Figments of Your Hallucination  Bingeing and Purging at Cannes
An unpredictable sexual tension often creeps into the films of
Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. What Time Is It There?
revisits the father-mother-son family unit of his previous
features, but kills Dad off after the first scene. The son
(Tsai's reticent muse Lee Kang-sheng, again playing a character
named Hsiao-kang) sells watches out of a briefcase. Not long
after a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) insists on buying the
dual-time wristwatch off his arm before she leaves for Paris,
he's mysteriously compelled to go around Taipei resetting all
the clocks to Paris time. (This eventually occasions a terrific
Harold Lloyd gag—among his other strengths, Tsai is a supreme
choreographer of snail-paced, deadpan slapstick.) The film
cross-cuts between Taipei, where Hsiao-kang's grieving mother is
haunted by her late husband's reincarnation prospects (possibly
in their fish tank), and Paris, where our heroine, newly
arrived, is feeling lonely and unmoored