I figured I’d be coming up against some of the odder films of the challenge when I got to Chad’s week – he’s got some of the more eccentric tastes in my main movie group on Facebook, and he didn’t disappoint.
Tsai Ming-liang’s 1998 take on the turn of the millennium in Taiwan has the city suffering from a strange virus that makes people act like roaches. The city is supposed to have been evacuated, but some residents are stubbornly staying behind, despite the epidemic and the accompanying breakdown of basic services. We’re focused on two people, a woman in a lower apartment that’s beset with constant leaking (a monsoon outside never lets up, providing an unrelenting buzz on the soundtrack) and the man who lives above her. A plumber fails to fix the leak, but manages to put a hole in the man’s floor/woman’s ceiling, connecting the two apartments and annoying the woman considerably.
