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

60/100

First half tried my patience, second half won me over (mostly). Apparently, Tsai made this one up as he went along, shooting over the course of several years without having even a general idea in mind at the outset. That absence of direction is reflected in early shots that employ grueling duration to no evident purpose. Our initial views of young Laotian immigrant Non play like Jeanne Dielman minus the formal rigor and implicit psychological breakdown—just endless, utterly banal food prep (much of which, I gather, was originally recorded with no particular intention of its being utilized in a film). Unlike, say, What Time Is It There?, which follows its dual protagonists separately following their brief first-reel interaction (thereby encouraging us to superimpose his longing onto hers, and vice versa), Days plays the "How will these stories eventually connect?" game, which isn't terribly effective when there's nothing inherently interesting about one of them. Lee Kang-sheng's scenes benefit, as always, from familiarity with Tsai's oeuvre, since he always seems to be playing more or less the same guy. His severe neck injury from The River—which I hadn't realized reflects a real-life problem that's dogged Lee his entire adult life—has returned with a vengeance, and we watch him struggle to prop his head upright, wander the streets in a neck brace (Tsai actually follows him around Dardennes-style for a bit!), undergo some sort of weird acupuncture treatment that involves burning objects placed atop the needles. That's already far more compelling than a twenty-ish kid scrubbing lettuce, and watching Lee (who was born six months after me) slowly age onscreen has always been oddly poignant. What once came across as free-floating alienation now looks more like deep-seated regret, of the sort that one can only accumulate over many years.

This emotional subtext gets amplified once Days finally brings Kang and Non together, revealing the latter as a sex worker hired by the former. The film's central setpiece is a 20-minute erotic massage notable for its intense intimacy, with Lee making guttural noises that signify something much deeper than sexual gratification (though that's certainly present as well—this might be Tsai's most openly queer film, no longer cloaking furtive male-male action in deep shadow). What follows, now that I think about it, does in fact echo What Time Is It There?, replacing clock faces with Chaplin's Limelight theme emanating from a music box; there's the same sense of both parties mired in loneliness and idealizing what had fundamentally been a mercantile exchange (albeit one that's expressly carnal in this case). But while déjà vu diminishes the potency, passing time (which we could measure in days: nearly 7,000 of them since Cannes 2001) heightens it. Use of duration finally stops feeling like autopilot: Nobody will wonder why a devastating close-up of Lee staring into space is held for so long, nor why the final shot observes Non sitting alone on a bench for six straight minutes (which of course is nothing compared to the ending of Stray Dogs, in any case). Also, while dialogue has never been very important to Tsai, he deserves credit for finally going all the way and making a movie that requires (and provides) no English subtitles whatsoever. I'm skeptical that a second viewing would make the first hour's nearly non-stop Non nonsense non-tedious—please, filmmakers, don't just start shooting with no plan whatsoever; it almost never turns out well—but the back half earns a hearty "Good save."