Reseñas de la crítica

Like other films by Mr. Tsai, it has a postapocalyptic feel. Torrential rain is virtually constant, and Taipei feels depopulated — a place where events, mostly concerning food and shelter, may be staged in situ. The aesthetic tension between Mr. Tsai's beautifully lit and framed compositions and the desolation of his characters' lives is disconcerting. They do not live in the metropolis so much as haunt its ruins.

It is a rich essay on _belonging_: what object or property belongs to anyone, and what two elements in a story ever belong together? Tsai's cinema, for all its bleakness, emanates a beguiling, poetic aura of hope: if our world and its stories are all truly in ruins, he seems to suggest, then its pieces can belong to us all.

It was described by Tsai at its premiere as his last, and in many ways it's his most challenging. Considered as the apotheosis of his film work to date — which also includes eleven telefilms made between 1989 and 1985, and ten shorts or segments of portmanteau features, culminating in the 2014, 56-minute Journey to the West – it constitutes a kind of nervy dare to the viewer, and to prime oneself for it, it might help to look at Journey to the West first.

Tsai's work has always straddled the line between critical cultural portraiture and pure aestheticism, and with Stray Dogs he's obliterated the binaries entirely. This film is concrete blocks and midnight rain: a brave and adventurous foray into surrealist neorealism.

Tsai Ming Liang's lastest film, Jiao you (Stray Dogs), winner of the Venice Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize (2013), was made after a long period of silence. One may feel that it is a sort of summary of what is so highly appreciated in all his films, their style and vision, the bold and excessively long takes, the sustained silence, the lean narrative and the sublime beauty – these immediately address the spectator.

The power of the director's cinema lies in its aural and tactile quality — and that's where we might find a hint of a meaning. If I had to find one word to describe Stray Dogs, it would be cavernous. There is no warmth to be found anywhere in the film. Even the one nice house we see is cold and vast.

Scene after scene drives home the difficulty of daily existence while also... making you appreciate the incidental beautiful sights and sounds that our busyness or our pain might otherwise cause us to ignore... This is the sort of movie that does not have what studio executives would call a pre-sold audience. It asks a lot of us; in fact it asks us to set aside what we've been conditioned to think movies are, and just roll with a different way of seeing and hearing things, and connect with it.

You don't have to be signed up to the Tsai cause to appreciate Stray Dogs; it's essential viewing if you're interested in what cinema can do with time, space, fragmentation. It's also a compelling piece of poetic realism: Tsai remains, along with Pedro Costa, cinema's foremost painter of urban poverty... Personally, I found Stray Dogs as mesmerizing as anything Tsai has done, but not as satisfying as his best work...

The Chinese title of Tsai Ming-liang's award-winning Stray Dogs is apparently "Excursion," which is a dry description if there ever was one for the derelict existence endured by its woebegone characters. But, this being Tsai—an auteur with idées fixes that have stayed fixed for years—the title "Still Life" might serve just as well for a gorgeously designed film that's equally a fascinating study of landscape, colors, and contours with a nearly sculptural texture.

There's an unquestionable finality to Stray Dogs. Even more so than The Wayward Cloud nearly a decade ago, it's difficult to take this film in and envision where the artist could possibly go next. Speaking strictly of its formal dimensions, we can truly say that Tsai's dominant tropes and concerns are pushed to an absolute breaking point in Stray Dogs.

Stray Dogs is in fact unlike Tsai's nine previous features in one crucial respect: it does away almost completely with continuity editing. Most of its scenes are single shots, and there's no causal link between one and the next. Some shots are so realist that they could have been taken with a hidden camera. Others are so stylized that they might well represent dreams.

This interior space is bizarre and dreamlike, an alien home, and throughout the film, Tsai restrains himself to certain kinds of environments: consumer palaces and urban ruins. The former conceal the existence of the latter, as if one were the guilty conscience of the other.