The Hole

I'm happy to have picked up a copy of it. You can find bits and pieces online, but ever since I saw it once years ago I've wanted to have it in my collection. It's an unusual film, but the dance sequences and strange imagery are just too memorable not to own it.

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Gorgeous cinema, perfect acting and the Grace Chang "karaoke"/Dennis Poter-esque musical numbers are exquisite. Many people who are used to standard United States movies wil never enjoy/get it, but the rest of us love it.

The government wants to quarantine an area after an outbreak of Taiwan Fever and they will turn off the water in the area after New Years Eve of 2000, which is seven days away. However, some people refuse to leave their homes as they have lived there for a long time. A young man, who lives in the quarantined area, goes about his mundane life as he feeds the cat, goes to work, eats, and sleeps. When the plumber knocks on his door due to a water leakage in the apartment complex it is about to little by little change his daily life style. The plumber creates a small hole that leads to the apartment downstairs where a young woman lives. The young woman is first very annoyed by the hole in her ceiling, but as time goes by she begins to communicate with the young man upstairs. Hole is not an ordinary cinematic experience as it uses shots that seem to go on forever, which instill a feeling of boredom and lifelessness. These long shots are enhanced by the rain that keeps falling non-stop in the background creating an illusion of a invisible wall that no one can escape. Simultaneously the radio and TV are spitting out threatening information in regards to the rare disease in the area, which is terrorizing the minds of the audience. The director Tsai creates an artificial imprisonment where the audience can fall into the same trap as the characters as they struggle with their coexistence through the hole, which is occasionally interrupted by colorful hallucination like scenes of song and dance. This leaves the audience with a remarkable cinematic experience as they view the development of the hole.

The reviewer below had some great advice: "OK maybe to see once, not to own." I own this DVD, spurred on by some egregious advice in a Jonathan Rosenbaum review which ignited my interest; and despite some Jobean patience and the use of heavy stimulants I cannot get through its grating pacing, its alienation effects, its submarined plot. Its hintings of premillenial urban anomie is far more suggestive in reviews about the movie than in the actual viewing experience, and I would direct other curious or hysterical viewers to heed the heroic Amazonian's advice and RENT IT. Take it from me, my sisters and brothers, because I bought it and I've wept ever since. "The Hole" is one of a series of "Year 2000" films commissioned by La Sept Arte commemorating the (then scary) millennium; its brethren include Hal Hartley's "Book of Life" and a Spanish director's entry, "The Night That I Was Born." (There's a French entry as well, which I think is called "Les Commisionaires" or "Les Communards" or something; sorry, I don't remember.) I can enthusiastically recommend the charming, if light, "The Night I Was Born" -- especially over "The Hole."

The final days of the year 1999 prove to be a bleak and chaotic time in Taipei. A widespread virus, "Taiwan Fever", has crippled the city, reducing its victims into exhibiting unusual, cockroach-like behavior. Quarantined areas have been established, and the uninfected residents are repeatedly encouraged through news broadcasts to evacuate into government arranged temporary housing until the spread of the virus can be controlled. But some defiant residents refuse to abandon their homes, and as a last resort, the government has threatened to cut off the water supply and garbage collection to these quarantined areas on January 1, 2000. A young man (Lee Kang-sheng) and his downstairs neighbor (Yang Kuei-Mei) have decided to remain in their dilapidated tenements and ride out the figurative (and literal) storm. One day, a plumber knocks on the young man's door, looking for the source of a leak in the apartment below. The man leaves his apartment to open his small grocery store and feed an abandoned cat in the desolate town market, only to return home and find that the plumber has left a gaping hole through the concrete slab floor into the woman's downstairs apartment. Initially, the intrusive young man sees the hole as a convenient mechanism for observing his unsuspecting neighbor: mopping the floors from the water leak, stockpiling toilet paper in a spare room, eating instant noodle soup. However, as the isolation of their oppressive environment continues to erode their psyche, the hole becomes their only source for human contact - their last, desperate means of connection. The Hole is Tsai Ming-liang's Taiwanese entry into the monumental world cinema project, 2000: Seen By..., commissioned by French television, La Sept Arte. Tsai's oblique vision of a languishing, highly industrialized, and impersonal post "economic miracle" Taiwan recalls the bleak landscape and pervasive ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni's films. The sound of incessant rain, extended silence, and viral quarantine create a sense of claustrophobia. Tsai's camerawork consists of long, extended takes and narrow, isolated framing to further create a visual sense of entrapment. Note the dichotomy of the first Grace Chang-inspired musical sequence by the woman in the elevator (Oh, Calypso), followed by the jarring, mechanical sound of closing elevator doors, as the unconscious, inebriated man sits inside. Tsai further uses the visual incongruity of the colorful, high energy, campy musical fantasy sequences as a sharp contrast to the tedium of the woman's oppressive existence, and as a reflection of her increasing attraction to the man upstairs. The Hole is a highly original, spare, and clever film on the primal need for human connection, an examination of the omnipotent power of love ...and an exhilarating, unabashed tribute to the musical legacy of the irrepressible Grace Chang.

