The Hole (1998, Tsai Ming-liang) (Patreon)

84/100

Second viewing, last seen 1999 (when Cinema Village screened the entire "2000 vu par…" series, for which this film was made; it never got a proper U.S. theatrical release*). The Hole was only my second Tsai, and I hadn't yet connected with his environment-as-psychology approach; you can see this clearly in my contemporaneous review of Vive L'Amour (my first Tsai), which I liked quite a bit but ultimately found wanting: 

Consistently compelling throughout, it finally seems a bit less than the sum of its parts, perhaps because one of the three characters (all of whom are more or less equally prominent in the narrative) is explored in considerably finer detail than the other two. The final shot is clearly intended to be powerful and emotionally overwhelming, but I found myself strangely unmoved...mostly because I didn't feel that I knew, or understood, the character whose face fills the frame for several minutes.

Revisiting that film a dozen years ago, long after a concentrated dose of Tsai (saw Rebels of the Neon God, The River and What Time Is It There? in July–Aug 2001) had unlocked the door for me, proved illuminating but not revelatory. The Hole, on the other hand, now strikes me as Tsai's greatest work, and I can only assume that my original, mildly positive reaction involved misguided grumbling about the frustrating opacity of Man Upstairs and Woman Downstairs. Once you recognize that the constant rainfall and omnipresent dilapidation are doing that work, it's easy to let go of conventional expectations and gape at, just for example, the woman telling someone on the phone that she's "stripping" as she proceeds to walk around her apartment peeling entire giant strips of wallpaper to the floor, languidly enough that it actually does kinda seem like an erotic act. (Surely there's no need to address the suggestive symbolism of the hole itself, and particularly of Lee inserting his leg therein.) No doubt it also helps to have recently experienced pandemic lockdowns—Yang even wears a mask at times—and to have become familiar with the phenomenon of terminal burrowing, which I assume informed Tsai's ideas for the symptoms of his invented disease. Mostly, though, The Hole just seems like the perfect distillation of this filmmaker's singular sensibility, with the world reduced to a couple of lonely people and the (initially) small conduit between their respective circumscribed existences. Being confined to that building apparently liberated Tsai, too, as I'm not sure he's ever matched this film for compositional precision and dynamism. In most respects, this is his simplest movie, achieving a breathtaking purity.

That's Ed, it's probably not a coincidence that my new favorite Tsai (The Hole) and my previous favorite Tsai (The Wayward Cloud) are his two Dennis Potter-style lipsync musicals. The danger of going all-in on anomie is that you can wind up inadvertently generating a certain numbness, and recurring bursts of joyous movement provide a jolting ironic counterpoint that arguably heightens the bleakness in turn. It's been nearly 20 years since I last saw Wayward Cloud, but a quick YouTube jaunt confirms my recollection that its musical numbers are more lush and extravagant; here, Tsai genuinely follows Potter's lead, staging pure fantasy in the same cruddy, demoralizing locations that make up the film's "reality." As an American who's sadly unfamiliar with Grace Chang, I can't fully appreciate whatever nostalgic emotions The Hole seeks to tap into by using her recordings exclusively, but the five songs themselves are sublime (can't dislodge "Achoo Cha Cha"'s melody from my head, which is fine by me), and Tsai's closing testimonial/dedication—"In the year 2000, we are grateful that we still have Grace Chang's songs to comfort us"—adds some retroactive pathos. I confess that I'm slightly torn about the slow dance to "I Don't Care Who You Are" that ends the movie, simply because the final hole interaction, shot from the perfect angle, bridges fantasy and reality with such elegant impossibility that I really want that to be the last thing we see. (So much so, in fact, that I'd incorrectly remembered it as the ending for almost a quarter of a century.) Still lovely, though, and there's hardly a moment in the entire movie that I don't find hypnotic, hilarious, improbably moving, or all three of those simultaneously.

* It's also never had a high-def video release, as far as I can determine—just a substandard DVD. (You can find a 1080p file, but it's upscaled from the DVD.)