Francesco Quario’s review published on Letterboxd:
It took me a while to get around to writing this updated review, about a week since I rewatched Days for the third time at the London Film Festival. The reason is that I want to make this a slightly longer, more detailed review than most of the ones that I churn out in half an hour, and I’ve been working on a video essay script (What is Slow Cinema?) that is going to take several days to edit. Moreover, my first review of this film, from the first time I saw it in Berlin, is by far my most liked review on Letterboxd, it single-handedly garnered me probably half of my followers, and it’s a tough act to live up to. So, here goes.
What separates Days from Tsai’s previous features is its production method, as this is the director’s first script-less film, with one of the smallest crews imaginable. The end credits of this film are shorter than most of its shots, and that’s not an exaggeration. This is due to the fact that Tsai was originally filming the two subjects separately, in a documentary fashion, and only decided to convert his footage into a single feature mid-filming. Lee Kang-Sheng’s chronic neck pain, originally the subject of The River, recently resurfaced, and Tsai shot the actor’s treatment. Elsewhere, he filmed the daily life of Anong Houngheuangsy, a young and attractive Laotian man who just so happens to be shirtless for much of his time on screen. But it’s not as weird as I made it sound: Tsai, much like the neorealist directors to whom he looks up, has a talent for finding interesting subjects to film during his travels. It’s how he originally found Lee, working in an arcade in the late 1980s and moving with such a deliberate slowness that made Tsai reconsider his way of filming people.
In the first half of the film, the twofold production is evident in the two different styles of shooting and editing of each character’s pivotal, individual scene. Although this is the slowest Tsai (there are only 46 shots spread out over its runtime), you wouldn’t be able to tell that looking only at the scene where Lee undergoes acupuncture. While it’s not by any means fast, that scene involves continuity editing, with the same action framed by different angles and a lower Average Shot Length (ASL) compared to the rest of the film. It’s also the most documentary-like scene in a film that has, already, very little fiction: the cinders burning Lee’s ears and face are real, and at one point we even see the director’s hand poking out from behind the camera and hear his voice talking to the acupuncturist. Yes, it took me three viewings to realise that the third man in that scene is Tsai and not a second doctor.
Meanwhile, Anong’s routine is filmed in a much more deliberate, constructed way. Although this scene also makes use of continuity editing, there are few setups, all of which serve to construct the space of his small kitchen and show the different stages of his cooking. Now that I think about it, this is the film of Tsai’s that makes the most use of continuity editing in 20 years but, despite that, it’s so much slower than some of his work that consists entirely of isolated tableaux. If you’re interested in how that works, I urge you to check out my upcoming video essay on the matter. Segues aside, the sequence in question is reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, with its static camera and focus on ritualistic, menial housework. The shot that reminded me of Akerman’s the most is the one where Anong leaves the frame at several points to grab some ingredients, but the camera lingers on his empty kitchen waiting for him to come back, rather than following him.
However, unlike in Jeanne Dielman, Anong’s cooking is never shown in its entirety. In fact, we don’t even get to see the finished product, as Anong teasingly holds his plate just below the frame while he eats his meal in a later scene. This led me to wonder just how much of the cooking we actually see. Even Jeanne Dielman never forces us to wait for the potatoes to boil or the meat loaf to bake, but at least it shows the food’s preparation in its entirety. Here, the camera cuts away from Anong as he’s still cutting vegetables. This led me to think, looking at the scene’s duration of ~15 minutes: how often does it take you less than 15 minutes to cook a meal? Especially vegetables? I asked myself this because I’m aware that the sequence is probably the most boring in the film. This is based on anecdotal evidence, but after three times watching Days in the cinema I noticed every time that that was the scene during which the most people looked at their phones and started losing their patience. Yet, it’s one of the few scenes that cuts the action incredibly short compared to real-life (granted, most of the scenes outside of the massage sequence can’t be considered “action”-oriented, unless you count sleeping as an action). This is likely due to the mundanity of the action and the emotionlessness of the scene, rather than its rhythm.
But this leads me to what I hope to be my final point in this review, which is Days’ true potential as an art piece. Some people may not see the use of rewatching a film like this multiple times, especially since its “narrative” can be entirely summarised in a single line. But the amount of detail that I gathered from multiple rewatches, both in the shots and in the soundtrack, is positively astounding. Watching this film, especially on the big screen, is like playing a long game of “Where’s Waldo?”, where you are invited to probe the image in its most minuscule details in order to spot something that you wouldn’t otherwise notice. This ranges from the mundane (while Anong seems to be calling to a small animal off-screen with kissing noises, a cat briefly appears in the lower-right corner of the frame) to the more stimulating (all the details about the duration and rhythms of cooking). And it’s this latter point that I would like to address, which is at the core of the emotional meltdown that I experienced the first time that I saw the film.
I mentioned how often, in real life, cooking takes much longer than the snippet of it that we see in the film. Yet, while we cook, I bet that we rarely feel the same need to escape boredom as when we watch Anong doing it on screen. The reason is that, while we do things, we rarely watch ourselves doing them. This is what this film offers us, but in a way which is significantly better and more profound than, say, security camera footage. In spite of its objectivity (in this film, Tsai strived to capture reality in its pure form), the subject is still filtered through a humane gaze. We are watching someone else, watching ourselves, and watching someone else watch us. In other words, we see the characters on screen, empathise with them, and realise that we’re seeing them (and us) through someone else’s camera.
And the film’s slowness invites this empathy, because we don’t often get to spend this amount of time with someone in complete silence and intimacy. The cooking scene is paramount to this, because we’re not supposed to be there: Anong is alone in his house, wearing nothing but swim trunks, unaware of other people’s presence. We observers take on the role of lovers, rather than voyeurs – or, better yet, we place ourselves inside of Anong’s mindset and become one with him. And how often do we get to watch ourselves cook?
Later, the film does this with other aspects of life that we would generally like to forget or ignore. How often do we see ourselves alone, disoriented and lost in a bustling city street? How often do we see ourselves grasping for a connection, needlessly clinging onto that person who gave us a brief moment of happiness and who is about to disappear forever? Walking at home alone, at night, in quiet streets, with nothing but your thoughts as company? Waking up in a bed too large for you, with an arm outstretched still needlessly reaching for that lost connection? Laying in bed in the morning, eyes open, wondering why you should wake up?
Those are the painful, crushing moments that Days lays bare in front of our eyes, in their excruciating duration. But in showing them, Days also offers us something more: it’s the understanding gaze of someone who has been there with you. It’s the company you lacked during those moments when you were too depressed to go to sleep, fearing the thoughts that came to you when you closed your eyes. It’s the functionality of the music box: a gift from a stranger, a voice that reminds you that there is someone out there who knows and loves you. A voice that you can summon at any time, telling you that there’s no need to feel the way you do. Because someone understands.
I understand.
You are not alone.