The apartment floods when it rains. What’s the point in trying to clean it up if it just keeps happening? Your bedroom floor is a puddle. Might as well use it as an ashtray, then.
Inescapable poverty, petty crime, a few coins for the arcade. Angry, aimless youth. A view of the modern world through a taxi’s broken mirror. Is that Chekhov’s air gun? I thought something would come of it, but no. Ain’t that type of movie. Instead, we get a ringing telephone, never answered.
Hsiao-kang stares at a poster of James Dean, the original rebel without a cause. He finds a real one, Ah-tze, and begins to follow him. Does he want to be like this young man…