In Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole, rain-drenched Taipei is overrun—seven days before the year 2000—by “Taiwan Fever,” a virus that turns people into light-phobic human cockroaches. Yang Kuei-mei and frequent Tsai collaborator Lee Kang-sheng play, respectively, an unnamed woman and man who occupy vertically adjacent apartments in a rundown public housing complex, unaware of the other’s existence until an incompetent plumber, examining the source of a leak, opens a hole in the floor/ceiling between their two residences.
The hole acts as a metaphorical and, finally, spiritual connection between the two characters—Lee being the comically silent voyeur to the annoyed yet curious Yang, who daydreams Technicolor fantasies in which she sings the pop love songs of Grace Chang. Tsai details their love among the ruins as an extended pas de deux set against cold concrete structures and accompanied by the consistent drone of an alternately oppressive and liberating deluge.
The filmmaker, though, takes welcome time out for a few stock-company walk-ons before eventually returning his focus to the lovers’ shared fantasia. He observes the elder, former martial arts actor Miao Tien wandering past numerous abandoned grocery marts in search of the proper bean sauce—which Lee informs him has been discontinued—is one particularly hilarious and heartbreaking moment out of many. It culminates in an ending of transcendent beauty with Lee literally lifting Yang up where she belongs—above and beyond the surrounding malaise and decay and into an illuminating, musical embrace for the ages.
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