The theme of alienation and disaffection in Egoyan's and Tsai's films receive different stylistic treatments, which can be attributed to both the directors' personal styles and their respective cultural contexts. With an equal degree of self-consciousness, Egoyan and Tsai seem to be on two extremes of stylistic complexities. Egoyan, on the one hand, uses intricate and multiple plots to present the complexities of human desire and relationships; his films (after the deceivingly straightforward Next of Kin) are typically fragmentary with frequent flashbacks which gradually reveal a past trauma. Tsai, on the other hand, purposely under-plots his films and downplays the other dramatic elements such as music and dialogue to be true to the un-eventfulness of daily life; his camera insistently focuses on the characters' plodding through their present time with their fears, desires and ingenious uses of daily objects. As a director of meta-films, Egoyan self-reflexively makes use of different cameras, camera angles and video images to discuss the relations between reality (desire, power, the past) and human artifact (ritual, video, photography and other communication media). Tsai, as a minimalist, insists on being "seem[ingly] realistic" (Berry 19) with his use of only one camera, his long-take and fixed camera angle.6

Besides personal styles, the differences in their film languages can be explained in terms of the respective film history and urban culture Egoyan and Tsai belong to. Egoyan, like David Cronenberg and Patricia Rozema, is part of the group of "post-tax shelter" Ontario independent filmmakers who offer filmic constructions of Canadian identity since the mid-1980's by depicting alienation, dislocation, as well as their relation to media technologies (Egoyan 1995: 63; Pevere).7 In this context, Egoyan, like the other directors in Ontario New Wave, is rebelling against the Hollywood dream factory and critical of media technologies in his unique way. Tsai's films, on the other hand, are characteristic of Taiwanese films in the 1990's, which stylistically continue but expand the realist tradition of the New Cinema in the 1980's (to include magic realism and formal self-reflexivity). Thematically, Taiwanese filmmakers in the 1990's, Tsai included, turn their attention away from national history to the contemporary urban world and its "abstract space" of global capitalism (Wenchi Lin 112). Out of different national contexts, however, Canadian films and Taiwan films are both struggling for self-identity in face of the dominant power of the Hollywood film industry, and they both win more attention in international film festivals than at home. Only with Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter did Egoyan win box-office success and critical acclaim at home as well as abroad, while Tsai's films have not been well received locally by general audiences, film companies and distributors.

The different ways the two directors visualize the theme of isolation and constraint are partly due to their respective urban environments, and partly to their personal styles. The sense of isolation in Tsai is more "physically felt" than that in Egoyan. Tsai has his characters constrained by their physical space (with the wall[s] cutting the screen in halves or framing it on both sides; see Appendix I) and suffer from some environmental problems Egoyan's characters, on the other hand, are less physically confined. Instead, they are obsessed or confined by some videos, a camera, or a certain ritual which serve to replay their memory like a tape. While the dominance of houses (or their doors, walls and windows) in Tsai's films makes Kien Ket Lin think that they are more important than the characters (68), in Egoyan's, as Pevere puts it, "media become environment" ("No Place like Home" 17). The two directors' different urban settings can indeed partly explain this difference: Taipei, as a Third-World global city, has been troubled by over-population, epidemic diseases, environmental pollution and, more recently, natural disasters (worsened by human errors) such as flood, draught and earthquakes, while Toronto, renowned for being "one of the most livable cities" (Condi 122),8 is highly advanced technologically without being exempt from the increasing crime rates and alienation characteristic of contemporary postmodern cities.9 On the other hand, however, being in the worldwide but uneven circulation of wealth, migrants, virus, commodities and technologies, Toronto and Taipei have their share of each type of problems, only to a different degree. It is only the two directors' different focuses that make one not deal with, say, the housing problems of the Caribbeans in Toronto, and the other, the TV walls and many other types of hyperspaces in Taipei.

