The romantic laws distinguishing most films by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang are as reliable as gravity. Under the deadpan gaze of long takes, lonely people creep and scurry through broadly framed, empty urban interiors. They long to connect, and do so, but the courtship must be indirect, coy, even outlandish: In his 1998 film “The Hole,” it occurred through a hole in the floor and was bracketed by throwback musical numbers.

Thanks to a sense of space — and a near lack of dialogue — that suggests Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton, Mr. Tsai’s roundabout unions are often charming. But sometimes their oblique angles extend out into deep melancholy and even devastation. “Vive l’Amour” (1994), which won the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival, ends with a woman’s six-minute crying jag, and in 1997’s “The River,” one of Mr. Tsai’s best works, anonymous urban solitude somehow leads to a father and son unwittingly having sex in a dark bathhouse.

“The Wayward Cloud,” a 2005 work making its belated premiere Friday night at Anthology Film Archives, starts playfully but eventually falls at the outer limits of Mr. Tsai’s jarringly antic alienation — and falls flat. A man and a woman, almost-lovers from two earlier Tsai films, reunite. The result is either Mr. Tsai’s idea of a message film about love in the age of pornography or one of the most distastefully unconvincing romantic statements in some time.

Lee Kang-sheng, a fixture of Mr. Tsai’s films, plays a porn actor with a mullet who’s filming scenes in an apartment (mainly in the bathroom). In the same building lives the woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) who became his transcontinental obsession in Mr. Tsai’s 2001 film “What Time Is It There?” after buying one of his watches in his past life as a street vendor. Now in the throes of a nutty city-wide drought, she spends her days slurping watermelon juice and scavenging. (Water problems always figure prominently in Mr. Tsai’s films.)

The two cross paths in a small park in a typically sweet encounter: She finds him dozing on a swing set and naps next to him, and they wake up next to each other. Scenes of shy reserve like this cute silent movie-style coincidence are interspersed with the dazed slapstick of cramped porno shoots starring Mr. Lee and a zaftig Japanese actress (the porn star Yozakura Sumomo). The monotony of the sex scenes, which Ms. Chen’s character doesn’t know about, makes the goosy flirtations a precious relief, but you can sense Mr. Tsai building up some tension around the way both scenes hold something back. (An unforgettable early shot manages to combine the direct and indirect approaches, when a watermelon stars as an erotic aid.)

Elaborate musical numbers erupt periodically to add another layer of expression to the mix. A merman sings a ballad in a water tower; Mr. Lee dances in a penis suit in front of a chorus in a bathroom. The bawdy wackiness feels obligatory, and the numbers are uneven. But the openheartedness, the release the song and dance might provide, doesn’t jibe with the rest of Mr. Tsai’s setup this time.

Which is what, exactly? Most of Mr. Tsai’s films feel like peeks into private worlds, new takes on old romances, threading desire tightly through expertly controlled spaces and lithe visual connections. In “The Wayward Cloud,” the director seems to be treading water, setting cute against vulgar, and reaching for effects: An opening shot tensely spanning the crossroads of two corridors — basically, an architectural crotch — is repeated to the point of dilution, a facile trick on the eye.

The ramshackle film falls to pieces with Mr. Tsai’s strident money-shot of an ending. Ms. Chen’s character (the director never gives them names) eventually finds out her amour’s occupation after discovering the Japanese actress unconscious in an elevator. Intrigued, she tails the crew to a shoot — which occurs with the woman still out cold. Spying through a face-height portal in the hallway, she ends up eye to eye as he works on the bed on the other side of the wall.

Guessing what happens next does not require an active imaganation. You don’t have to be a feminist to find Mr. Tsai’s scenario — grotesque forced union in the heat of one party’s near-necrophiliac passion — unsatisfying on any number of levels, as well as polemic overkill. It’s a disconcertingly flashy and aggressive move from a filmmaker who is usually so patient and assured, which perhaps explains the unevenness of the Mr. Tsai’s first real misstep.

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