by Sean Donovan
Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s brand has reached a point where any objections to his style seem of limited use or value. At this point in his career, Tsai is going to do what Tsai is always wont to do- which is make films composed of far less shots overall than most filmmakers working today, some stretching as long as 10 minutes, studies in slow repetition and urbane melancholy, sometimes touching on queer themes but just grazing them (Tsai himself is gay). When a filmmaker’s brand is so immediately recognizable it’s sometimes met with impatience and boredom by audiences, as if wondering ‘when are they gonna just get over this already?’ ‘How many lengthy shots of people doing housework is too many?’ Matías Piñeiro’s latest entry in the New York Film Festival, Isabella, received notices of exactly this kind from many critics, wondering what the balance is between honing a brand vs. refusing to develop creatively (I reviewed the film here for TFE to a similarly lukewarm shrug).
Yet with Tsai Ming-liang I find myself not caring whatsoever about any criteria of versatility or artistic variance in his work...
Tsai exists as a kind of eternal rebuttal to a culture of speed that defines most areas of human life in contemporary global capitalism. There’s a reason he claimed in a 2019 interview with The Guardian that young digital natives in Asia have flocked to his films as respite from the heightening pace of life. The slowness of Tsai’s work, a lingering meditative dirge that would make even the likes of Kelly Reichardt jumpy, forces us to watch films in a different way than we’re used to. We dwell with the film in an odd act of connection that slows the pulse in a radical refusal of the currents of speed demanded of us. Days, Tsai’s latest film, points us to these issues fervently and passionately in one of the richest experiences playing the New York Film Festival.
Not much happens in Days. The middle-aged Kang (Tsai’s eternal muse Lee Kang-sheng) leads a quiet unassuming life fraught with physical instability. His body seems sore and uncomfortable, and imprecisely cared for. We watch him attend an acupuncture session that seems less than relieving, hot metallics and burning skin pretty distant from anything resembling comfort. We also see another man, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) who lives in an under-decorated apartment and washes a stunning amount of vegetables for what feels like eternities of the film. We later infer that Non is possibly a sex worker, based on the way he somewhat suggestively loiters around a carnival occasionally circling both men and women, a kind of silent cruising. The men eventually meet up at a hotel room Kang has booked. Non gives Kang the massage his flesh is begging for, and we see the entirety of it: each body part worked to relaxation and adjustment. The massage ends in a happy ending, just out of frame, Kang coming to sexual climax with a violent shake transforming his staid physicality. The two men share precious moments of intimacy in the post-sex haze before departing, returning to the patterns of their lonely lives.
Your mind wanders watching Days. It’s only natural that over two hours of fairly monotonous activity can’t keep us laser-focused- but it’s the rare film where your process of watching becomes its own kind of experiment. You feel the slowing of your thoughts, the relaxing of your body- it’s an enforced meditation that only the act of cinema-watching can provide. The reactions of your body feel as much ‘the text’ as anything up on screen- a new dimension of cinema 3D and D-Box could only dream of. And in this chemical rebuilding of your perceptive faculties even the smallest suggestions of intimacy, care, and sensuality between the two men build to a tectonic power they would never have when watched out of context. A twinkling music box, a hand on a knee. These gestures speak with the mountains of affective charge that they deserve, only visible because we’ve slowed down as much as we have. The film’s focus on massage even speaks to this- Days is a slow, extensive cinematic massage. A slow, sad world feels impossibly changed even for just a transient moment; where Kang and Non saw loneliness and isolation there is possibility and a blossom of inter-connected feeling. It’s a cinematic magic trick entirely of its own league and vocabulary. Days is an effective argument for exploring the many things cinematic pace and form can achieve, and Tsai as the stubbornly persistent poet of that tradition deserves continued attention. A-
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