Stray Dogs (2013)

Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs (郊遊) has lots to recommend it, including a particularly great performance by the always good Lee Kang-sheng. But I think Tsai overdoes things here. There is just a little too much inexplicable content. The usual themes are here - loneliness, abject poverty, hunger, houselessness, crumbling buildings. But Stray Dogs just didn't quite work for me, or perhaps I mean that I feel like I've already seen it because I've seen so much of Tsai's other work. As I say, there are some great moments, but this one felt a bit too self indulgent. 

The film's title is, to my mind, an obvious reference to Kurosawa's 1949 Stray Dog. The definition of the stray dog in that film – a young war veteran living in squalor who turns to crime – links the stray with the way the state has abandoned the young man at the film's center. This same theme has its echoes in Tsai's film as we see Lee sing what sounds like a nationalist song from the Classical theatre (though it is probably invented for the film??). Tsai's film is a much more hopeless film than Kurosawa's, of course, and it doesn't aim for the emotional punch of Kurosawa's ending, either, though Stray Dogs does contain a cri de coeur similar to the final, deeply moving one in Stray Dog.

I've been watching a lot of Tsai Ming-liang lately. I got into him in earnest this summer after my friend Alison recommended The Hole, but then I read a couple interviews and got sort of hooked. The most recent two that I've seen – Stray Dogs and Rebels of the Neon God – were just about to leave the Criterion Channel, so I tuned in while I still had the chance.