Stray Dogs

STRAY DOGS   ***

Tsai Ming-liang

2013

IDEA:  A man struggles to make a living while raising his kids in homelessness.

BLURB:  Even in a filmography filled with as much anomie and anguish as Tsai Ming-liang’s, Stray Dogs is particularly despondent. In disgorged takes of harsh digital beauty, the filmmaker wallows in the simmering emotional distress of his homeless protagonist (Lee Kang-sheng) and his desolate surroundings, which often appear in shadow like post-industrial ruins. By day the man stands at an intersection, whipped by rain and wind, as he advertises a new apartment complex he’ll never be able to afford; at night he joins his two children for rest in a makeshift shelter. Tsai’s themes are fully accounted for, perhaps more explicitly than ever: crises of urban habitation, alienation, frustrated desire, the degrading effects of capitalism. But in its unrelenting moroseness, the film comes discomfortingly close to trafficking in that dubious category known as “miserabilism.” If anything about Stray Dogs exists to combat the sense that it’s more interested in aestheticizing poverty than seriously commenting on it, it’s the film’s mannered strangeness, an otherworldly quality that allows it to transcend the trappings of social realism. Tsai has always made Taipei askew and vaguely hostile, but here it’s basically slow-motion apocalyptic, a sludgy, decrepit dystopia of interiors that look as though they’ve weathered both tsunamis and nuclear blasts. In such expressionistic excesses, Stray Dogs can sometimes feel needlessly indulgent or even self-parodic. But the feeling it leaves one with goes to the bone - a mix of unspoken sadness and wonder encapsulated in a 13-minute shot that suggests there will always be a bittersweet, even stupefying refuge in art.