Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020) (Patreon)

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Above is a still from the first shot of Tsai Ming-liang's latest film, his first feature in seven years and an apparent coming-out of retirement. It is among the most painfully lovely images Tsai has ever made, in a career defined by exacting composition and a subtle, expressionistic use of color and chiaroscuro. The above shot introduces a muted palette, with shadows of foliage and a horizontal shaft of light transmitted by an unseen facing window, layering their ghostly information onto the slouched seated form of Tsai's permanent muse, Lee Kang-sheng. The corner of a lacquer table juts into the left side of the frame. Within this shot, whose radiance and detail wouldn't look all that out of place in a Nathaniel Dorsky film, we mostly notice, over the duration of looking, that Lee seems exhausted, old. We have been with him, and Tsai, for a long time.

That opening shot prepared me for unimaginable greatness. However, while Days is never less than interesting, it is not a great film. Even the lesser works of great masters tell us quite a lot about the times we live in, and can mentally ricochet off their other films in illuminating ways. Like many, I wondered what Tsai might have left to say after 2013's Stray Dogs, an anguished, apocalyptic film whose implicit finality seemed to close out the director's filmography with an almost audible slam. Days suggests a new direction in certain ways. The director's films used to expand on one another, finding different frameworks in which to explore his favored themes and motifs. But Days represents not just a simplification but a thinning out, as though Tsai and Lee have become interested in fewer things, desiring a simpler, more emotionally straightforward cinema.

Days traces the activities of two men. Kang (Lee) is a middle-class man who, like the actor's character in 1997's The River, is afflicted with severe neck pain. A significantly younger man, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), lives in a somewhat grungy apartment in the center of Taipei, the sorts of dwellings familiar from many of Tsai's earlier films. In a sense, Tsai is charting his own upward mobility, while acknowledging that a new group of underclassed immigrants have taken his place in the intervening years. (Whereas Tsai came to Taiwan from Malaysia, Anong is from Laos, demonstrating the shift in migration patterns over the decades.)

Until about the midpoint of the film, Kang and Non are engaged in completely separate storylines. Tsai elaborates them in long takes, sometimes. One of the strange things about Days is that, unlike in previous films, Tsai breaks the major sequences up into multiple shots from different angles. While there is a flatness to these set-ups that hardly resembles conventional coverage, there is still no clear reason for the decision. In particular, a long session during which Kang is subjected to heated electric acupuncture bounces back and forth between four different perspectives. The scenes of Non making food in his hallway kitchen, meanwhile, is shown from a number of different angles.

In its own bizarre way, Days at times feels less like a new Tsai feature than the preliminary mapping-out for a feature, the blocking for shots that will later be set up in more complex, visually evocative ways. (The experimental short films the director has made in the intervening years were so striking that perhaps we failed to notice that they relied on planimetric compositions that are somewhat at odds with his previous work.) Tsai sets up various angles, as if to find the most compositionally advantageous one, but instead of selecting the best of the bunch, he shows them all. These various perspectives on individual scenes, and their connections through editing, seem to lack purpose or precision. Gone are the stark, geometrical organizations of space that have for so long defined Tsai's cinema. Instead of movement through depth, there is an awkward, declarative flatness.

Just past the midway point of the film, Kang and Non meet in a hotel room. Non is a masseur who has come to provide the aching Kang with a full-body massage that develops into a tender erotic encounter. Again, it is difficult not to recall the somewhat similar scene from The River, although whereas that film depicted physical and emotional release suddenly supplanted by psychological horror, the coupling in Days is purely positive, displaying both a tenderness and an erotic charge that might have been unthinkable in earlier Tsai films. Over time, it seems that the director's attitude toward his own queer sexuality has perhaps become less fraught. 

But what does it mean that this has made his cinema less compelling? After their hotel tryst, Kang gives Non a music box that plays a tune from a Charlie Chaplin film. They sit together on the edge of the bed and listen to it together in one of the film's longest shots. After Kang has paid Non and they intend to go their separate ways, they end up stopping at a food stall to grab a bite to eat together. As expected, the music box recurs later in the film as a token of the lingering memory of the time the men spent together, a quiet bit of belonging snatched from the overall alienation of 21st century Taipei.

Truth be told, the more I analyze Days, the more I end up convincing myself I liked it a bit more than I thought I did. There's no question that Tsai is consciously aiming for a more emotionally available kind of cinema, about as close to the romanticism of Wong Kar-Wai as he could ever bring himself to be. I still find Days to be formally clumsy and under-articulated, as if it was more important to employ observation to create character -- the body in pain, the patient young man who cooks -- than to explore cinematic language. 

Tsai allegedly made his last film seven years ago, and so now, perhaps, here we have a debut film, from a new filmmaker, with a very different set of concerns. I think it'll take me awhile to figure him out.