Et là-bas, quelle heure est-il ?

On the point of leaving for Paris, Shiang-Chyi wants a dual-dial watch at all costs. He has only one, his own, and he sells it to her. Hsiao-Kang lives with his mother, who is shut away in her apartment while awaiting the reincarnation of her husband. The young man escapes from this oppressive world, attempting to follow Shiang-Chyi's example, and watches François Truffaut's The 400 Blows on a loop. Even better, he has the crazy and poetic idea of setting all the clocks, alarm clocks and watches in Taipei to Paris time. 

"This poetic space made up of cinematographic time, the cinematographic framework and cinematographic editing, is perhaps the realm of the dead and perhaps that of beauty. In addition to the cinephile inspiration, and complying with coproduction logic, the journey to Paris is justified because, from Antiquity to Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1958), a mythological term refers to both of these two spaces, the Champs-Elysées. It's obviously a gag, one of many that punctuate the deadpan filmmaker's funniest film, haunted by a despair to which he opposes the exquisite politeness of great artists." Jean-Michel Frodon, Le Monde, 21 May 2001 

Tsai Ming-Liang, What Time Is It There? France-Taiwan, 2001, 116 min, 35 mm, colour, original version with French subtitles 
With Lee Kang-Sheng, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chen Shiang-Chyi, Lu Yi-Ching 

Preceded by: 

Tsai Ming-Liang, It’s A Dream. France-Taiwan, 2007, 20 min, video, colour, original version with French subtitles  
With Lee Kang-Sheng, Lee Yi-Cheng, Chay Yiok-Khuan 

A short film from the film collective To each their film or that little heartbeat when the light goes out and the film begins, made for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Festival. 
Venice Biennale 2007 

Shot in a theatre in Kuala Lumpur, occupied notably by a family sharing durians or by a woman who offers pears to the man sitting behind her, It’s A Dream could be a sequence from the feature film Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003).