Journey to the West (Directed by Tsaï Ming-liang)
I missed the first 10 minutes of the movie as I had been running late and my first view of the movie as I rushed into the theatre was a close up of French actor Denis Lavant's face. Five minutes later, the camera had not moved and we were still looking at Lavant's face. We could see every little mark, every pore on his face, his whiskers, the little flecks in his eyes.. His stillness evoked the oddest reaction in me. I found myself needing to scratch my nose,the palm of my hand, my cheeks, fold my arms, unfold them, fold them again. I couldn't seem to be able to stay still. And then suddenly the camera's focus moved to a man with a tonsured head and clad in orange robes. Initially he seemed to be standing still, one leg in front of the other as if in mid-stride. As the seconds ticked by I started to notice that his foot was moving. He seemed to be walking but at a pace so slow that a snail could cover the distance faster. I was mesmerized by how he could do this and i was so focused on him that I was ignoring his surroundings. At one point I was also wondering if the whole movie was going to be of us watching him cover a meter in an hour. It was then that I started to notice the people around him. There were people who stopped and just stood there watching him, there were others who took photos and some who just kept walking. There was one segment taken at a subway entrance. The monk was walking down a set of stairs and was taking up one side of the stairs separated by a metal rail running down the middle. People were rushing up and down the stairs and most ppl were in too much of a hurry to do much more than glance at him before carrying on. There were a handful who stopped to look but being no closer to figuring out what was going on and reluctant to ask or make any attempt to elicit more information, just carried on. I remember another segment where there were people who just sat down at cafe and just watched him painstakingly put one foot in front of the other. It gets better as at this point, he gets his own imitator less than 5 feet behind him. This was in a busy outdoor market-like area and there were ppl hurrying about their business with plastic bags loaded with groceries.
It all got me thinking about what I would do in such a situation. Are we so immune to similar goings-on in our day to day life or we just have so much going in our lives that we may pause to watch as we might a street performance before going on our way. Have we lost the curiosity or do we just not have the time to find out about it? Do we just mark it down as another kooky thing going on around us? What was the movie trying to show us?
Before i finish, kudos to the crew on the movie - Director, cinematographer, camera crew. The camera angles, locations, the lighting, the positioning were all impeccable, Definitely a well-presented and thought-provoking film!
