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Journey to the West (Xi you)
From out of retirement, Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang surprised the world with a great gift: “Journey to the West,” the sixth installment in his “Walker” series. Perennial protagonist Lee Kang-sheng unswervingly makes his way at an exaggerated snail’s pace through the French city of Marseille, with life bustling around him, like an illusion in his bright red robe. Loosely based on the life of Xuanzang, a seventh-century Buddhist monk who painstakingly traversed Asia for 17 years in search of “the void,” the film’s series of 14 magnificently composed shots are often startling, even witty, as when Lee slow-walks past a human figure more immobile than he is—a trendily dressed sidewalk dummy—and past red paint which literally seems to be drying. Part performance art, part tone poem, and part rebuke to bloated commercial film productions, “Journey to the West” insists that we, too, slow down and see the world anew.
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