Tsai Ming-Liang’s first feature since 2013’s career-capping Stray Dogs is full of the Taiwanese director’s signature long takes, surrounding an extended intimate encounter between a middle-aged man and a younger male sex worker. Yet for all its arthouse trappings, Days is a straightforward story of loneliness and an old-fashioned longing to connect.
Kang (Lee Kang-Shen) is the older man, and we meet him sitting in front of a picture window for a stationary shot that lasts about five minutes. It’s a sobering start, as Kang watches a rainstorm pass before him, and by implication, time—lots of it. Lee has worked with Tsai since the 1992 film Rebels of the Neon God, and the once vital youth, now half a century old, looks defeated from frame one. Typical of Tsai’s work, nothing really happens at first, but Kang’s expression gradually changes from blank resignation to an awful despair. Subsequent long shots observe Kang as he tries to get relief for physical pain, whether soaking in a bath (the frame revealing a supernumerary nipple) or enduring acupuncture treatments in which needles placed on his neck and back are heated with some kind of candle stubs. One such shot evokes a dramatic device that one might call Chekhov’s portable vacuum cleaner; as Kang gets his treatment, one might notice the dust-buster in the background, and as the heat source turns to ash, the therapist vacuums up the residue.
Juxtaposed with these scenes are episodes from the life of Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), a young Laotian whom we see in his cramped apartment preparing a meal with fish and vegetables. These too are long takes, and foodies may well wonder what kind of fish sauce he adds to the mix some five or six minutes into the scene. But they seem to have no dramatic purpose; Kang’s life appears to be once of pain; Non, on the other hand, seems to be always in the process of preparing.
Days features little dialogue; in fact, the film dispenses with subtitles entirely. But translation isn’t necessary; the sound of the rain in front of Kang’s window, the water rushing when Non cleans vegetables, is enough, and communication, of a sort, occurs through the body. The men don’t meet cute; Tsai cuts from scenes of Kang and Non wandering separately, and the next minute they’re together in a spacious hotel room for an extended erotic massage and shower. What follows is unexpected: after Kang pays Non for his services, he gives the young man an unexpected gift: a small music box that plays Charlie Chaplin’s theme from Limelight. This resonates on a few levels: Chaplin composed music that like his alter-ego evokes nostalgia and childhood, but one recalls that the actor also had a reputation for being a predator.
Tsai developed Days without a script; in 2014, when his longtime star Lee fell ill, the director and a cameraman accompanied him on clinic visits, though Tsai didn’t know what he’d do with the footage. Likewise, he began filming Houngheuangsy, whom he met through video chatting, without a narrative in mind. So the film’s first half plays like a documentary of the actor’s separate lives, observing the process of their daily activities. If what brings the two together is sexual, what Non, at least, remembers is fairly heartbreaking: that little music box. This isn’t a late-career masterwork; but given its somewhat random origins, this modest drama demonstrates the artist’s ability to make natural connections simply by observing the real world.
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