The Skywalk is Gone

Lovely. The more Tsai I watch the more clear it is to see his themes of alienation with the urban environment you find yourself living in. It's a minor work by Tsai, but even a minor Tsai is still really darn enjoyable.

Star Rating: ★★★1/2

A perfect little bridge between What Time Is It There? and The Wayward Cloud... picking up the characters from the former and setting up situations (the water shortage, Hsiao-kang's porn career) for the latter. It's also fitting that Tsai would follow up WTIIT (a sort of tribute to The 400 Blows) with a short, like Truffaut did with "Antoine et Collette". I don't rate this as highly as Tsai's feature-lengths, because I feel like his work needs a little time to really get under your skin.

we're all loosely connected in this dense and disconncted urbane world of ours. that's nice, i suppose. the slow minimalism and drab photography don't really combine well in a film this short though, makes it seem incomplete, perhaps even pointless.

Something like Truffaut's Antoine et Collette, between Tsai's "What Time is it There?" and "The Wayward Cloud".

The middle piece of a brilliant trilogy about life without intimacy.

A heartbreaking film about the inability to connect with the other, Tsai fuses image and editing to produce often surprising and engaging formal results. The early scenes of reflections and angles, as well as the later scenes through cloudy glass, evoke a sense of confusion and lostness. The film's centerpiece is the shot on the escalator: the camera's stillness combined with the closeness and the already-determined movement of the bodies evokes a profound desire for the other.