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Kasagi Kozo (Sorimachi Takashi), a city assembly member and also the nephew of the mayor, Tayama Yotaro (Issei Ogata), receives a call from his mother about his uncle’s death. The very diligent mayor had suddenly disappeared while on official business. A few days later, his dead body is discovered at a hot spring resort. The mayor has been absent from the assembly for six days without prior notice. At a regular session at the Yokogawa City Hall, jeers about the mayor fly back and forth and it gets chaotic inside. The mayor’s secretary, Yazaki, is hounded. Yazaki has been wondering about something the mayor had abruptly said to him while observing a classic concert. “I wish to skip tomorrow’s session because I suddenly recalled something I have to do.” Furthermore, he had called the hot spring resort he was headed to “Shimagawa Onsen”, which made Yazaki suspect that it was not his first time going to that town. With the help of the mayor’s housekeeper, Tezuka Sumiko (Baisho Mitsuko), Kasagi who doubts that his strait-laced uncle would have excused himself from work for a private matter, cleans up the belongings in his room after his death. That is when Kasagi finds a diary and learns from its contents that his uncle was besotted with a woman called Fujishima Yoshiko (Kimura Tae)! Is there a connection between the details in the diary and his uncle’s disappearance?

Check Out: The Movie (2023)

The most audacious film to date from visionary director Tsai Ming-liang, The Wayward Cloud is about a porn actor and the museum tour guide who enters into a strange relationship with him, unaware of his profession. Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) is the same alienated youth whose chance encounter with Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi) provided the spark that fueled Tsai's earlier films. Once again, these two lost souls cross paths—he now works as an actor in no-budget porn films, and she wanders around Taipei, hoarding bottles of water because of a serious drought. In fact, the government is recommending that people eat watermelons to hydrate themselves. This fruit sets in motion a perverse (and often hilarious) symbolic theme throughout much of the film. As in his earlier film The Hole (SFIFF 1999), Tsai adds campy musical numbers into the narrative. These sequences play against the raw sex scenes, creating a bizarre, existential chaos. The filmmaker has created a perfectly realized alternative universe in his ongoing exploration of sex, bodies and loneliness. His stationary camera perfectly illustrates the isolation and exploitation the characters are trapped in—yet the film is as funny as it is emotionally tortured. Tsai's characters are indeed wayward clouds, drifting through life without purpose, in a world without water. And prepare yourself for the film's unbelievable final scene (no spoilers here), which manages to be both weirdly erotic and profoundly disturbing. For mature audiences only.

Facing the Society with an Open Heart Documentary series on various issues of the society and touching stories of our neighbors.