Days of Isolation and Pleasure in Tsai Ming-liang’s Latest

Malaysian-born Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is a poet of loneliness and alienation, and a favorite among devotees of “slow cinema.” Days, his first feature in seven years, finds him working in long, static takes with almost no dialogue and, as a pre-credits caption forewarns, without recourse to subtitles. It’s a fitting aesthetic stratagem for the story of two men whose unremarkable lives converge for a fleeting moment of pleasure.

One of the two men is played by Lee Kang-Sheng, the director’s favorite actor and lifelong friend. (Tsai hasn’t made a film without him since the Rebels of the Neon God in 1992.) First glimpsed staring plaintively out of a living room window as a storm gathers, he seems worried about something. Before long, we learn that he has a neck problem and is seeking therapies to relieve it.

The second man, years younger, lives alone in a downscale apartment where he laboriously prepares meals of vegetables and fish. The ritual of washing, chopping, boiling, and seasoning is conveyed with the utmost interest by the director, who demonstrates again what Chantal Akerman proved with Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080— an intelligent camera can invest even the most mundane actions with fascination.

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