I always find it difficult to write about performances. Whenever I try I feel like I’m merely describing an actor’s work––how they talk, how they move––and the best among them have a way of turning those choices into an alchemy that makes all adjectives redundant. But there are some for whom the task is twice as hard because their films do not just star them, but adjust to their auras; it’s as if they were shaped by their presence. Lee Kang-sheng is one such actor, that rare performer whose craft makes all words seem tired. I’m incapable of doing justice to the sight of him staring at the window in the opening moments of Tsai Ming-Liang Days, or walking at turtle speed clad in a monk’s orange robe in the director’s Walker series. All I can do is talk about the calm he radiates and what that gives me: a feeling of boundless peace. In every film I’ve seen him––whether by Tsai or the few others he’s teamed up with through the years––Lee’s always struck me as someone “suspended,” a man with an untimely quality about him, so antithetical to the breakneck rhythms of our era as to turn him into an alien creature. There’s something about his gaze that sets him apart from our 21st century, suggesting a much older, more contemplative way of being in and looking at the world.
I suspect Siew Hua Yeo feels the same––his latest, Stranger Eyes, thrives off that special anachronism Lee emanates. The actor plays Wu, a voyeur armed with a DVC camera who stalks a couple living in a flat just across the street from his. That’s Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), a young father and mother, respectively, whose baby vanished in broad daylight. Months after the event, a series of DVDs arrives at their doorstep bearing footage Wu recorded of them in the days before the child went missing. Was the man responsible for the disappearance? It’s a premise that echoes Michael Haneke’s Caché: a stranger haunting a family and slowly uncovering their secrets. Everyone in Stranger Eyes either spies or is spied on––sometimes both. Sight is the primary sense, and Yeo routinely finds his characters staring at screens: Junyang and Peiying watching in bated breath those anonymous clips; the police studying the CCTV footage captured in and around the couple’s flat; and Wu himself, gazing at his own material in a quiet stupor.
In a film so concerned with our current media regime––the way we produce and consume images of each other––Lee saunters into Stranger Eyes as a kind of anomaly. There is a stark contrast between the surgical eyes of CCTV cameras and the actor’s own, the way surveillance devices capture reality and how Lee’s Wu processes it. I do not mean to downplay Wu and Panna’s turns. The former in particular channels a feverish angst, and his transformation from object of Wu’s obsession into voyeur himself largely works. But Stranger Eyes belongs to Lee. Whether or not Yeo wrote it with him in mind, I can’t think of a better performer to flesh out the chasm that powers the film: between different ways of looking, between fears as old as time itself and the state-of-the-art technology used to bring them to light.
“Everything’s so advanced these days but we haven’t figured out how to raise kids yet,” a character quips halfway through. “It’s absurd!” That absurdity, and the way Lee embodies it, is arguably more compelling than the plot itself. For all its twists, Yeo’s script can’t quite maintain momentum, saddled as it is with secrets and backstories that feel less revelatory than rote. It’s a complaint that can be levied against his previous feature, too––2018’s Locarno-winning A Land Imagined, a neo-noir that followed a cop investigating the disappearance of a Chinese construction worker in Singapore. Similarly fueled by absence, Stranger Eyes also suffers from the same predictability that plagued Yeo’s earlier project, shedding its mysterious allure to embark on a more formulaic tale of estranged love.
Maybe this is why Lee’s presence feels so rejuvenating. To paraphrase a line from Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, the man doesn’t demonstrate, but reveals. While Stranger Eyes seems hell-bent on deciphering its ambiguities, couching the relationship between Junyang, Peiying, and Wu as a codependency, his character remains refreshingly oblique. In a performance that’s by and large wordless, he’s a Peeping Tom entranced by what he records. Yeo likes to frame people as spectators, their eyes peeled to TVs, laptops, and phones. It is only when that audience is Wu and Wu alone, however, that the film arrives at what disquiet it strives for. In these moments, Lee draws Stranger Eyes into a kind of trance; time slows down, Hideo Urata’s camerawork swaps Steadicam for static shots, pausing on the man’s face as he registers what’s onscreen. This is when Stranger Eyes is at its strongest: when it taps into the actor’s ability to look with eyes that aren’t strange so much as ancient, a gaze that always seems to invite me to see the world anew.
Stranger Eyes premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
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