The Wayward Cloud 2005 CHI SUB ENG, ITA DVDRip x264

Year: 2005
Country: France, Taiwan
Director: Tsai Ming-liang
Cast: Kang-sheng Lee, Shiang-chyi Chen, Yi-ching Lu, Kuei-Mei Yang
IMDB: Link

Language : Mandarin
Subtitles : English, Italian





By incorporating both musical numbers and sexual numbers in its narrative, Wayward provides the perfect example for examining, on the one hand, the generic relationship between musical and pornography, and, on the other hand, the radical transgressive potential of nostalgic pop songs through allegorical and stylistic devices.

It is noteworthy that none of the five musical numbers in Wayward is in the form of a romantic duet. The “umbrella” number subverts the heteronormative convention by featuring a couple (Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi) both dressed in drag, with a third character (Lu Yi-ching, who in the film’s main narrative plays the other porn actress) acting as a competing love interest who constantly disrupts the couple’s amorous gestures toward each other The “penis” number stages a battle between a penis (Hsiao-kang) and an army of breasts led by a leader (Yang Kuei-mei) with particularly conical ones à la Madonna and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Wayward demonstrates that the musical form, like pornography, has the potential to challenge the myth of the romantic heteronormative couple with its parodic performance of drag, threesome, and battle of the sexes.

More important, Tsai uses the musical form to launch a critique of the era from which the songs are drawn, dispelling any notion of nostalgia toward a seemingly innocent age.

Tsai’s parodic critique is best illustrated in a musical number that uses as prop a statue of Taiwan’s former president, Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), located in front of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Entitled “The Beginning of Love”, the 1959 song signals the start of a love relationship between Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi in the main narrative. In the musical number, four actresses in gaudy neon pink and green short dresses perform the love song to Chiang’s statue, which is surrounded by props of phallic flowers reminiscent of the still photography of Robert Mapplethorpe

Lip-synching the lyrics, “This is the beginning of love between the two of us / The love relationship between the two of us / Nobody can forget / Forever won’t forget,” the actresses gaze at the statue in a longing manner, simulate stroking gestures in the statue’s groin area, and entwine its legs with suggestive bodily movement as if making love to Chiang. The musical number ends with a zoom-in (a technique hardly ever employed in Tsai’s filmmaking but one that features in the final shot of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows) to the statue’s face, with Chiang’s serious expression appearing somewhat bemused in the context of the musical number’s camp performance.

Tsai’s staging of this musical number is clearly parodic rather than patriotic, “a mockery of the phallogocentrism of the political order”. Chiang Kai-shek was the longest serving president of the Republic of China (ROC), ruling Taiwan from shortly after the Kuomintang’s (KMT) 1949 retreat to the island until his death in 1975, during which time he imposed a martial law that was lifted only in 1987 by his eldest son, the then president Chiang Ching-kuo (1910–1988). For more than a quarter of a century the senior Chiang was a towering figure in Taiwan, his picture adorning every school classroom alongside that of ROC’s founding father, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925). While Chiang’s political stranglehold on Taiwan may have become a distant memory in the year in which Wayward was released (2005), Tsai’s choice of Chiang’s statue would have been informed by his early experience of living in Taiwan when he arrived to study in 1977, only two years after Chiang’s death.

Through this musical number, Tsai launches an uncharacteristically explicit political critique aimed at challenging the heteronormative discourse and nationalist myth propped up by the KMT regime under Chiang’s leadership. In particular, given Tsai’s queer sensibilities, the camp style makes a mockery of the procreation imperative in Chiang’s famous maxim, “The purpose of life is to improve the livelihood for all mankind; the meaning of life is to create emerging lives in the universe”. Furthermore, while the lyrics of the song are a declaration of love, the musical number is not staged in the form of a romantic duet. In fact, the song is performed by two female singers (Yao Lee and Tsing T’ing), not as a duet but in harmony. Thus not only does the image of the erect and somber statue of Chiang jar, visually and ideologically, with the image of the colorful and limber performers coiling around the statue, but the two female voices performing the song also subvert the heteronormative convention of the musical number.

In Tsai’s staging, the seemingly nostalgic song that sonically hails so clearly from another era no longer sounds wholesome in today’s ears. It also casts into doubt the notion that the 1950s and ’60s were indeed a golden period in Taiwan. The parodic musical number arguably gives voice to those who would have been silenced in the past, a “redemptive” effort, in Jameson’s words (albeit for a different context), “for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations”. In Taiwan, the 1950s and ’60s were known as the “white terror era,” during which an unknown number of intellectuals and political dissidents were arrested by Chiang’s regime. In the realm of cinema, the genre of healthy realism was made possible only because the ideology of “health” dictated that the critical spirit of the Italian cinematic movement that inspired it had to be expurgated in favor of “a cinema of closure, of resolution, and of reassurance”. The regime’s obsession with wholesomeness can be traced at least to the New Life Movement, launched by Chiang in 1934 on Mainland China. (Song Hwee Lim)

