Days First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Tsai Ming-liang exists in a curious position within the cinephile consciousness. One of the greatest Taiwanese directors and a foremost practitioner of the very loose movement known as slow cinema, which arose in the late 1980s and early 90s, predominately in Asian countries, his feature films all share distinctive attributes — extended, static long takes; frequent presence of rain or water flooding; a patient eye dedicated to a decaying, ultramodern Taipei, where he has set most of his films — that have become so ingrained that it can obscure some of his most interesting recurring elements. In addition, while Tsai himself is well-known, and a certain number of his films are commonly seen, relatively speaking — including Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2013), Vive L’Amour (1994), and Stray Dogs (2013) — others are underseen, lost in the vagaries of poor quality windowboxed DVDs and ultralimited distribution. This isn’t to say that his vaunted aesthetic unity — which, it should be said, is disrupted when needed, such as in the unconventional musical sequences in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005) — isn’t a key factor of the films, but it is too often favored in comparison to the great narrative unity that his films present. For Tsai is one of the most teleological of directors, concentrating a step-by-step, film-by-film procession focused upon his muse Lee Kang-sheng, who has been in all his feature films, ever since his debut with Rebels of the Neon God (1991). Understanding Lee’s role is crucial, and not just because his distinctive, halting manner of movement and speaking sets a kind of template for all of Tsai’s actors: Tsai is openly gay, and the backbone of his films is his necessarily unrequited longing for Lee, who is straight but often plays a queer character. In effect, the films are tortured by this central relationship, resulting in narratives of outsiders, Lee most of all, longing for some sense of meaning and companionship in a world that is changing before their eyes; the title of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) could scarcely be more apropos. Lee’s presence, in addition to recurring male and female actors like Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Yang Kuei-mei, is crucial to this: he plays more-or-less the same character in all these films, initially named Xiaokang but eventually being named just Kang (xiao is Chinese for small). While taking Tsai’s career as a totally coherent continuous narrative isn’t strictly true, it does very much feel like his oeuvre was leading directly to the last two shots of Stray Dogs, a twenty-minute tour-de-force where cinema itself seems to come to a final standstill. It’s no surprise that Tsai initially announced that he was retiring from narrative feature filmmaking after that film. While he has continued to make short and mid-length works in fiction, documentary, and even gallery settings, Tsai kept his promise until Days, which premiered last year in Berlin. One of Tsai’s most stripped-down, direct, and moving works, and one which heralds the start of an exciting new chapter in his career, it was conceived under unusual circumstances for him. Lee was undergoing severe neck pains a few years ago, reflective of Xiaokang’s affliction in The River (1997), and Tsai journeyed with him to film his intense treatments without any specific reason. At the same time, Tsai met a Laotian immigrant to Bangkok, Anong Houngheuangsy, and began filming him as well as he went about his daily work, including extended moments of cooking. From these roots came the first half of Days, which crosscuts between these two strands of footage formed from roughly three years of filming. While these were filmed without any specific concept in mind, they remain as brilliantly shot as any of his films, patiently and lovingly watching these people doing their quotidian tasks. This suddenly pivots at the hour-mark, where Kang and Anong come together in a hotel room for an erotic massage encounter. The effect is stark and entrancing: it has been decades since Tsai had a male lead performance alongside Lee’s continual presence, and to see these two men locked in such intimacy, whether transactional or not, over a period about half an hour, is unprecedented in his work. The summative effect of Days’s elements, especially the long, fading conclusion, is of a melancholy as potent as his other films, but there is something new: a genuine fulfillment, a belief in deep, life-changing connection, even if it is only for a single night.