Lonely Bodies: Tsai Ming-liang's "Days"
Review
It has already been pointed out how Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema is perhaps the most ideal COVID-companion. His quasi-apocalyptic The Hole depicts a man and a woman living at once in close proximity to one another and yet completely alienated and isolated in their respective apartments—the barrier between which becomes eroded by the appearance of a mysterious hole. Or there’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, a swan song for communal moviegoing that is even more poignant in this time of homebound viewing. In general, though, Tsai’s cinema could be said to be one of lonely bodies. Bodies that long and desire, that are suspended in space and time while they wander around in search of another body to connect with. Tsai’s latest film, Days, his first narrative feature since 2013’s Stray Dogs, follows two such lonely bodies, at first apart, and eventually together.
Of course, one of these two characters is Lee Kang-sheng’s Hsiao-kang, the perennial protagonist of Tsai’s oeuvre. We see him at home, sitting, staring, or standing around, coping with an illness that causes him chronic discomfort with his neck—an ailment suffered by the real Lee and that has been an element of Tsai’s films going back to the 90s—and for which we also observe him receive treatment. Meanwhile, we also observe a Thai immigrant, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), as he goes about his quotidian routine, preparing food, and working as a vendor at a night market. Typical of Tsai, one shot of Non cooking lasts about eight minutes, immersing us in the rhythm of his everyday experience. Days cuts between these two characters without any apparent connection between them aside from the resonance of their respective modes of solitude. That is until a (literally) climactic sequence that takes place as a 20-minute long take in which Hsiao-kang receives a massage from Non in a hotel room.
Tsai has always been interested in private, intimate moments. That’s when we find out who people really are, how they really behave, how they really feel. Ironically, the performances Tsai wishes to capture are the stretches of time in between the everyday social performances we all engage in. In avoiding story, and conventional character development, Tsai actually aims to get closer to what it means to be, and what it feels like to be, human. This is intensified by a material and temporal realism where surrounding environments are palpable, and duration is something we are also made to feel through unbroken takes. While we may not to get to “know” Tsai’s characters in the conventional sense, the spectator’s relationship to them is nevertheless incredibly intimate.
This is not some simple “empathy machine” nonsense, but is Tsai’s formal strategy in getting at and expressing various feelings, ideas, and themes. Tsai engages with the spectator in a state of heightened embodiment. We relate to his characters via bodily sense and understanding. Embodiment in Tsai’s cinema functions on two levels: firstly by way of formal approach and emphasis, and secondly, via intertextual building, as Hsiao-kang has been an avatar for the spectator for followers of his work for 30 years. We not only relate to the character in Days through this embodiment created by attention paid to bodily, material, and temporal reality but also through our connection to Lee across three decades of films, and our intimate proximity to his aging body and experience.
Our time spent with Lee during his treatment is a chance to feel along with him but also to reflect on the fickle nature of the body, its frustrating constraints and deficiencies, and this in turn leads to a magnified ecstasy and release when the massage takes place—we feel and understand the transcendent possibility of connection and physical contact, and what it means for us. Cinema can evoke the senses and stir up impressions in the viewer through editing or sensationalist filmmaking, but Tsai prefers to have those senses and sensations exist in the reality of the film without isolating them or bringing them right to the surface, putting the spectator in proximity but typically avoiding a haptic visuality—in other words, we don’t touch Tsai’s bodies, we observe them, but this doesn’t contradict their intensity or evocation of bodily sense, it places it in a context.
The 2010s were a peculiar and explorative decade for Tsai, who deliberately moved outside of feature filmmaking, announcing a retirement of sorts after the release of Stray Dogs. Between 2011-15, his primary focus was the “Slow Walk, Long March” series, consisting of short and medium-length films in which lead actor Lee Kang-sheng is dressed as a monk and walks at a remarkably slow pace through different urban spaces. Tsai’s films were always light on narrative detail but this notable digression was marked by the complete absence thereof, stripping away much of the artifice and detail found in his other films. Moving from fiction filmmaking to gallery and performance spaces (and, in one instance, VR), and documentary, Tsai’s work became more observational, and more honed in on the body in itself. His creative impetus has always been driven by an attempt to capture real human behaviour and experience. However, this has always been in conjunction with fairly intricate formal construction, and however light on story his films were previously, they had a fair bit of narrative periphery, not to mention flights of fancy.
So, after nearly a decade of exploring alternative forms and approaches, Tsai, in a sense, comes full circle. Days finds Tsai more interested than ever before with simply observing people in frame with as little obstruction as possible. Unfettered by any semblance of storytelling, the film shares more documentary-like aspects with his recent work, while distilling the essence of his feature films into something remarkably pure and minimalist, and yet still completely in step with his career-long obsessions with navigating modern life.
There’s a sentimental sweetness in Days. After they finish in the hotel room, Hsaio-Kang gifts Non a small music box that plays a melody by Chaplin from Limelight (a tune Tsai already used once in 2006’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone). There’s always been an affinity between Tsai and Chaplin in their relationship to the use of the body, their tender, bittersweet treatment of human suffering, and a certain romanticism (as an aside it’s worth mentioning Tsai also has much in common with Keaton, and perhaps, most of all, Tati—all masters of the body in frame but Tati’s mastery of the frame-space itself aligns him even more closely). It’s rare to see such a tender touch applied not to some ideal romance but to a transactional, nearly impersonal relationship, but this one-off coming-together still registers as something profound, articulating the transient relief offered to one another by two lonely bodies, and with it nothing less than the affirmation of being human.
If you enjoy this and other pieces, please consider supporting Long Voyage Home by becoming a paid subscriber.