Taiwan Film Symposium: The Hole

The Hole (March 8, 10 p.m.): Billing itself as "a love story for the millennium," Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole imagines a world ' a Taipei, anyway ' invaded by a strange virus that causes victims to scurry toward the darkness, like cockroaches. Whatever its origins, the epidemic seems to be related to the fact that, in the neighborhoods designated as quarantine zones, it never, ever stops raining. Indeed, the sound of water ' dripping, splashing ' permeates this romantic tragedy in which a man and woman who live above/below each other are brought into intimate contact when a plumber accidentally knocks a hole in their floor/ceiling. Wary at first, they gradually grope toward...well, you'll have to see the movie's ending, which is one of the most poetically sublime moments in all of film. With almost no dialogue and a camera that just kind of sits there, The Hole might have seemed a little bleak, but Tsai inserts Hollywood-ish musical numbers that remind us how, for every time it rains, it rains Pennies from Heaven.