An exceptional if bleak drama with musical interludes, Tsai’s prescient work explores a virus epidemic and severe climate change hitting Taiwan—his style is still unmistakable and, best of all, he finds new levels of miserabilist humour.
Review #2,697
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang
1998 | Taiwan | Drama, Musical | 89 min | 1.85:1 | Mandarin
PG13 (passed clean) for some sexual references
Cast: Yang Kuei-Mei, Lee Kang-sheng, Miao Tien
Plot: While neverending rain and a strange disease spread by cockroaches ravage Taiwan, a plumber makes a hole between two apartments and the inhabitants of each form a unique connection, enacted in musical numbers.
Awards: Won FIPRESCI Prize & Nom. for Palme d’Or (Cannes)
Source: Big World Pictures
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Virus Epidemic, Climate Change, Loneliness & Alienation
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: General Arthouse
Viewed: Oldham Theatre (as part of Asian Film Archive’s Y2K DreamZ programme)
Spoilers: No
The ‘90s was an extraordinary period for Tsai Ming-liang, with a string of arthouse hits from Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive L’amour (1994), The River (1997), to this, The Hole, which was, at that point in time, a departure from what came earlier.
Still, Tsai’s bleak, ruminative, ‘slow cinema’ style is unmistakable, perhaps even made more conspicuous when counterpointed against its campy musical interludes.
Well, musical sequences are usually set on grand, elaborate studio ‘stages’, or at least that’s what Hollywood musicals tell us, but Tsai finds new levels of miserabilist humour by setting the songs and dances in the lifts, stairwells and corridors of a grimy and decaying apartment block.
The Malaysia-born Taiwanese director pays tribute to Grace Chang, a popular HK idol in the ‘50s, with a selection of salacious songs that at once ‘disrupt’ the monotonous and dreadful existence of two lonely neighbours, conveniently credited as Man Upstairs (Lee Kang-sheng) and Woman Downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei), while also providing some measure of subtext on the need for human connection.
“The plumber will come and fix the hole this afternoon.”
Taiwan is hit by severe climate change, with torrential rains that never let up; worse, a virus epidemic has caused those infected to behave like cockroaches that are attracted to dark and damp places.
These themes make The Hole particularly prescient today—it pre-empted the pandemics of the 21st century, and also the floodings that have plagued cities like Hong Kong and New York in the past months.
Through the plot of these two neighbours who find themselves communicating (mostly non-verbal) through a hole in the ceiling/on the floor, Tsai treats their situation with requisite levity amid some of the drabbiest mise-en-scene ever committed to screen.
It somehow reminded me of Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), a film so realistic yet absurd that the only way to cope with it is to laugh at it. And indeed, this could be Tsai’s funniest film.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 