Watching his films in order, they were always building to fulfill a vision and it is questionable if he achieved it, but here he broke the dam down. How to quantify this notion of the breakthrough? It is hard to say.
It is achieving deeper ends of surrealism than ever before, but not pushing it on us like the others. The others are really racing to impress us, work for us, as auteur works, clever puzzles.
This one is existing in its own orbit. So if I discuss the notion of a breakthrough it is that he finally erased the director Tsai from his film and let it exist on its own without the artist winking at us. That can't be understated in the arts which, and his body of work specifically, has always been about him. He even had a line of merch.
Something about the chilling emptiness of the slow cinema does something to our bodies, our minds. Here I feel he truly let the baby be born, and let it exist, and came into his own as an artist director.
It is a film that must be earned, through understanding Tsai, through understanding slow film and what it is reacting against in the traditional forms, it is not one that can be viewed through ignorance. It is making connections, moods, feelings, the canvas isn't the film on screen, but is our consciousness. All slow cinema operates in the same way, but to different ends. Here is the same actors and actresses as his other films, but they do not feel like the 10th film of them, it feels like they all got together for the first time. The transience of it all, creates a pure cinema and points to new frontiers.
