The fifth feature film from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang (who’s the subject of a retrospective currently at the Museum of Fine Arts) is a rich and thoroughly enjoyable work. Like his earlier efforts, it combines compositional beauty, reticence as to spoken dialogue, and an elliptical narrative style while exploring mysteries of loneliness, loss, and renewal.

Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) is a young man who spends his days selling watches from a suitcase at the Taipei railway station. Shortly after the death of his father (an event that the director, characteristically, elides, rendering it as a mysterious disappearance), Hsiao-kang meets a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) who is about to go to Paris and who insists on buying the watch he is wearing. Shaken by this encounter, and perhaps displacing his grief over his father’s death, Hsiao-kang develops a compulsion to reset to Paris time all the watches and clocks within his reach. Meanwhile, the young woman, an alienated tourist in Paris, embarks on a series of utterly normal but also odd adventures that seem to be bringing her closer and closer to some sort of epiphany — but what?

The renowned consistency of Tsai’s films is deceptive. He always uses a small group of main actors: Lee Kang-sheng has starred in all five of Tsai’s features; Miao Tien and Lu Yi-ching here play Lee’s parents for the third time; Chen Shiang-chyi embellished the beginning of The River (1997); Chen Chao-jung, who played key roles in Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l’amour (1994), and The River, pops up in the background of a shot in the Paris Métro. The apartment where Hsiao-kang’s family live in What Time Is It There? is Lee Kang-sheng’s own home; it previously served as the settings for Rebels of the Neon God and The River. Drawing up a list of motifs from previous Tsai films that recur in What Time Is It There? is no problem: the more important of them include a cockroach, a toilet, noises from the next apartment, chance meetings, and near-strangers lying side by side in bed, facing each other.

But what should be stressed is not just the repetition of elements in Tsai’s films but the imagination with which he combines them into new structures, varying their nuances of meaning and emotion. A limited set of characters, concerns, and devices is the condition that allows Tsai to make such free and beautiful films. The main themes here are death, time, displacement in a strange city, and the presence of an earlier film as a master text — François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which Hsiao-kang watches on video in an attempt to establish some spiritual contact with the departed woman. She then has a chance encounter in a cemetery with Truffaut’s now aged star, Jean-Pierre Léaud. This perfect surrealist moment draws together all the threads of the film. Léaud’s presence is a gift that releases and frees both of Tsai’s protagonists — but it can take effect only afterward, perhaps only after the end of the story. Like all of Tsai’s films, What Time Is It There? needs not just to be loved while it is on screen, which is easy, but also to be carried around like a charm after it is over.