In spite of these differences, Egoyan's and Tsai's films similarly "de-realize" their city by focusing on the interior settings of the city and frequently its non-places--places without history, fixed identities or stable relationships. Even when their films have exterior settings, they seldom conjure up the wholeness of the city by offering a wide-angle or bird-eye's view of the city, or showing the city's nodal points or landmarks.10 Without offering clear signs of their geographic location, the two directors make their urban settings seem like--to borrow Pevere phrase again-the "middle of nowhere" or, rather, seem symbolic of dislocation, loneliness and obsession as basic modes of human existence. Their urban landscape, therefore, is more existential than sociological, whether it be a "landscape of desire" (Chang and Wang) or a local geography of the global "space of flows." To map the desire of marginalized urban dwellers' and the fluidity of traditional structures of meanings, Egoyan and Tsai frequently juxtapose the emptied domestic space with non-places. For instance, in Egoyan's Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Tsai's Rebel of the Neon God, The River and What Time is it There, the spaces of biological families are de-realized by either video frames (where the family talks over with a psychiatrist the son's problem; Appendix II-1) or mechanical rituals (of watching videos, eating, drinking water, urinating, communicating with the dead husband but not the real son), as a contrast to the protagonists' more genuine quests and self-expressions in another family or in such non-places as video parlors, hotels, saunas, and overpasses.11 In the other films (all of Egoyan's after Family Viewing and Tsai's Vive l'amour and The Hole), traditional family and home are simply non-existent (with only some traces left in videos and photos in Egoyan's), Instead, we see "non-places" serving as substitutes for home spaces; for instance, the hotel of Speaking Parts, the nursing homes in Family, the model home in The Adjuster, empty apartment buildings in Vive l'amour and The Hole, and the strip club and pet store in Exotica.

The settings in both Egoyan's and Tsai's films, therefore, are important not as actual geographic locations, but as sites marked by frequent and irregular flows of people, information and desire. Not coincidentally, another related feature in Egoyan's and Tsai's films is the dominant symbol they use respectively: video and/or ritual in Egoyan's (before The Sweet Hereafter) and water in Tsai's. Egoyan's films, as Pevere puts it, are "about people whose very experience depends on the media that make experience possible" (17); here "media" mean the videos of their past or of other people the characters keep watching, the electronic means (video, camera, telephone and answering machine) and the rituals of gaze, touch, role play and substitution through which they communicate and express their desire. What connects the past and the present, or circulate among people in his films is memory captured in videos or other electronic codes, and desire embodied in some highly ritualized language. Egoyan's characters, in other words, are obsessed with certain memory and desire, which are encoded and expressed by their own non-traditional systems of signs, electronic or ritualistic. These systems of codes may be healing and connecting for a moment, but once fixed, they need to be broken away from to allow for more self-reflexive and genuine self-expressions and communication.

Tsai's characters, on the other hand, live only in the present. The dominant symbol in his films is not anything technological, but a basic element of life: water, whether it be rain water, river, drinking water, secretion from the body, or water flooding from the pipes below the room or leaking from above. The overflowing water, indeed, has to do with the pollution and sewage problems in Taipei; however, Tsai refuses to be limited by these environmental references. He claims that the water in The River is symbolic of desire and that Hsiao-kang's disease symbolizes his need to rebel (58-59). Also, he thinks that all of his characters' thirst for water mean symbolically their thirst for "love, or something they lack" (Rehm 94). To consider his films together, moreover, water is associated with other kinds of flows. In all of his films, there are the flows of people and their exchange of glances. In Rebel, for instance, the protagonists drift in and out of the flows of traffic on the street, of people in the ice-skate palace and video game parlor, and of telephone rings in a telephone friend-making center. In The Hole, on the other hand, the protagonists are confined amidst the flows of voices from the TV, garbage bags, the virus and insecticides. What flows in What Time is it There are not only the drifting people, but also the many watches they carry with them, as well as the clocks in public spaces which used to regulate the "present" modes of existence but is changed by Hsiao-kang and his mother to suggest another time-space. All of these different kinds of flows problematize traditional relationships and existence, and thus express and stimulate the characters' thirst for love and relationship. In this sense, video and water as the two dominant kinds of flows in Egoyan's and Tsai's films are related not only because they both have to do with the fluidity of human desire, but also because they are part of the global space of flows which destabilize our traditional meaning structures.