THE HOLE (1998)
"We are grateful that we have the songs of Grace Chan to comfort us."
1.5 out of ****
Starring Lee Kang-Sheng, Yang Kuei-Mei Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang Written by Tsai and Yang Ping-Ying Cinematography by Liao Peng-Jung
Taiwan, 24/12/99. The millenium approaches. An incessant downpour batters an unnamed city. Sectors of the city are being sealed, quarantined due to the onset of a mysterious virus. The virus causes people to act like insects: they crawl about on all fours, hide from bright lights, huddle in damp corners. The water supply to the quarantined zones will be cut off in a week's time. Residents are advised to evacuate the area, ASAP.
This premise--Kafka by way of Cronenberg--is the background for THE HOLE, which could have been a great movie, but, sadly, ends up as a waste of good ideas. The quick sketch above suggests a dark, absurd, hallucinatory near-future parable of life in the late 20th century; in execution, however, it is nothing like that.
The virus, the evacuation, the visual possiblities of the deluge: these are all relegated to the background. Instead, THE HOLE focuses on the lives--for want of a better word--of a man (Lee Kang-Sheng) and a woman (Yang Kuei-Mei) who live in the same apartment building, and who have no personalities. The entire movie taks place in settings that are uniformly ugly and sterile: the charmless rooms and corridors of a post-industrial apartment complex, photographed to look as dim and dingy as possible. It's a vivid setting, but an unappealing one, especially with the monotonous hiss of falling rain and the gurgle of drainage pipes in the background.
The man lives in the apartment directly above the woman's. One day, a repairman investigating a leak leaves a small hole in the floor of the man's living room, opening into the ceiling of the woman's living room. This hole--symbol of the solitary opening in the character's lonely, compartmented lives--allows them to interact in unusual (and mostly non-verbal) ways.
Example: the man, suffering from the onset of the virus (or so I assume--everything is obscure in this movie) vomits through the hole. The woman, wandering around in the dark, accidentally puts her hand on his vomit, and then cleans it up. This is what passes for meaningful communication. And they say romance is dead.
Much of the film does not even focus on their interactions, such as they are. There is almost no dialogue and we learn next to nothing about these people. They are ciphers. Instead, we are treated to long takes in which we witness their miserable lives; we watch, for instance, as the woman boils some water, pours it onto some noodles, then eats the noodles. (This is as fascinating as it sounds.)
Offered as counterpoint--or perhaps relief--to these dreary sequences are a series of musical numbers, fantasies in which the woman lip-synchs to pop songs by Grace Chan (popular, so I'm told, in 1950s' China). She prances around in grimy hallways and grungy stairwells, incronguously lit by cheerfully bright spotlights. Sometimes, in these fantasies, she is joined by the man. These scenes are presumably intended to be bright and fanciful, sharply contrasting the dreariness of reality, but they fail. When the man and the woman dance, it seems half-hearted and listless. Astaire and Rogers this is not. Even in imagination, these people are numb, weary, boring.
THE HOLE is part of the 'Collection 2000' series, a group of films commissioned by French TV station La Sept ARTE on the subject of the millenium. Others include Canada's LAST NIGHT, Brazil's MIDNIGHT, and American Hal Hartley's THE BOOK OF LIFE. THE BOOK OF LIFE is the only other one that I have seen, and it is infinitely superior to the Taiwanese entry. Witty, energetic, humane, it makes the THE HOLE seem (ahem) empty.
American movies with nothing to say try to disguise their lack of content with flashy movements, quick cuts, superficial emotions. Foreign movies with nothing to say do what THE HOLE does: they point the camera at something of minimal interest for unbelievably long periods of time, and call it art. THE HOLE is self-evidently a film about alienation, and perhaps director Tsai Ming-Liang wants the audience to share in his characters' alienation. If so, he succeeds. Perhaps it is a challenge: he dares us to enjoy this movie, despite his best attempts to ensure that we don't. If it was a challenge, I wasn't up for it.
A Review by David Dalgleish (October 9th, 1998)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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