BOOK DATA Nicholas de Villiers, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. $100.00 cloth; $25.00 paper. 216 pages.
Few directors have such an enigmatic, self-reflexive oeuvre as Tsai Ming-liang. Having completed twelve feature films, a plentitude of shorts, and a handful of museum exhibitions (including the first-ever work of film commissioned for the Louvre in Paris), Tsai cruises through different spaces of exhibition in ways that question the limits of the cinematic and theatrical. While any auteur’s work frequently returns to similar themes and stylistic devices throughout their career, Tsai’s films often comment on themselves, thematically folding in on each other. The result is a stunning, career-long metacinematic universe unto itself. In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang, Nicholas de Villiers illuminates Tsai’s complicated and opaque filmography by unpacking the complex intersectional...