The Wayward Cloud is a strange, strange, strange film. Perhaps the strangest thing about The Wayward Cloud is that it was a huge hit in Taiwan, grossing $20 million when the average film in the country makes under a million. When you see the film’s poster with a girl tongue kissing a watermelon, it is understandable to think “I’ll pass,” but in this case you would be missing out.

As best I can describe, The Wayward Cloud is about two neighbors who live in an apartment building in Taiwan during a water shortage in an unusually hot summer. A woman named Shiang-chyi Chen sits around her apartment eating watermelon, while her next door neighbor Kang-sheng Lee makes hardcore porn films (which in the opening scene involve a watermelon between a woman’s legs).

The Wayward Cloud is mostly minimalist and truly beautiful in its austere compositions and delicate urban electric light; the motif of shadows and silhouettes are repeated to gorgeous effects. This shadows and silhouettes are interspersed with scenes of graphic sex, albeit no more explicit than you would see in Crash, Short Bus, or WR: Mysteries of the Organism. The same long takes which lingered on an empty hallway now assume the position of Peeping Tom.

The detached view of sexuality would seem indebted to films like Crash and Salo where the body is reduced to a writhing mindless thing with genitals. This perspective becomes especially apparent in the last scene, where a women is unconscious/dead (there is some debate between whether this porn actress is dead or passed out from heat exhaustion), but the show must go on, and the crew literally props her up in a variety of positions so the Lee can have sex with her. These antics are all witnessed by Chen, who eventually figures out what Lee does for a living after finding one of his porn starlets passed out in a elevator.

The flirting and relationship between Chen and Lee are the emotional heart of the film, symbolized by the repeated images of watermelon and bottled water. Chen is often scene rubbing water on her arms while alone, juxtaposed with images of Lee covered in his and someone else’s sweat. Chen and Lee even share an homage to Annie Hall, giddily picking up crabs from the kitchen floor. And they laugh, and they love, and the film swerves back and forth between their two perspectives, meeting in an occasional musical number.

That’s right. The Wayward Cloud is a musical. There are about 5 or 6 full-on musical numbers, not merely spontaneous karaoke affairs like Happiness Of The Katakari’s, but at the level of Singin’ In The Rain Hollywood show-stoppers. In one musical sequence, a character becomes a merman and serenades the moon from a water tower. In yet another scene, Alice in Wonderland like giant flowers appear around the statue of a Taiwanese politician. In one scene, where Lee is having some trouble getting it up, there is a song where a man wearing a life-size penis-suit is surrounded by dancing girls wearing plastic buckets on their heads, all set in a public restroom. I can’t stress enough how genuinely fantastic (from a technical film standpoint) and absurdly incredible these scenes are.

The songs themselves are assorted 60s and modern soul and folk sounds from Taiwan, and are all unique and lovely in their own right. Weird as all this sounds, The Wayward Cloud comes together in a smashingly perverse, erotic, socially critical, and emotionally devastating climax, the sort you might find in a Lars Von Trier film at his most crafty in such films as The Idiots or Dogville.

Goodbye Dragon Inn, Ming Ling Tsai’s previous directorial effort, was so rigid in never moving its cameras and keeping its characters in the dark, that the film was distracted from how formally inventive and cinematically fresh the whole premise was. The Wayward Cloud has no such difficulties, getting its vitality up and keeping it up. The film veers between the common and the theatrical so organically that the musical sequence always seem natural, as do the money shots which flow into images of watermelons floating down a river.

As for what The Wayward Cloud means, I would say it’s a love story. The two lead characters, I later read, were in a previous Ming-liang Tsia’s film called, What Time Is It There?. In a sense, The Wayward Cloud is their “Before Sunset” second chance at love. It would have been simple for Ming-liang Tsia to make a moody little film about an alienated women infatuated with an alienated man, which is basically what The Wayward Cloud is about. However, Miang Liang imbues this common premise with a wild cinematic spirit, employing crisp editing, colorful cinematography, MUSIC, and subdued/wildly theatrical performances that becomes transcendent of the films run-of-the-mill social yearnings for genuine connection in the cold, cruel world. I can’t think of any film as repulsive, arousing, beautiful, fun, and sad as The Wayward Cloud, at least not with all those gears running at once like they are here.

In a way, I thought The Wayward Cloud had a happy ending. The couple gets together, right? No more lifeless proxy sex with sleeping girls and emotional amateur porn, and no more isolated peeking around the corner from what we desire while waiting for the water (life’s lubricant) to return. I don’t know, maybe I’m all wrong, but I believe our heroine’s tears are from a place of even deeper sadness. Or maybe their courtship was so convincing and extraordinarily arranged that I was rooting for the couple to get together, regardless of their strange and horrible acts.

Only one thing is for certain. The watermelon has lost its innocence in the fruit kingdom. Thanks to The Wayward Cloud, this fruit, along with the banana and kumquat, must now be placed behind the beaded curtain in the adults only section of the produce aisle.

Tags: ming liang, ming-liang tsia, wayward cloud

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