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If Tsai Ming-Liang's goal in pairing pornographic and musical sequences in The Wayward Cloud was to give audiences double the entertainment, he succeeds only for about a third of the film. As usual, his aims are far more complex than pleasing the viewer, but in this case what's meant to be about alienation becomes alienating itself. Hsiao-Kang, the perennial Tsai character played by Lee Kang-Sheng, is now a hardworking porn actor in a drought-stricken city where there's not even enough water to shoot a whole bathtub scene. As the city thirsts, it's become obsessed with watermelons. The film is well-made, and the situation lends itself to some good laughs. But Tsai's great body of work has captured the isolation of urban life by achieving a stark intimacy with its characters, and there The Wayward Cloud falls short. Even The Hole, which steps back from Tsai's usual realism into a drab apocalypse interrupted by fantasy musical numbers, makes the desperation of its stranded apartment dwellers visceral. The Wayward Cloud is similar to that film, its drought like a mirror image of The Hole's torrential rains, but too much of the film is taken up by burlesques of intimacy instead of the real thing. The relentless scenes of porn shoots start out funny but become as numbing for the audience as for the performers. The musical sequences, though amusing and well done, don't do much to draw us into the story. Tsai's uncanny trick of building characters and themes with virtually no dialog doesn't work as well this time, because his characters are almost always performing. And you can see Tsai working hard at it in The Wayward Cloud in a way you couldn't in his best films, such as The River and Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Lee Kang-Sheng fans, however, should seek out this film. Whether you're intrigued by the enigmatic Hsiao-Kang or just turned on, there's plenty to watch: He smiles! More than once!