What Time Is It There? (2001)

What Time Is It There? is a quiet little miracle of mood: Tsai Ming-liang turns the simple act of keeping time into a haunting, oddly funny meditation on grief, desire, and the way two strangers can feel connected across an ocean without ever truly meeting. The film’s long, still shots don’t rush you; they invite you to notice the comedy in everyday awkwardness and the ache that sits beneath it, until Taipei and Paris start to feel like twin rooms in the same lonely house. There’s a lyrical romance here, not in grand gestures but in small, stubborn rituals, and the emotional payoff lands with the soft force of something you didn’t realize you’d been carrying. It isn’t for viewers who need fast plotting or constant dialogue, but if you’re open to patient cinema that lingers like a late-night thought, it’s deeply rewarding.

What Time Is It There? is trying to capture grief and loneliness through small routines and a faint, time-zone-spanning connection, and Tsai Ming-liang commits to that mood with absolute discipline. The catch is that it’s deliberately slow, sparse on plot, and played in a deadpan register that can feel emotionally distant if you need clear momentum or big dramatic payoffs. If you’re not already on board for long stretches of quiet observation where “nothing happens” is kind of the point, this will test your patience. For the right viewer, though, there’s a haunting, oddly tender beauty in its images and its sense of two lives drifting in parallel, plus a memorable Paris thread that lands more as melancholy poetry than conventional storytelling.