space" -- it's reductive to consider him an outsider in multicultural France -- then suspended, in a perpetual state of waiting. He is either observing life from a discrete distance, or he anticipates a rendezvous that never occurs. Or better still, neither he nor the monk are aware that the meeting, their connection, has already happened, leaving a trace on the floor rather than in their minds.

All the while I've been writing this, I've been wracking my brain trying to craft some kind of joke about the Walker Art Center. I failed.