FRENCH-TAIWANESE EFFORT TEDIOUS SLOG THROUGH `TIME'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

It's about time for the first ludicrously pretentious art film of the year to arrive. ``What Time Is It There?'' has appeared right on schedule.

Yes, there were a lot of references to the fourth dimension in that paragraph. But it's nothing compared to what Tsai Ming-liang's Taiwanese- French production does with the matter of time - which includes a lot of different things, but for the most part just wastes it.

The movie begins with a guy smoking a cigarette in his ratty Taipei apartment. He's just smoking, and after awhile you realize that the scene will not end until the butt burns out. To, um, keep things interesting, he goes out on the porch for a few puffs.

This is how Tsai, the director of such acclaimed Taiwanese films as ``The Hole'' and ``Rebels of the Neon God,'' generally lays out his latest take on obsession, urban alienation, loneliness and other worn-out, existentialist concerns.

If somebody gets on a long escalator, you can bet the shot will follow her from top to bottom. Doors open slowly, then we just watch them hang that way awhile. There is one scene in which Tsai literally leaves us in an empty room watching fish swim - sluggishly - in a tiny aquarium.

And if a young man has to urinate into a nontraditional receptacle, we're treated to the sound of every last drop. This scene is done twice.

That's the film's protagonist, by the way, Hsiao Kang (played by Tsai's favorite actor, Lee Kang-sheng). His father has just died, his grief-crazed mother (Lu Yi-ching) is certain the old man will return to her in some supernatural manner, and Hsiao Kang makes a desultory living selling watches out of a suitcase on the streets of Taipei.

A young woman, Shiang-chyi (played by the similarly named Chen Shiang-chyi) needs a new watch for a trip she's taking to Paris, but the only one she likes is on Hsiao Kang's wrist. She eventually wheedles him into selling it to her, and gives him a cake as a parting gift.

Evidently, this is the kindest thing a woman has ever done for the lad. How else to explain his sudden obsession with changing every clock in the city to Paris time? Of course, when he does this at home, Mom thinks it's Dad's ghost's doing and goes further off the deep end.

Meanwhile, in France, Shiang-chyi wanders around listlessly, and we're supposed to infer that her experiences half a world away are somehow connected to Hsiao Kang's back home. This idea is presented to film buffs a la Hsiao Kang's repeated viewings of Francois Truffaut's classic ``The 400 Blows,'' while Shiang-chyi encounters that film's now middle-age star, Jean-Pierre Leaud, on a bench at a Paris graveyard.

After forever, the movie finally gets around to what might be called the ``Mulholland Drive'' moment, when all three principals act upon their desires to varying degrees of dissatisfaction. In keeping with the film's overriding aesthetic ... well, let's just say that Tsai's depressive Chinese take on psychosexual desperation is nowhere near as exciting as our homegrown SoCal brand.

Though not without moments of true poignance and its imaginative bits of absurdist humor, ``What Time Is It There?'' is a determined, ennui-hobbled slog that really doesn't have much to say beyond the news flash that loneliness can make people act weird. Very few auteurs - Antonioni and Tarkovsky come to mind - can achieve profundity with this kind of cinema of stasis, and even they weren't always successful.

Let's hope that, the next time out, Tsai remembers to reset his clock.

``WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?''

(Not rated: sex, nudity)

The stars: Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-ching.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. Written by Yang Pi-ying and Tsai. Produced by Bruno Pesery. Released by Wellspring.

Running time: One hour, 56 minutes.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.

Our rating: Two and one half stars