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But The Wayward Cloud was not yet over. Just like Chantal
Akerman’s statement that, after the climactic murder which
concludes the plot of Jeanne Dielman (1975), there are still
'eight strong minutes' left, Tsai gives us a portrait-shot of
Shiang-chyi, a cock in her mouth and a tear slowly rolling down
her face, which lasts over ninety seconds. And then one final
golden-oldie song, straddling the final shot and the blackness of
the credits ...
Shot 1 is through the grill that will become the pivot of the
scene; we see Hsiao-kang and the crew getting to work on the porno
shoot, manipulating Sumomo Yozakura’s body. (There is a visual
rhyme between this crew and the road workers that Shiang-chyi
encounters earlier.) The figure of the grill restates both the
distance of separation and the possibility of being an observer of
such a scene – the two indispensable, paradoxically interconnected
preconditions of Tsai’s cinema. An earlier appearance of a grill
appears during Lu Yi-ching’s musical number, where it stands for
the romantic longing induced by separation and distance.
Shot 2 is the most formally dramatic moment of the film, the only
shot containing a slow, deliberate camera movement not tied to the
motion of a character – like De Oliveira, Tsai frequently holds
back an essential element of his cinematic syntax for maximum
effect. This camera movement announces to us that something very
heavy is about to happen – and that Shiang-chyi, eventually
entering the frame from the side, will witness it.
We have now looped back to the images (and sounds!) that caused
such consternation at the Brisbane screening. Afterwards, in the
foyer, a moviegoer could be heard cynically asking: ‘Is that
ending meant to be the triumph of amour fou?’ But it is not as
simple as that; rather than some moment of pure transgression, in
the final scene elements from previous scenes (for example, the
fellatio recalls the stuffing of Sumomo Yozakura’s mouth with
watermelon in the first porn scene) are reformulated into an
imperfect, impure scenario which nonetheless contains a moment of
connection (Hsiao-kang’s buttocks ‘cry’, as well as Shiang-chyi’s
eyes, signalling the breaking drought, water from the body). Tsai
has said that he is ‘pro-sex, but anti-pornography’ yet when
Shiang-chyi and the cut-outs of China Airlines stewardesses mirror
Hsiao-kang and the porn crew, we are close to realising that to
maintain this credo requires some extreme or all-too-human action.
The coming together of Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang may be within a
strange and compromised world but it is also, within the entire
context of Tsai’s œuvre, ecstatic: it is the expression of love
they arrive at, and we (as spectators) bear witness to its power.
http://www.rouge.com.au/rougerouge/wayward.html