Review of The Wayward Cloud (2005) by Andrew S — 31 Mar 2008

This Tsai is certainly capable of bold, even startling moments, but there's never a great deal going on on a narrative level, and the compensatory wackiness, the desire on the filmmaker's part to doll up a conventional girl-meets-boy set-up with material both (in the musical numbers) utterly innocuous and (in the hardcore sex) thoroughly taboo, proves somewhat trying.

At best, it has the look of a director messing around with the medium's new-found permissiveness, putting his usual tropes into a blender along with some fruitier elements to see what comes out: the result's a lo-cal, if creamy, watermelon smoothie, to be polished off, perhaps enjoyed, between hopefully more intoxicating concoctions.