On DVD: Why Parking is One of the Best Straight-to-DVD Releases of the Year

The new indie Parking could be pegged as a Taiwanese version of Martin Scorsese's After Hours, but it's something altogether odder, less a Road Runner comedy than a simulation of one of those all-night odysseys we've all had -- when time evaporates and tiny logistical dilemmas drive us insane and eventually it's morning and something about our lives is different.

Like Scorsese's still-underappreciated film, Chung Mong-hong's is about both the dream-like anxiety of not being able to get home and the curious rhythms and eccentric behaviors that emerge on nighttime city streets. But Chung doesn't spring for laughs when you think he will -- he holds back, shoots his urban tapestry as if he were Wong Kar-wai and Ridley Scott's bastard son, and luxuriates in the secretive weirdness. If you're used to Taiwanese films in the U.S., it means being used to the elliptical art films of Hou Hsaio-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. Chung's movie uses that style for farce, but tastefully; it's like a Coen Brothers film blinking awake after a ingesting a roofie.

Indie or no, it's not a film that's bound to be ignored by most of the world, since it stars Chen Chang, star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2046 and Red Cliff -- in other words, a dose of star power over a billion Asians are much more intimate with than with Robert Pattinson. (Parking also played at Cannes.) Chang stars as Chen-Mo, a husband in a shaky marriage who stops to buy a cake for his wife, and returns to his car to find it blocked by double-parking, on one of the quietest streets in Taipei. His journey into soul-searching limbo begins slowly, like a bolero, but eventually spirals into authentic nonsense, roping in two crisscrossing gangster herds, a beleaguered Chinese hooker, a one-handed barber with a secret past, an executed murderer's family and orphaned daughter, a series of beatings, a mishandled fish head, and a particularly tetchy baker.

Still, Chung's movie isn't the litany of tense gags that After Hours is. Often the vibe is chilly and grieving, and it's hard not to notice that every story woven into this net, excluding only that of Chen-Mo's wife and their childless marriage, is a story of economic despair and exploitation. But it's not a preachy experience -- the film has a pensive personality all its own, and where you expect to find dramatic crescendos you find deadpan yocks and vice-versa. Largely reactive, Cheng has almost a Buster Keaton-esque posture going on here, even after he wakes up in a sewer trench somewhere with a busted face and lights a cigarette. Released by the small Canadian outfit Evokative Films, Parking deserves eyes, and is so far one of the year's best straight-to-DVD releases.