UK resotration premiere. Our screening on Saturday 4 October will be followed by an online Q&A with Tsai Ming-liang.
The Wayward Cloud is arguably Tsai Ming-liang’s least understood and most neglected work. The film has, moreover, gathered a notorious reputation for its unusual mixture of strange musical numbers and very explicit, deliberately sordid sex - all filtered through Tsai’s signature stylistic minimalism. Like so many of Tsai’s best films, The Wayward Cloud is an offbeat love story, the tale of two lonelyhearts struggling to connect in a drought-stricken Taipei. Complicating things is the fact that one of the lovers - played, as always, by Lee Kang-sheng - is a porn actor, a profession that Tsai uses to evince the ambivalence about both filmmaking and sexuality that run throughout his films.
Content warning: Contains a scene of non-consential sex which viewers may find extremely disturbing.
Cast:
Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-Chyi, Lu Yi-ching