Movie: Stray Dogs

Last night I watched Tsai Ming-liang's movie Stray Dogs on the Criterion Channel on my television. It is certainly a unique movie.

The plot of the movie is not complicated. A alcoholic man works in Taiwan's capital city, Taipei as a sign holder. He holds up a sign advertising apartments at a busy intersection. The wind blows and it rains for the entire time we see him working. This is not a pleasant job. While he works, his children, a son and a daughter, spend their time wandering grocery stores eating the free samples. A mysterious woman meets the man and the man and children move in with her. I suppose there are more details in the story, but that pretty much sums it up.

Like Yasujiro Ozu's movies, Stray Dogs plants the camera on the tripod and does not move it for the length of the scene. These are long scenes. (If you are unfamiliar with Ozu's movies Roger Ebert has an essay that makes for a good starting point.) For instance, the still below is from a scene at the end of the movie. The camera does not move for a full twenty minutes. Yes, twenty. There is no action in the scene, but there is something powerful in watching someone stand with a tear running down their face for a full ten minutes.

While Stray Dogs is very much an art movie, as opposed to a commercial movie, there is plenty of movement in the frame of the still camera. But it is different than most movies. Matt Zoller Seitz in his review of the movie offered this advice for people unfamiliar with the movies of Tsai Ming-liang:

Before he decided to focus on cinema, Tsai worked in experimental theater, and if you've decided to sample his work for the first time starting with this new feature, you should bear that in mind as you watch. There is no plot to speak of here, nor are there any characters—not in any conventional sense of the terms. We're not watching people pursue specific goals, solve specific problems, and learn and grow on the way to catharsis. We're just watching people exist and intuiting the story that drives them from situation to situation, and then moving on to connect the people and the landscape with basic, deep concerns: the isolation and disconnection of life in anonymous big cities; the sense of being suspended in a perpetual present even as time rolls on; the tactility of forests and roads, rooms and furniture, clothes and books, bedsheets and skin. Cinema often lures us into thinking about what people and places and situations represent rather than appreciating their essence. Tsai's films push against that tendency. They might owe more to documentaries, or to theatrical installations, than to most traditional scripted features. The last ten minutes of this movie consist of an unbroken long take of characters staring at a mural.

This is not a dull movie. Stray Dogs, at least in my opinion, delivers powerful emotional content. Ingmar Bergman once pointed out that the difference between movies and theater is that movies are able to offer a close up of a face but theater goes can not experience that. Bergman thought that the human face is the most interesting thing to film. As he said in an interview with Roger Ebert in 1975:

He said he’d been watching an interview with Antonioni the night before: “I hardly heard what he said. I could not take my attention away from his face. For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.”

Stray Dogs achieves its power with several long shots of the characters' faces. Seeing someone's face for so long without a cut to some other image is something I am not used to even though I have watched many movies in the course of my life.

With sparse dialogue and no back story, Ming-liang still had me asking questions about the movie after it was over. Why does he work in such an unskilled job? What happened to the mother of his children? Where exactly does this family live and is it stable housing? Why does this woman take such an interest in this family? What is the future of these four people?

The answers to these questions are not answered in the movie. There are not even hints of an answer to these questions. I liked the movie quite a bit, but I do recognize that a lot of people would not.