‎What Time Is It There? (2001) Directed By Tsai Ming ... - Letterboxd

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JustWatch What Time Is It There? 2001

你那邊幾點

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang

Synopsis

A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.

Cast

Lee Kang-Sheng Chen Shiang-Chyi Lu Yi-ching Miao Tian Liao Ching-Kuo Tsai Chao-yi Chen Hsi-Fei Java Sparrow Youth-Leigh Hsu Yue-Yin Huang Kuo-Cheng Chin Li-Fang David Ganansia Chen Chao-jung Arthur Nauzyciel Jean-Pierre Léaud Cecilia Yip Tung Tsai Kuei

Director Director

Tsai Ming-liang

Producers Producers

Michel Imbert Yeh Jufeng Lee Kang-Sheng Hsieh Chin-Lin

Writers Writers

Tsai Ming-liang Pi-ying Yang

Casting Casting

Marie-Sylvie Caillierez

Editor Editor

Chan Sing-Cheong

Cinematography Cinematography

Benoît Delhomme

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Wang Ming Tai Vincent Wang Chen Yi Yu

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Bruno Pésery

Lighting Lighting

Robert Bosch

Art Direction Art Direction

Timothy Yip Gam-Tim Lu Li-Chin

Sound Sound

Tu Duu-Chih Tang Shiang-Chu

Costume Design Costume Design

Jackie Budin Chia Hui Wang

Makeup Makeup

Chen Yi-Lin

Studios

Homegreen Films Arena Films

Countries

France Taiwan

Primary Language

Chinese

Spoken Languages

English Chinese French

Alternative Titles

Et là-bas, quelle heure est-il ?, What Time Is It Over There?, Futatsu no toki, futari no toki, Ni na bian ji dian, ¿Y allí qué hora es?, Que Horas São Aí?, Paljonko kello on Pariisissa?, Ti ora einai ekei?, És ott hány óra van?, Futatsu no toki, futari no jikan, ふたつの時、ふたりの時間, Która tam jest godzina?, Vad är klockan i Paris?, Qi dao si bai ji, Che ora è laggiù?, ¿Qué hora es?, 你那边几点, 거긴 지금 몇시니?, А у вас который час?, Quina hora és allà?

Genres

Romance Drama

Themes

Humanity and the world around us Heartbreaking and moving family drama Show All…

Premiere

17 May 2001

• Czechia Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

09 Sep 2001

• USA New York Film Festival

12 Nov 2001

• France

Canada

09 Sep 2001

• Premiere Toronto International Film Festival

Czechia

11 Jul 2001

• Premiere Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

France

17 May 2001

• Premiere Cannes Film Festival

26 Sep 2001

• Theatrical

South Korea

12 Nov 2001

• Premiere Pusan International Film Festival

USA

29 Sep 2001

• Premiere New York Film Festival

116 mins More at IMDb TMDB Report this page

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Popular reviews

More Review by Marcissus ★★★★★ 9

Hsiao-kang speaks to his fathers ashes assuming that his ghost still clings to its edges with his celestial fingertips, giving him a much needed warning when they are about to enter a tunnel. His father is soon to be reincarnated as mice and fish and walls and maybe even time, his mother says. Hsiao-Kang pisses in bags and lackadaisically sells watches. Shiang-chyi enters the game at this point. They meet when she wants to buy a watch and he sells watches and she says she is moving to Paris and he says ok. They may have coalesced greatly but she went to Paris, France and he doesn't live there. He lives in Taipei and the time there is not the…

Translate Translated from by Review by Sally Jane Black

I feel like I've read so much about this film before that adding anything new might be impossible. Having become a fan of Tsai Ming-liang over the last year, and having discussed him with my friend Basil, I spent some time reading up on him and this film in particular, in part because it came up in my Letterboxd feed a few times by chance. The two things that stayed with me while I watched it were Basil's mentioning the father as a metaphor for Taiwan, and an odd thing from Roger Ebert's review. In his review, he speculates that the graveyard Jean-Pierre Leaud is sitting in in the film is where Francois Truffaut is buried, and the idea of…

Translate Translated from by Review by russman ★★★★ Liked 16

7:25pm

Translate Translated from by Review by Ayush ★★★★½ Liked 11

Loneliness as an all-consuming omnipresent being. The acts of communicating feelings and forging meaningful relationships are akin to ghost towns. Actions are eccentric, words are deficient. Loss - be it a death, or someone's temporary departure to another land - is coped through silence and obsessive tendencies. Whether an impossible quest to change the collective time of a city, or in the search of a reincarnated soul in any living being, estrangement borders on insanity in this friendless realm; all of it concluding in the most perplexing ending I have seen. The perennially lonesome Taipei of Tsai Ming-liang has never been more alienating.

