With the traditional families deconstructed in both Family and Rebel, the films show their drifting characters constructing their own families or searching for connections. In Tsai's films after Rebel, eating and sexual intercourse, still two of the main activities, are less and less meaningful family rituals. The characters in The River eat the restaurant's leftovers alone, while food stands, lunch boxes and instant noodles become more regular sources of food for the characters in Tsai's other films. Sex between the parents is impossible; it is, instead, secretly or rapidly done alone, with a sleeping lover, or a stranger in a sauna, in an empty apartment building, or--similar to some of Egoyan's characters--through telephone. As the leaking roof in Hsiao-kang's father's room in The River suggests, the familial center can no longer hold values or keeps its authority. All the characters in Tsai's films, the Mother, the Father and the Son as well as the other lonely people, have to search for their own meanings and comfort in the non-places of Taipei, places filled with drifting people and floating signs. The characters' desires in What Time is it There are even more abstract and uncertain: both the mother and the son long for a person elsewhere and in another "time zone," while that "person," the dead father or the girl traveling aimlessly in Paris, is either non-existent or completely lost in the subway, on the street and in restaurants.

Likewise, the biological families in Egoyan's films after Family are dead and lost, as the static picture of a beautiful suburban house at the end of Exotica suggests ironically. However, these families are not to be easily forgotten. Instead of drifting from home like Tsai's characters, Egoyan's characters are fixated by the loss of family in some non-places, obsessively repeating some rituals for memory's sake. Clara, for instance, watches her brother's video repetitively in a mausoleum in Speaking Parts(Appendix II-2); the Egoyan character in Calendar, too, does that to his wife's video in his empty room(Appendix II-3). The fire victims use the photographs to help the adjuster in the namesake film itemize what they have lost in the motel, while Hera's sister burns the pictures from home in the model home they live in. Some other more intricate rituals are invented by the characters to repeat the past or heal the wounds. For instance, "Egoyan" in Calendar gets a girl with a different accent each night to play the role of his date who, as his lost wife did, get involved in a long conversation in a foreign language he does not understand. Francis in Exotica has the strip girl Christina (who used to be the daughter's baby sitter) play the role of his lost daughter in the strip club, and then has his brother's daughter play the role of the babysitter at home.

Inventing new rituals and new meanings in a world deprived of fixed meaningful structures can be healing only temporarily; it can be harmful to oneself or interrupted by other rituals. For instance, in the world of film-making in Speaking Parts, both the script writer and the actor are under the power of the producer: Clara's desire for therapy through writing her screenplay is denied by the domineering producer, as the flow and exchange of images in the talk-show studio expose the confusion of the roles Lance takes (as Clara's brother) and his actual powerlessness. Hera's "family" with Noah in The Adjuster is threatened by the abuse of three rituals: by her colleague who mistakes her ritual of recording pornography to share with her sister for mere pleasure in sex and thus as an invitation for sexual harassment(Appendix II-4); by a couple who turn their model home into a setting for another ritual of exhibitionism, and by the adjuster, Noah, who revises the work of an adjuster to include sexual services. The ending, however, does not show Hera caught in the power relations at work, nor the vicious circle of Noah's "family life" in the motel; instead, she leaves both her work and Noah, refusing to be a victim of sexual harassment or Noah's sexual "redemption." In her rejection of both, Hera keeps a family with her sister and her son, a family without a house, without a husband or even past memories, but with all the genuine mutual concern.

Hsiao-kang also re-invents new meanings in Vive l'amour, but not in the form of repetitive rituals. The small actions he does show his ingenious re-definition of signs related to eating and his attempts to connect with people. In Vive l'amour, Hsiao-kang's performances in the empty apartment re-invent the meanings of a watermelon (by kissing it first and then turning it into a bowling ball, making it both an object of sexual desire and something to eat), as well as his own identity (by crossdressing and then doing summersaults and push-ups).

Hsiao-kang's watermelon-bowling and push-ups in nightgown; Vive l'amour


In The River, he uses a toothbrush to wash his body and a glass as a hearing aid, while in The Hole, a pot lid is used to fan away insecticide. Also, as Chang and Wang puts it very well, besides "de-commodify[ing]" the commodified space of the apartment for sale, in this non-place Hsiao-kang and Ah Jung also become "roommates, friends, partners, and a family" (123 underline added).

