Dir. Lee Kang Sheng. Taiwan , 2007. 103mins
Best known as Tsai Ming Liang's regular lead actor, Lee Kang Sheng's second feature film will cater mainly for the regular followers of Tsai's special brand of cinema - slow, minimalist, obsessive and heavily reliant on such compulsive fixations as sex and food, unflinchingly explored to their more scabrous outer limits.

Having refrained from playing in his earlier film, The Missing, Lee changes tack and assumes the lead part himself. This is a picture that is supposed to be yet another downbeat portrait of loneliness and desperation, combined with reflections on Taiwan 's unstable economy and politics, not to mention the alienation generated by the changing landscape of the city.

Tsai Ming Liang is once again extensively involved on the production team - he was executive producer on Lee's first effort also. But the urgency and implied poignancy his films usually generate is absent here. Lee's picture instead relies on the appeal of some pretty kinky sexual acrobatics, performed at length and with very little restraint on camera, to keep the faith of his admirers intact. A niche item at all times, certain to do the festival rounds and land specialized arthouse dates, a wider audience beyond that is pretty improbable.

At the centre of the schematic plot lies a bankrupt stockbroker Ah Jie (Lee). This is a man who routinely hyperventilates and gets panic attacks, hocks all his possessions to survive and smokes the marijuana he grows in a wardrobe. He calls a suicide line every once in a while to listen to the soothing voice of Chyi, the girl at the other end of the line. Failing to squeeze a date out of her, he consoles himself in the arms of Shin (Yin Shin) who has no objections sharing either his sexual fantasies or his abundant stack of marijuana.

But he is still obsessed with Chyi, whom he stalks around town, not realizing that another girl (Liao Hui Zhen), overweight, unattractive and married to a gay cook, is the one who is always answering his calls. Unable to give up his dependency on the weed, and after selling out everything he was left to play the lottery and loose, abandoned by Shin who won't see him again, he makes a last call of distress, before he attempts to take his own life.

If The Missing followed Tsai Ming Liang's film vocabulary faithfully all through and even added a couple of suitable twists to it, Help Me Eros is stylistically more erratic, the individual shots, shorter though still far from conventional length, lack the sophisticated choreography and the psychological intensity of the previous film. Though the characters themselves seem closer to the audience, they are less affecting, and their loneliness in a cold and indifferent world is less painfully involving.

The sheer unadulterated onscreen pleasure of the pot smoking sometimes resembles a marijuana commercial; this may well cause censorship problems in some territories, while the sex trysts it releases recall some of the blunt irreverence in Tsai's The Wayward Cloud, with some new touches as well, like a nude girl sharing a bath with a bunch of over-active eels.

Lee, whose script is built around the same kind of persona he has played in the last fifteen years for Tsai, could go through this blindfolded. Yin Shin has the right cinematic presence and the necessary courage to handle the intercourse contortions required by her role. Behind the camera, the main contribution comes again from Tsai Ming Liang, who fills in as production designer, one of his contrivances being a plastic armchair that lights up when sat on. Camera work is again proficient, but in a surprise move, background music has been introduced to support the action, provided by Japanese composer Fumio Yasuda.

Production companies
Homegreen Films

International sales
Fortissimo Films
(31) 20 627 3215

Executive producers
Tsai Ming Liang

Producers
Vincent Wang

Screenplay
Lee Kang Sheng
Cinematography
Lia Pen-Jung

Editor
Lei Chen Ching
Production design
Tsai Ming Liang

Music
Fumio Yasuda

Main cast
Lee Kang Sheng
Yin Shin
Jane Liao
Liao Hui Zhen
Dennis Nieh
Tracy Chou

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