Side by Side in What Time Is It There?

Parallel editing, a technique that alternates between two or more distinct locations to convey a sense of simultaneity, was popularized by D. W. Griffith, and became a standard practice in film editing. Sometimes called cross-cutting, it was especially useful for building suspense within a narrowing window: Would the hero arrive in time? Who would win the race? The cross-cut is the cinematic equivalent of the literary term “meanwhile,” which, as Benedict Anderson has argued, allows members of a community to maintain a sense of coexistence without actual interaction. “Meanwhile” unifies far-flung people through shared time.

In cinema, parallel editing pulls events together, joining them in an eventual and singular end point. A hundred years after Griffith, Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time Is It There? probes the entanglement between cross-cutting and the unifying function of “meanwhile.” Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng), a wristwatch vendor in Taipei, sells a watch to Shiang-Chyi (Chen Shiang-Chyi), who is bound for Paris the following day. She wants the watch he wears on his own wrist. He refuses, saying that it will bring her bad luck because his father recently passed away. But she persists, and we next see her lying awake in a hotel bed, jetlagged and unable to sleep. Hsiao-Kang, meanwhile, has begun resetting clocks to Paris time: the watches in his case, the clock in the home he shares with his mother, and the one in a run-down cinema, the same one that later appears in Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). The film toggles between these two characters and the two cities where they sleep, eat, initiate or refuse sexual advances, and sleep again. They won’t meet again, at least not in this film.

The film’s title suggests a split between “there” and “here”: Paris and Taipei, as well as the afterlife and the world of the living. Hsiao-Kang’s father (Miao Tien) is the first and last person seen onscreen. First, in his family’s apartment, he calls his son to dinner; no one comes. At the film’s conclusion, he appears at the Tuileries Garden in Paris, where Shiang-Chyi has fallen asleep in a chair. No one else is around, not even the children who previously stole her suitcase and tossed it in the fountain. Could he be a ghost? In Taipei, Hsiao-Kang’s mother sees the altered clock in their home and declares it a sign of her deceased husband. She begins cooking dinners at midnight, as if the next world was on Paris time. Though her son protests, why is he afraid to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night?

Though all “meanwhiles” are open possibilities, the film also closes around each character. Not only are Hsiao-Kang and Shiang-Chyi physically distant from those around them, they are also temporally separate as well. As Giuliana Bruno has said of What Time, “everyone…is bound to inhabit his or her own time, while dreaming of sharing it.”1 In addition to her jetlag, Shiang-Chyi is separated by her language, appearance, ethnicity, and speed. A telling moment occurs when she stands on a moving walkway in the Paris Métro while other passengers rush past her. The scene recalls Tsai’s Walker series (2012–2022), in which Lee, dressed in monk’s robes, steps extraordinarily slowly through different cities, often taking several seconds just to lift a foot. Cross-cutting may achieve simultaneity, but in Tsai’s films, unity is forestalled.

Instead, it is approximated. Hsiao-Kang goes to a DVD vendor looking for films about Paris, and comes home with the 400 Blows, Tsai’s own favorite film. As he watches young Antoine Doinel, played by French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud, spin in a carnival ride and steal milk bottles, Shiang-Chyi encounters the real-life Léaud in the Père Lachaise cemetery. What might in another film be a moment of daisy-chain serendipity is here one of wry estrangement. Now a much older man, Léaud tries to pick up Shiang-Chyi, like the many men that gawk at her throughout the city. The encounter with Léaud underscores the alienating experience Shiang-Chyi has of the city, where anyone who speaks to her, even a luminary of film history, is only trying to fuck her.

In a sense, Hsiao-Kang is Taipei and Shiang-Chyi is Paris, or at least this is how each views the other. But the substitutions have hollow centers. These otherwise vibrant metropolises become mere stages for the expression of each character’s loneliness and longing. Across time, the film suggests some kind of connection, though indirect and tenuous. Perhaps it is the curse Hsiao-Kang warned of, the loneliness of a grieving man passed onto another. Cinema is like this too, an incidental intimacy among those who sit in the dark, our faces dimly illuminated by the screen. We watch people we feel we know—chimeras, all, but still, they sometimes enter our dreams. Few directors are as cinephilic as Tsai, and few so profoundly understand how a viewer’s solitude can be a sign of their desire. This is true of his characters, too, especially regular players like Lee and Chen. Be especially attentive when they seem to be doing nothing at all, even sleeping, because that’s when they’re closest to those they love.