To examine in detail the characters' human connections and re-invention of family in non-places, I will focus on Exotica and The Hole. The domestic space in Exotica, like the outdoor space of nature, is empty of its traditional meanings: Francis's house is just empty, while the deceivingly bright field is associated with death, but not natural life. The other two main settings of Exotica, Thomas's murky and dark pet store and the strip club, Exotica, are spaces for the exotic and forbidden: illegally smuggled exotic animals in one, exotic plants and devious desires for female bodies in another. These two non-places are Foucault's "heterotopias of deviation": invisible and hidden at the nooks of society, they reflect negatively society's utopia. In other words, both the lonely people in Exotica and the exotic animals reveal how Toronto is not a happy and orderly "meeting place" where people can blend in and mix well with each other. Like the animals, many people remain "exotic" and lonely in this city. However, they survive; as Francis puts it, "just because they are exotic doesn't mean they can't endure extremes." Moreover, they--Thomas, Francis, Christina, Eric and Zoe--try hard to connect, each with the rituals and new family relationships they invent.

The connections these characters make, indeed, are strange ("exotic"); however, it shows their continuous attempts at re-defining family when the traditional ones are lost or unavailable. Thomas' "exotic" nature is his homosexuality and his shyness. Not being able to get a lover easily, he invents a way to meet and befriend strangers--through buying a scalped concert ticket and then giving it to an ethnic (exotic) male for free. The relations he establishes may be chancy, transient, or even dangerous (his smuggled macaw eggs are taken away by one of the lovers who turns out to be a customs officer), but his attempts at making human connections are genuine. Exotica as a strip club is supposed to be a place for sexual exploitation. However, different kinds of "family relationships" are established among Francis, Christina, Eric and Zoe. The "father-daughter" relationship between Francis and Christina meets the needs of the two: the one in need of protection and the other of being protected. Zoe, the only one with a good memory of her mother, continues her mother's business of running Exotica. However, she is a different sort of "mother": she becomes a mother by taking Eric's sperm with a contract; different from her mother, who betrays the girls, Zoe is a mother protective of the girls there by insisting on the "no touching" rule. Moreover, to both Christina and Eric, she is caring and intimate as, ambivalently, a mother and lover: she lets both of them touch her belly to share her joy as a mother; she gently cares about Eric's feelings about the consequences of impregnating her (not being a father and then losing Christina); moreover, she kisses Christina deeply like a lover.

All of these newly defined "family" relationships depend on the taciturn understanding among the parties involved, or, in the case of Zoe and Eric, a contract. This understanding or contract, however, can be broken or betrayed. The plot of Exotica develops through a series of betrayals: in the past time of the film, there is the betrayal of Francis's marital contract by his wife and his brother and that of Christina's trust by Eric. In the present time, Eric leads Francis to betray Christina's trust, and Francis, in turn, has Thomas do the same by touching her. These betrayals could have led to more and more violence, but for the self-reflexive choices made by the characters to trust and to care. At the time when Francis is about to kill Eric for breaking his relationship with Christina, Eric makes a choice to show his understanding of Francis's grief over his lost daughter. "I found her," Eric said, which refers to both the fact of his finding the daughter's body, and his finding Christina in the search team to be his lover. In the ensuing embrace between the two men outside Exotica and after the series of betrayals, a connection is made through the sharing of their respective losses.

Inside Exotica, too, there is understanding, trust and self-confirmation. Although Thomas is coerced into following Francis' plan to talk with Christina, a connection has been made between Thomas and Christina because she feels the need to talk and he listens. Although Thomas, out of sympathy for Francis' desperate need, breaks Christina's trust by touching her, Christina, seeming to understand Thomas's innate kindness, firmly takes away the hand with a smile and keeps on dancing, establishing herself as a "daughter" who no longer needs protection. At the same time, Zoe sees it all on the stage, but, as a non-interfering mother, she accepts the way Christina deals with it without throwing Thomas out. As the camera shifts from Christina in her dance to Zoe in her gaze, moreover, the mother-daughter bond is firmly established, with Christina resembling Zoe not only in appearance but also in her independence from man's protection.

The non-place in The Hole used to be a domestic space--an apartment building. Typically, this apartment building is shown by Tsai to be dilapidated, gloomy and constraining with walls, cage-like iron railings, small rooms and a small elevator. It is, moreover, turned into a non-place, because of the residents' evacuation after the spread of an unknown epidemic in the area. In the whole building, therefore, there seem to be only two residents, and in a huge market place, only one store is open, with a cockroach-like man hiding in a hole on one side. The setting further takes on an apocalyptic atmosphere because of the ceaseless rain and the continuous falling of garbage bags from above. Besides the rain and garbage, three other things penetrate the walls and pervade the space: the TV news sending more and more serious news about the epidemic, the virus, and the insecticide which looks like poison gas. Another sign of the space's lack of boundaries is the hole in between two apartments, which deprives the male and female residents (Xiao-kang and Meimei) of their privacy and protection.

