SDAFF 2020: Days
sdaff 2020Throughout his entire filmography, Tsai Ming-liang has focused on capturing the raw and organic emotions tied to the human experience, with his newest feature Days – which is streaming as part of the 2020 San Diego Asian Film Festival – possibly being his most unique outing yet. Without using a single subtitle or piece of dialogue, Tsai Ming-liang captures the life of two men who break their routines of loneliness to spend an intimate time together before going their separate ways.
With the film being intentionally lacking subtitles and using drawn-out scenes of casual everyday life which can span 10 to 15 minutes at a time, Days quickly makes its intentions clear when it comes to building emotion. Days is a film that lets emotions wander in and out of the film naturally, never forcing anything to happen or any reaction to be felt. This is a film that thrives in its quiet and meditative approach to storytelling. Emotions of loneliness and the desire for love are universal, and Days captures this poignantly. The emotional connection between the actors and the audience grows slowly and naturally, with the film allowing the audience to put their own weight and meaning on the actions of the characters. As each man lays alone in bed, the audience has to sit largely with the emotions they put on the scene, themes of loneliness and distance sticking out as particularly strong in a time of lockdowns and social distancing.
Whilst this emotional core has an incredible power to it, the film overall creates a viewing experience that works against it. Though the meditative and slow style of filmmaking works well to a point when it comes to getting the audience to engage with the film emotionally, the film takes this idea to the extreme. Days is, ultimately, a film that will stand as completely inaccessible for most audiences. The film's 127-minute runtime drags slowly with 15-minute unbroken scenes of a man washing lettuce or one man giving another a massage. Where this captures the mundane experience of the everyday human experience, it fails to stand as engaging cinema. The solid cinematography from Chang Jhong-yuan and the powerful emotions within Days can only do so much as they are surrounded ultimately by an endless sea of white noise and overall boring content which drastically hurts the film’s overall viewing experience.
Whilst there is a sense of poetry to Days and the emotional core of the film is a powerful and relevant exploration of humans' need for connection, the film overall is hard to recommend. It captures life in such a way that, though realistic, will fail to connect with most audiences and ultimately will lose most before it ever gets to its more powerful moments.
