The Hole

THE HOLE (1998) ****

Reviewed on 3/14/99

Every once in a while a movie will come around that is so refreshingly different that it leaves you enraptured as you leave the theater. The Hole was that movie for me. It ends the drought of striking, original films that plagued 1998 and most of 1997. For 1998, The Thin Red Line and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came close, but those films had major flaws in other respects. The Hole, just now being released in the United States in 1999, does not. It is doubly a surprise because it is an out-and-out comedy from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, who is known far more for his stark, neorealist dramas. Tsai restricts his usual inclination to let takes run beyond the attention breaking point. He indulged in that all too tortuously in Vive l'amour. He also adds delightfully funny musical numbers. As with most foreign films, we lose something in the subtitle translations. This is especially true in comedies, which rely on a line's delivery and timing. Even though there is a minimum of dialogue in The Hole, much of the hilarity of the songs are missed I think by only reading the subtitles. (While I understand Mandarin, I do not understand Cantonese, which leaves the Hong Kong cinema aficionado in me not altogether sated.)

The Hole is part of the film series "2000 Seen By..." commissioned to seven international directors for their views on the turn of the Millenium. (The U.S. is represented by Hal Hartley's The Book of Life.) Tsai sees it as eternally raining while a spreading virus makes people behave like cockroaches, making them crawl on all fours and avoid bright light. Once again Tsai casts Lee Kang-sheng (who's been in all four of Tsai's films) and Yang Kuei-mei (who's been in three, but is best known in the States for her part in Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman), this time as characters who remain nameless. Yang's apartment is leaking water and the plumber makes a hole in the floor of Lee's upstairs apartment while trying to fix the apparent culprit pipe. This hole becomes a source of great anguish for Yang and great amusement for us. The incredible simplicity of this idea belies the creative visual whimsy Tsai provides from it. But even funnier are the half dozen odd musical numbers interspersed throughout. Showgirls and guys, gaudily-dressed, lip-synch from and dance to 1950s songs by Hong Kong performer Grace Chang. This is played to the hilt and the sendups are all the more bizarre since all of them are performed in the corridors of Yang and Lee's rundown apartment complex. The theme is lack of communication and loneliness. Hope is provided by Grace Chang (art).