Connections are not easily made between Xiao-kang and Meimei, two lonely people with very different eccentricities: Xiao-kang as a messy alcoholic, while Meimei, obsessed with cleaning the room and buying toilet paper. In a destitute and dangerous environment and without the wall as a protective boundary, there is even antagonism between the two, as we can see from Xiao-kang's vomiting into the hole and Meimei's spraying insecticide there. Feeling invaded by this messy person in an overall unclean environment, Meimei also piles up bags of toilet paper to use as a barricade. In spite of all the antagonism, they need to cooperate in trying to fix the hole first, and then coping with the leaking problem and water shortage. Cooperation happens when Xiao-kang urinates into the sink when asked not to do so in the toilet. Incidentally, this brings them closer together, since Meimei can hear the sound of water going down the pipe. Their lives are physically tied closer to each other as they have to take turns using water, and then, interestingly, eat instant food at the same time.

As the situation of the epidemic gets worse, moreover, we see voyeuristic curiosity develops into concern and help. Very tellingly the film shows how environmental destitution and physical problems can reduce humans to bare existence but cannot deprive them of curiosity, fantasies, love and human concern, ways to be self-reflexive and to break away from physical limitations. Curiosity is aroused even when their life is endangered: they start to peep at each other when they both are driven to the balcony by insecticide. Here again we see the characters producing new meanings with old signs in order to establish a new relationship. Meimei plays with the mask she uses against insecticide coquettishly as if it were a handkerchief. After feeling connected and knowing Meimei's sickness, Hsiao-kang starts to change his messiness. For him, the hole becomes a means of connections: he cleans the hole to sleep beside it, and he even tries to stick a leg into the hole. When Meimei is seriously ill, Hsiao-kang clearly shows his strong concern, banging the floor with a hammer, crying, and attempting to help. The scene in which Meimei struggles out of her cockroach existence and receives help from Hsiao-kang is surreal indeed: in a typically constrained space framed by two walls, we see from the originally bothersome hole light, clean water, and then a helping hand lifting Meimei up.

The final scene of The Hole is a strong statement Tsai makes about his belief in human reflexivity and connections, which he expresses visually at the end of each film. As I discussed above, the flows of traffic Hsiao-kang is in at the end of Rebel may look indifferent and aimless, yet we know Hsiao-kang to be active and selective in his searching. At the end of Vive l'amour, the Da-An park Meimei cries in may be a waste land, but her crying expresses her self-reflective discontent with her present life, just as Hsiao-kang's kissing of Ah Jung expresses his longing for affection. The sunny hotel balcony Hsiao-kang walks on at the end of The River may still be limiting, but he is able to go out, leave the frame of walls and come back. The epidemic and worldwide environmental problems may be unsolvable as Wood worries, but here in the newly established human connection at the end of The Hole, there is hope for survival. Finally, towards the end of What Time is it There, Hsiao-kang, after losing his trunk which contains his obsession, shows his concern for his mother by putting a blanket on her; Xiang-mei's aimless drifting, on the other side, seems to be responded to by a gentleman's rescue of the trunk and thus stopping it from drifting further on a pond. On an even more abstract level, the film has the gentleman look like Hsiao-kang's father, who turns and walks towards a ferris wheel, thus both the roundness of the wheel and the "father" figure visually rounds off the film about the endless sense of lack and displacement of desire.

Tsai's belief in human resilience and connection, however, is not without modifications, as we can see from the multiple meanings he implies in the multiple space of fantasies he allows the characters to have in The Hole. Undeniably, the fantasy space of the musical scenes allows the characters to temporarily leave their present constraints, to dream, love, be independent and merry.

Juxtaposition of the colorful dance girl with the gloomy
background; The Hole.

However, as Wood rightly points out, it is quite ironic that one musical scene shows Meimei's merry "Achoo!" song after she has contracted the epidemic. Granted the intertextual reference to Hollywood illusionism, however, I want to argue that the multiple musical space is not completely separated from reality. Hollywood-style illusionism wants us to forget reality. However, the musical scenes remind us of reality all the time by making incongruous juxtaposition between the beautifully costumed singer and dancers on the one side, and, on the other, the darkness outside the dirty elevator(Appendix I-5), the narrow staircase, the narrow balcony, the iron gate, as well as the white hanging drapes (actually plastic bags) in the market place which remind us of the peeling wallpaper in Meimei's apartment. In the film's overall dark, decaying and empty "non-place" environment, the scenes of the musicals, for me, are extensions of those non-places with floating signs, where the characters re-invent new meanings out of existing signs more freely than they do in reality. The contradictory signs in the musical scenes are meant to be ambiguous, suggesting both exuberant human imagination and escapism. What is most important, however, is how the characters act on their desire and fantasy in daily life.

In other words, in such a space whose meaning depends on the spatial practice of the subjects, fantasies plus voyeurism can develop into human concern, and in the case of Hsiao-kang, they do. We do not know what will happen to Hsiao-kang or Meimei after she is lifted up to his apartment; the end of the film, instead, shows us another piece of music and dance, accompanied by the song: "I don't care know who you are, in your arm I linger. . . , " suggesting the forming of a new family by people who do not know each other in this domestic non-place.