Days/Afternoon: Two Films by Tsai Ming-Liang (15) |Home Ents Review

Pure visual and auditory pleasure is on the menu in Days, a contemplative but engrossing film by the writer-director of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Afternoon is an equally laidback feature, an extended if minimal, single shot conversation between the director and his lead actor. 

In Days, the camera shows us fixed shots of two men, one older, one younger. We see them being still or moving around a city. The older man goes for acupuncture therapy, the younger man makes dinner on his own, then gives a ‘happy ending’ massage in a hotel room to the older man. 

This is not a dramatic film, although it is hard not to totally engage with the simple actions we see on screen. The stillness of the image and the lack of dialogue means that the viewer experiences much that the characters experience; but there is, of course, the difference effected by the camera. 

The effect is weird, especially when there is no talking at all, merely a few grunts during the massage scene! You become very aware of the urban soundscape as well as following the minimal actions on screen. But the experience is also very temporal, an experience of time, the time of your watching and the time of the actors’ actions. 

Watching Days is an experience that verges on the pure. It isn’t just an experience of the form of cinema or even of its conditions of possibility; there is a nice grace to the movements of the two actors and there is visual information onscreen as they do the things they do. 

All in all, a strange and beguiling couple of hours. 

The second film here, Afternoon, is a conversation between director and actor: it sheds more light on their personal relationship than on their working methods but is equally hypnotic. 

Days/Afternoon: Two Films by Tsai Ming-Liang is out on Blu-ray from Second Run on 18 November 2024.