| Director | Tsai Ming-liang |
|---|---|
| Genre | drama film |
| Runtime | 138 min |
| Country | France, Taiwan |
A man and his two young children, a boy and a girl, are homeless in Taipei. During the day, the father has a job holding up a sign advertising real estate along a busy thoroughfare. The children spend their time wandering around stores and the cityscape, which appears to be mostly depopulated. The family meets at night to wash in public bathrooms and sleep in a makeshift shelter they have established in an abandoned building. Only occasional casual conversations are overheard. Long wordless sequences pass of the man performing daily activities: eating, drinking, sleeping, smoking, urinating, defecating, sometimes weeping. Obviously depressed, he violently assaults, then eats, an anthropomorphic cabbage that his daughter has kept as a toy. A woman, the kids' mother or at least a mother-like figure, stealthily observes the family. She "rescues" them from the rainstorm-drenched punt where the father has tried to take them, and later joins the family in an abandoned building assuming her maternal role.