Translate Translated from by Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 ★★★★★ Liked 14

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

Images speak for themselves in Tsai's invigorating cinematic oeuvre. Ni na bian ji dian is almost as symbolic as a modern Lynch masterpiece; Taiwan is shown through a low-class scope where silence plays the most important role in the characters' inner desperation. Life is an enormous chess board: the game is unpredictable and there are several ways in which you can win, but half of the circumstances are out of your control. Besides, the game is too short. Human emotions felt to their most extreme boundaries become, ultimately, in the most intense escapism available. The loneliness of completely separate individuals, both in the physical and spiritual levels, is connected regardless of kilometric distance.

100/100

Translate Translated from by Review by Jerry ★★★★ 13

Time for saleTime for saleTime for sale

Left hanging by the thinnest thread. Why does privation linger so pervasively? Phone calls left unanswered, silences left unspoken, promises left unbroken. Time that is kept on supposedly unbreakable pieces is subject to the whims life procures. We discover that clocks and watches do not provide shelter from dark shadows cast down by the hands of destiny; lonesome in the night, awaiting arrivals that it seems may never emerge, and returns which shall not manifest. But that thread stretches far: alone and bereft in Taiwan, isolated and desultory in France—a life becomes lives; junctures become singular, closer than ever metaphysically, though miles away materially. You can feel it. Looking within you…

Translate Translated from by Review by nick ★★★★ Liked

loneliness knows no timezones. Taipei and Paris are interlocked in such a melancholic manner in What Time Is It There, Ming-liang Tsai's heartbreaking tributes to his father, as well as to French cinema that has obviously played an indelible role in his filmmaking mastery.

This is a wittily written story about mourning, both for the living and the dead, and the crazy length people would go to simply to ease the pain. Lee Kang-sheng is troubled by his newly deceased father, and a female customer who he may never meet again, and a bizarre, multiple-perspective journey starts from there. It's both hilarious and heartwrenching to watch this tormented Taiwanese family grieving in their own unique, borderline obsessive ways, and the…

Translate Translated from by Review by 🌻 lindsay 🌻 ★★★★ Liked 9

9:04amyou wake up groggy and not wanting to open your eyes. your first thought is how comfortable your pillow is. your second thought is how hard the day is going to be to get through.

10:45amyou’ve managed to pull yourself away from the comfort of sleep to make some food. you feed your fish too. you talk to him for a while and it makes you feel a little bit less alone.

12:04pmwork is normal today because every day is the same. selling watches to countless, nameless faces and you don’t care. except this one face stands out from the rest. she takes the watch from your wrist and now you can’t get it out of your…

Translate Translated from by Review by Jerry ★★★★ 13

Are connections coincidences? or communions with God? I guess that all depends on what you believe. Regardless, kismet has quite the reach, and closure seems to know no time or distance. Either it is the same time everywhere or no time anywhere. Only the dead can know true peace, true acceptance, true timelessness, and I think that’s beautiful—something to look forward to.

Translate Translated from by Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ Liked 7

ceremony becomes a way to demarcate change and create a repetitive experience of history -- you celebrate a holiday that your ancestors did, and in that repeating, you bridge the temporal gap between yourself and a world which is always slipping into discontinuity, into death. the cinema itself, as with all artforms, carries with it a ceremonial essence -- through spending time with a film, one becomes acquainted with the singular qualities of a time that is not their own, sees people who may look and act like real people, but who invariably perform the same tasks over and over -- lighting cigarettes, going to cafes, mourning. movie people are just like us, but a vertical slice of us, frozen…

Translate Translated from by Review by theironcupcake ★★★★★ Liked 15

"Is that you coming back to see me?"

Life is built on a series of rituals. We all have them, whether we would willingly share them or not. Street merchant Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) has a few, but the most intense one is a compulsive need to switch all the watches and clocks he can find - even on the sides of buildings - to Paris time, driven by his obsession with a customer he met only once, Shiang-chyi (Shiang-chyi Chen). She convinced him to sell her his watch and gave him a cake along with the cash; that gesture was like a key turning a lock inside his heart. It changed him.

We simultaneously follow Shiang-chyi's solitary vacation in France…

Translate Translated from by Review by rafid ★★★★

in tsai's films, there's always a wound that's bleeding, a road always walking. endless arms of tribulation, uncertain romance. trying to adapt to the wilderness, where even foes close their eyes and leave. rarely anyone talks, anything happens yet there's tons of deep thoughts looms amidst one. another slow tsai capsule of urban angst that left me dwelling on plenty of things long after it ended.

Translate Translated from by

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