Stills: The unique cinematic style of Stray Dogs

Stray Dogs (2014) by Tsai Ming-liang (had to look up his name) is by no means a movie for everyone, but if you have patience and don't expect every movie to be drive by plot, character, or action and are willing to try to meet this very unusual film on its own terms, it's an excellent, provocative, and moving picture. Rather than think of it as a movie, think of it almost as a photo gallery through which you could wander room by room and take in each "picture" for as long as you want, and maybe view them in any sequence - or a photo essay on homeless children in contemporary Taiwan (Taipei?). But it's more than a photo gallery or photo essay, as these are not exactly "stills." The film consists of probably about 100 scenes, each (with one exception - one sequences is filmed with conventional shot to shot editing) shot by a still camera that may pivot from time to time or deepen its focus but that never otherwise moves of tracks. Each shot is composed like a beautiful still photo, but the photos comes subtly to life: there's some (but never a lot) of movement in each shot, limited dialogue - but taken in sequence they tell a quite beautiful, sorrowful, and mysterious story. To the extent there is a story: it's about a young boy and girl, apparently abandoned by their mother (we see her in first scene only, in a weird but run-down apartment), who spend their days blending into the crowd in a local supermarket - and go home at night with father, who lives as a squatter in what seems to be an abandoned housing project, and who makes a little money standing at an intersection holding a sign advertising luxury rentals. Over the course of the film, a worker in the supermarket intervenes to help the children (and their father), but at the end we sense that she has her own problems and her efforts will be ineffectual. There is no back story whatsoever, and many of the scenes - particularly those in the abandoned buildings where some of the characters live, are spatially confusing. I have no idea whether the conditions portrayed are accurate re life in Taipei- at times they seem documentary, at times surreal. The structure is intentionally open to our interpretation, and not all the scenes are equally effective - the extremely long takes in the last two scenes seemed to me overdone and empty. But some extraordinary scenes as well, some of them painful to watch: the light in the supermarket, reflections in the glass of new construction, the closeup of the father singing softly to himself as he holds the advertising sign, the children and father washing up in a public bathroom, the drunken father devouring a head of cabbage - each scene composed and thought through to the smallest detail. No other filmmaker I know of is working in exactly this way - a very circumscribed style, but a unique cinematic signature.