Tsai Ming-Liang is truly a unique talent. In The Hole he's envisioned life at the end of the 20th century in Taipei, beset by a bizarre combination of endless rain and a very weird viral plague that leaves its victims sneezing, crawling around like roaches, and avoiding the light. In a rundown apartment building live a single man and, directly underneath him, a single woman, both in their late 20s/early 30s. The ceaseless rain ruins everything--wallpaper, mattresses, you name it. The juxtaposition of this constantly dreary environment with continuous loneliness gives rise, in the heart of the young woman, to fantasy sequences in which the songs of Grace Chang, a popular Taiwanese singer, are enacted, musical revue-style, by the woman and backup singers/dancers in appropriately glitzy attire. These astonishing interludes, coming completely out of nowhere, make the viewer sit up and take notice--here is a filmmaker with some serious filmmaking chops, no question. The title refers to the opening left in the young man's floor by a clumsy plumber who's come to, supposedly, fix the faulty pipes in the man's apartment. He never returns to fix the hole and through it, in the course of the film, comes bug spray, a leg, an arm, and, eventually, the young woman herself. Seeing a leg dangling from your ceiling--from the perspective of the downstairs apartment resident--is surreal to say the least. This is one of the most creative love stories in cinema and Tsai Ming-Liang should be heartily congratulated for doing what so few filmmakers these days are doing--taking chances to a remarkable degree, giving in film what so few can give--real inspiration based on creativity that knows no limits. A terrific film that should be seen by those who love cinema for what it really can do. Very highly recommended.

Tsai ming liang's hole is a film about loneliness that is set somewhere in Taipei where people are advised to leave by government. Reason is a A disease that pass from the bugs which causes strange changes in people's life styles like fear of light. We witness the main character as the lonely person who refuses to leave the flat which he lives.Only a hand ful people remain in the area and the place he works is also deserted too and only open shop seems to be his. He is visited by a friendly cat and a customer who asks for products that are no longer sold in the market. Later in order to get some pipe work done, a hole is dug in his flat thus enabling him to indirectly communicate with the lady that lives alone downstairs.He later starts to live around this hole in his room. Tsai Ming Liang uses cameras and colours in order to create an environment that is lonely, very hot and soaked with sweatthat is only washed by rain once a while. Interestingly, he uses some old style cha cha songs (by a famous Chinese singer) and dance accompanied to it in order to inform more about the characters lives somehow. For example during those sessions we learn that the lady character is divorced .( the words like, dont call me tiger lady etc) Film also has some science fiction tendencies due to the strange illness that turns people in to 'roaches living in dark, using hands as extra feet etc and taken out of their small dark places by paramedics. But again it is a an art house film and especially not made for the everyone's liking, do not expect much about this genre. In short , hole is an interesting movie and a good watch. But it is not your average Chinese movie even in art house standarts. It may dissapoint and bore some people but may also amuse many others.

Tsai Ming Liang, immense réalisateur taïwanais, nous livre là sa vision du passage à l'an 2000. Ses thèmes récurrents sont tous présents : pessimisme noir, incommunicabilité entre les personnages (toujours très peu de dialogues), même si cet opus ne se hisse pas au niveau de ses autres chefs d'oeuvre : "Vive l'amour" et "la Rivière". Un DVD indispensable pour appréhender l'univers personnel du cinéaste, en attendant la réédition des films cités plus haut.