[ About file ]

Name: The Wayward Cloud.Tsai Ming-liang.2005.DVDRip.mkv
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:48:19 +0200
Size: 1,818,755,307 bytes (1734.500224 MiB)

[ Magic ]

File type: Matroska data
File type: EBML file, creator matroska

[ Generic infos ]

Duration: 01:49:07 (6547.48 s)
Container: matroska
Production date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 02:38:05 +0200
Total tracks: 3
Track nr. 1: video (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC) {und}
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Muxing library: libebml v1.3.3 + libmatroska v1.4.4
Writing application: mkvmerge v8.9.0 ('Father Daughter') 32bit

[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 716 x 552
Width: multiple of 4
Height: multiple of 8
Average DRF: 20.756535
Standard deviation: 3.863791
Std. dev. weighted mean: 3.683155

[ Video track ]

Codec ID: V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Resolution: 716 x 552
Display resolution: 1018 x 552 (pixels)
Frame aspect ratio: 179:138 = 1.297101
Pixel aspect ratio: 509:358 = 1.421788
Display aspect ratio: 509:276 = 1.844203 (~1.85:1)
Framerate: 25 fps
Stream size: 1,633,748,301 bytes (1558.063794 MiB)
Duration (bs): 01:49:07 (6547.48 s)
Bitrate (bs): 1996.18577 kbps
Qf: 0.202027

[ Audio track ]

Codec ID: A_AC3
Sampling frequency: 48000 Hz
Channels: 2
Stream size: 183,315,328 bytes (174.82312 MiB)
Bitstream type (bs): AC3
Frames (bs): 204,593
Duration (bs): 01:49:07 (6546.976 s)
Chunk-aligned (bs): Yes
Bitrate (bs): 224 kbps CBR
Sampling frequency (bs): 48000 Hz
Mode (bs): stereo

[ Video bitstream ]

Bitstream type: MPEG-4 Part 10
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User data: bluray_compat=0 | constrained_intra=0 | bframes=6 | b_pyramid=2
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Num ref frames: 8
Aspect ratio: Custom pixel shape (64:45 = 1.422222)
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PPS id: 0 (SPS: 0)
Entropy coding type: CABAC
Weighted prediction: P slices - explicit weighted prediction
Weighted bipred idc: B slices - implicit weighted prediction
8x8dct: Yes
Total frames: 163,687
Drop/delay frames: 0
Corrupt frames: 0

P-slices: 31961 ( 19.526 %) ####
B-slices: 130980 ( 80.019 %) ################
I-slices: 746 ( 0.456 %)
SP-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)
SI-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)

[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 20.756535
standard deviation: 3.863791
max DRF: 31

DRF=1: 15 ( 0.009 %)
DRF=2: 32 ( 0.020 %)
DRF=3: 126 ( 0.077 %)
DRF=4: 226 ( 0.138 %)
DRF=5: 184 ( 0.112 %)
DRF=6: 525 ( 0.321 %)
DRF=7: 1005 ( 0.614 %)
DRF=8: 1625 ( 0.993 %)
DRF=9: 606 ( 0.370 %)
DRF=10: 280 ( 0.171 %)
DRF=11: 178 ( 0.109 %)
DRF=12: 268 ( 0.164 %)
DRF=13: 631 ( 0.385 %)
DRF=14: 775 ( 0.473 %)
DRF=15: 1302 ( 0.795 %)
DRF=16: 3464 ( 2.116 %)
DRF=17: 9365 ( 5.721 %) #
DRF=18: 14042 ( 8.579 %) ##
DRF=19: 16782 ( 10.252 %) ##
DRF=20: 25182 ( 15.384 %) ###
DRF=21: 25088 ( 15.327 %) ###
DRF=22: 15718 ( 9.602 %) ##
DRF=23: 12288 ( 7.507 %) ##
DRF=24: 11165 ( 6.821 %) #
DRF=25: 8251 ( 5.041 %) #
DRF=26: 4115 ( 2.514 %) #
DRF=27: 3526 ( 2.154 %)
DRF=28: 3767 ( 2.301 %)
DRF=29: 1247 ( 0.762 %)
DRF=30: 1864 ( 1.139 %)
DRF=31: 31 ( 0.019 %)
DRF>31: 0 ( 0.000 %)

P-slices average DRF: 18.537311
P-slices std. deviation: 3.265011
P-slices max DRF: 30

B-slices average DRF: 21.324492
B-slices std. deviation: 3.789142
B-slices max DRF: 31

I-slices average DRF: 16.115282
I-slices std. deviation: 2.988828
I-slices max DRF: 27

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 10-07-2026 01:41:36