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 pieces of the director’s identity and thematic output. Tsai is a unique character in cinema history: a gay, Malaysian-born, ethnically Chinese filmmaker working in Taiwan, Malaysia, and France.De Villiers’s auteurist approach studies how queer themes emerge throughout Tsai’s oeuvre, arguing that their queerness emerges by virtue of how they “help us understand queerness in forms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation” (2). Tsai’s treatment of sexuality is often dizzying and perplexing. De Villiers puts forth the concept of “disorientation” to explain the more mysterious and elusive effects of Tsai’s work. Disorientation refers to questions of both space and sexuality, mobilized here as an affective disposition that challenges binary divisions, including the assumed divisions between hetero- and homosexuality. In Vive L’Amour (1994), for example, Hsiao Kang’s “performances” in the apartment “have a destabilizing effect on how [the viewer] reads his gender and sexual identity” (23).Elsewhere, de Villiers outlines the disorientating role that camp plays in Tsai’s films. By juxtaposing sexual and cultural hierarchies, such as the low-art form of pornography within the high-art film (as in 2005’s The Wayward Cloud), Tsai’s use of camp “queers” heterosexual difference, disorienting binary distinctions between genres (71). De Villiers argues that Tsai fits into a long-standing effort to reintegrate the beautiful into the campy (63). Disorientation comes in many forms but repeatedly frustrates all heteronormative, binary distinctions.De Villiers defines how Tsai’s frequently observational approach to space causes spatial disorientation. Tsai’s complex cultural and migratory background informs his portrayal of space, in terms of both physical settings (domestic or urban) and conceptual settings (country, migrant status, and geopolitical relations). Spatial disorientation indexes both the disorientating effects of migration and the vexed conception of “home” (28). I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) marks Tsai’s return to Malaysia, his country of birth, after spending most of his life in Taiwan. As a Huaqiao, an overseas-born Chinese living in Malaysia, Tsai had an upbringing that fostered an ambivalent relationship to his homeland. The main relationship of the film—between a Bangladeshi laborer and a Chinese homeless man—heightens that sense of dislocation and uses the effects of migration and urbanization to challenge conceptions of home.Spatial and sexual disorientation are often interwoven in Tsai’s work, perhaps most endearingly in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). De Villiers analyzes the film in light of Roland Barthes’s “twofold” fascination with the movie theater as space: interest in the image and in one’s surroundings. As the main character ambles around a desolate theater, unsuccessfully cruising, his interest in the theater’s space becomes erotically charged (35). The aleatory quality of this space is represented both literally and metaphorically (40). Spatial and sexual disorientation describe why Tsai’s films can feel simultaneously naturalistic and oneiric.Rather than mourn for a lost golden era, Tsai’s metacinema makes references to Malaysian and Taiwanese film history and questions ideas of “Westernization.” As with Edward Yang, many critics see Tsai’s work as suffering from “Westernization.” He frequently references Truffaut and the French New Wave, but his films also thematically reference the New Taiwanese Cinema and Hong Kong New Wave film movements (38). De Villiers notes that the key to reading Tsai’s citations of Western cinema is to look at the cultural significance of his references (39). Tsai questions the place of film in postmodern life, too, as he alludes to the bygone era of swordsman films within a postmodernist critique of the medium itself. De Villiers notes that Goodbye, Dragon Inn “simultaneously pays homage to the pleasure of Hu’s film and brings the audience to a crisis that unsettles the viewer’s assumptions (about sexuality, cultural tradition, narrative, etc.)” (49). Tsai’s metacinema evokes nostalgia for the history of cinema while also interrogating the present.Tsai’s films are also nostalgic for the continually transforming city of Taipei. His films’ narrative momentum often derives from his exploration of particular locations, like a specific movie theater or urban ruins, and of the possibilities for chance encounters that a city provides (41). In many ways his films are architectural in how they depict and document a space. His complex, ambient soundscapes create an additional “texture” for the places on-screen (44). Think back on the ticket taker’s unique gait, treading through the halls of the projection booth, in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. De Villiers briefly engages with Deleuze, whose notion of “optical and sound situation” helps parse the still-life quality of many of Tsai’s shots. His fascination with spaces intersects with his metacinematic practices in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, where the space itself becomes the primary factor for questioning the place of film in postmodern society.Since retiring from feature filmmaking, Tsai has produced several works for museums, including the first commission for the Louvre, Visage. His 2009 addition to the historic Parisian collection not only adds Tsai to its long list of great artists but also queers the canon of Western art (89). Visage has references to Leonardo da Vinci and Oscar Wilde as well as to the cruisy atmosphere of the Louvre itself. Tsai’s other museum exhibitions include Stray Dogs at the Museum (2014), for which Tsai’s eponymous final feature was screened at an overnight sleepover in the museum of National Taipei University of Education.Tsai’s career trajectory mirrors the contemporary transitional phase that faces cinema today. His work “attempts to ‘lower’ the lofty status” of museums by transforming “sacrosanct” spaces into the quotidian and common (120). His reappropriation of museum space echoes his earlier interests in spatial practices and subverts the generally acknowledged ways of inhabiting and behaving within a space, whatever its status. De Villiers’s book, though repetitive at times, unpacks many of the complicated emotions that enter into watching Tsai’s films. It provides an excellent heuristic that will help readers navigate Tsai’s approach to space and sexuality.