Tsai Ming-liang season at the BFI

Time Out looks ahead to BFI Southbank's Tsai Ming-liang season

Of the four outstanding figures of the Taiwanese New Wave – which also number the late Edward Yang, the Hollywood-domiciled Ang Lee, the Chinese-born Hou Hsiao-hsien – Tsai Ming-liang is the most elusive. Fifty this year, this unique director has excited and challenged critics ever since he made a startling splash with his debut in 1992, 'Rebels of the Neon God', reaping festival prizes for films such as 'Vivre L'Amour' (1994), 'The River' (1997) and 2005's controversial 'The Wayward Cloud'.

Like many of the most innovative directors, Tsai is a rebel soul. His subjects are almost exclusively outsiders, be they petty criminals, watch-sellers or porn stars of the sort that may haunt any of our cities. Tsai observes them, with a tough, almost invasive compassion – he's not a director to avoid a confrontation with truth, but neither is he immune to life's ironies, or the sweet seductions of a song.

He's Western-friendly, too – a flag-bearer for the stylistic breakthroughs of the French New Wave, for instance. But despite that, his profile in the West – and in Britain – has remained discreet, his work hard to obtain, and you'll find few if any books dedicated to him. The Southbank season alone may not be able to put that right but it may, along with its simultaneous releases of Tsai's two most recent works ('The Wayward Cloud' and 'I Don't Want to Sleep Alone') enable British cinemagoers a greater understanding and appreciation of Tsai's special 'aesthetic'.

It's been a long journey since the eight television dramas he wrote and directed before 1991 – which mutated his interests from an almost documentary approach to social problems and the people who suffer them. Through the nine features he's since made, Tsai has developed a style and personal vision that has beautifully embedded both Western and Eastern traditions – absorbing, say, Godard's dismissal of 'story', Antonioni's fascination with architectural spaces, Fassbinder's fearlessness, or Tarkovsky's apocalyptics – with his realisation of the interrogative, psychologically empathetic, spiritual potential of the contemplative long-take. As his work has progressed, Tsai seems to have become more concentrated on, and ever more eloquent at the evocation of, tiny moments of intimacy, transient touch, our small transcendent epiphanies.

Some – this writer included – have even found in his latest, '…Sleep Alone' – the first made in his native country of Malaysia – a new positivity that Tsai, down the phone from Taiwan, denies. 'I don't like, normally, to compare my films to my others', he explains, 'but for me it is never a question of optimism or pessimism. In every film of mine, I just try to present my mindset at the time.'

In the extraordinary '…Sleep Alone', Tsai's regular actor – and some say cinematic alter ego – Lee Kang-Sheng is split: he plays two men, one in a coma, the other beaten to a pulp; both men are administered to by, and engender strong emotional and erotic responses from, their carers, in the first instance a man, the second a woman. Both relationships are essentially mysterious –whose aren't? – fundamentally silent and tactile, floating in the gently suggestive Tsai universe, where the ying of concrete, naturalism co-exists naturally with the yang of his discreet use of metaphor and symbolism.

'But, yes,' Tsai comes back, 'I do think that this time, something is different. In all of my films I have been trying to look for the meaning of life, maybe question the meaning of life. But in this film I seem to have found an answer. For example, in the making of this film, the scene where the Malay man is helping to clean the body of Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng). I realised that, from this person, from his action, I could see the relationship between people can be as simple as that. And that is what his whole life is about.' Or, perhaps, what he means is that there is a god of small things after all.

The Tsai Ming-liang season is at the BFI Southbank all month.

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