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Taipeh, only days away from the turn of the millenium: Because of a
weird disease, the city has been mostly evacuated, and the rain just won't
stop. Few people have remained behind like a woman ((Yang Kuei-Mei)
stockpiling toilet paper since water is coming down her walls permanently,
and her upstairs neighbour (Lee Kang-Sheng), a rather carefree storeowner
who has one of the last stores that still open in the whole city at the
time of crisis.
Eventually, a plumber (Tong Hsiang-Chu) comes to fix the woman's
problems of her dripping walls, but all he actually does is leaving a
gaping hole in the man's living room floor and leave to never been seen
again ...
The first thing the man does when he finds the hole and is slightly
drunk is to throw up into it, right into the woman's living room, but soon
he starts spying on his downstairs neioghbour, with her starting to defend
her privacy before long with unorthodox means, while her appartment is
getting wetter and wetter. At the same time though she starts fantasizing
about her upstairs neighbour in a string of musical numbers set to light
pop tunes fromthe 1950's sung by Grace Chang. - and in the end, his hand
reaches through the hole to lift her up to his appartment - but is it
dream or reality ?
The Hole is not a film with all that much going on really,
actually it's extremely (and deliberately) slow-moving, consisting of
often minute-long takes of people doing next to nothing in front of an
inanimate camera, and the non-events only occasionally being interrupted
by intentionally cheesy and intentionally clumsy musical numbers set to
very banal pop tunes.
That all said though, The Hole is an extremely fascinating film,
Tsai Ming-Liang is actually one of the very few directors to create a
melodrama entirely out of non-events and he also manages to give the
characters' trivial actions an edge of irony, plus the musical numbers in
all their imperfection are nothing short of wonderful.
Of course, The Hole is not for the impatient, but those willing
and able to sit through it will be richly rewarded.
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