Wu suo zhu

Modest and unassuming enough to initially seem like minor asides, Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker films have emerged as a major corpus in the filmmaker’s late career, an ongoing collaboration with Lee Kangsheng that has now had the actor move at a snail’s pace through multiple different environs over twelve years and ten installments. WU SUO ZHU, the most recent addition to the series, is among its most ambitious, conceptual and compelling chapters, moving from the verdant periphery of Washington DC to the centre of the American capital, contrasting the bustle of train stations and street corners with Lee’s ever steady, ever meticulous advance. Similarly, in a gesture that proves the format’s ongoing malleability, Tsai oscillates between tracing out the different sections of Lee’s dérive and passages that show his more recent collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy in moments of quiet domesticity, never making explicit what—if any—relationship might exist between the two figures. Challenging not only narrative impulses and our distinction between fore- and background, WU SUO ZHU invites us as spectators to set ourselves free from specific cinematic or temporal expectations; to embrace the drift, to abide nowhere. (Jesse Cumming)  

In the presence of Tsai Ming-liang, Anong Houngheuangsy and Claude Wang (producer).

Tsai Ming-liang: REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1992), VIVE L’AMOUR (1994), THE RIVER (1997), THE HOLE (1998), WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001), GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003), THE WAYWARD CLOUD (2005), I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE (2006), FACE (2009), STRAY DOGS (2013), NO NO SLEEP (2015), AFTERNOON (2015), THE DESERTED (2017), YOUR FACE (2018), DAYS (2020)