• 洞 (The Hole)

8/3/22 (Wed)

An apocalyptic musical, not a crowded genre, by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. It was made in 1997 as part of a French series envisioning the upcoming millennium, when the big talk was the Y2K bug that was supposed to upend the world economy. Tsai instead imagined a full-on viral pandemic traced to cockroaches that turns victims into bug-like crazies who crawl on their hands and knees and shun the light. The radio says that French scientists have termed it the Taiwan Virus (in the days before you could be canceled for such). The vision of a viral outbreak is the polar opposite of that in the later Contagion, where people were swarming chaotically in a brutal battle for dwindling resources. Here the focus is the loneliness of quarantined individuals and the need for connection. From the perspective of the past two years, the Taiwanese film proves more prophetic.

A mysterious virus has taken hold in Taipei, and authorities have ordered people to evacuate by the turn of the millennium, just one week away. They are furiously spraying the streets and turning off essential services amid an intense rainstorm that persists throughout the film. Warnings as well as occasional screams can be heard from the streets, and television programs veer from advice on how to boil water safely to how to make the best instant ramen.

Meanwhile, two residents of a rundown apartment building, one living directly above the other but otherwise unacquainted, stay stubbornly behind. The man upstairs, known only as The Man Upstairs, goes dutifully each day to his small sundries shop in a deserted center with no other open stores or customers, his only real pleasure being to feed a stray cat. The Woman Downstairs is accumulating huge volumes of toilet paper and other necessities for a long stay. A plumber who has come to fix a leak in the floor of the upstairs neighbor succeeds only in leaving a hole in the floor instead. He promises to return but never shows up. In the meantime, that hole serves as a portal linking the two isolated residents.

Their actions initially irritate one another: the man, who spends most of the film in his underwear, unwittingly vomits in the hole after a drunken night out, and she retaliates with insect repellent that stinks up his room. His early-morning alarm wakes her up, and she sticks a mop in the hole to plug it. They slowly become more aware of each other. She spots him on his balcony looking lonely, and when he learns that his toilet is leaking on her, he thoughtfully pees instead in the sink.

His actions become more desperate. When she tapes up the hole after seeing him peer down, he pours water to open it up again and expands the hole with a hammer (thoughtfully hanging an umbrella upside down to catch the dust). In the most outrageous image, he sticks his leg down the hole and swings it in the air in a bid to be noticed, not realizing that she doesn’t even see it. On her end, she talks down and dirty in a pornographic phone call with the neighbor, imagining him spying at her through the hole, except that we know that he’s not on the line at all; in her longing, she wants to think that she’s being watched. Each clearly needs the other but can’t make the connection, and only rarely speak to one another throughout the film.

The woman ultimately catches the virus. She begins to go crazy, crawling madly under the debris in her home. In an astonishing final sequence, a hand extends from above and offers her a glass of water – and an escape.

The most memorable moments in a film full of them are the musical interludes, lip-synched fantasies taking place in the woman’s head using music of 1950s Hong Kong pop star Grace Cheng. These are deliberately tacky versions of Hollywood dance scenes, but unlike the glamour of the fantasy sequences in Kiss of the Spider Woman, these all take place within the confines of the apartment building or the desolate marketplace where the man has his shop, as if the woman can’t even dream beyond her own quarters. She even performs one entirely in the elevator. The old songs are cleverly chosen to comment subtly on the woman’s state of mind. The slowly building “I… I want… I want you… I want your… I want your love” (我…我要…我要你…我要你的…我要你的愛) sounds at first like a typical love song but emerges as a plea for a human touch. (I discovered that this was based on a song written by jazz great Jon Hendriks for Louis Jordan and recycled for Rich Crazy Asians.)  I loved “Achoo Cha Cha”, which the singer sneezes her way through as various men approach. In Asia, a sneeze is supposed to mean that someone is thinking of you at that moment, but here it is intercut with scenes of the woman actually suffering from the virus. There is also a lovely pas de deux between the two protagonists after the final scene (entitled tellingly “I Don’t Care Who You Are”), the only time they truly get together, if only in the woman’s mind.

The tight confines of the story make this a viable stage show. Even with the scenes in the hallway or shopping center, Tsai creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that rings particularly true in the wake of the coronavirus farce. Often the only sounds on the screen are the constant heavy rainfall and peppy television announcer, highlighting the sense of isolation among the residents. His approach beautifully pulls the theme together. Yang Kuei-mei (woman) is fine if not a particularly distinctive performer, making the dance sequences generally better in concept than execution. Lee Kang-sheng (man) is similarly charisma-free but gets the job done. A curious, highly engaging piece.