Leading a lonely life in a house in the mountains, Kang suffers from an unknown disease. Illegal immigrant Non nestles in a tiny shack in Bangkok. A new film by Tsai Ming-liang, this picture is a wordless visual poem about solitude, intimacy, and desire. Garage Screen presents the Russian premiere of the movie where the languages of cinema and contemporary art dissolve in each other.
Modern-day classic Tsai Ming-liang long ago announced retirement from cinema. His previous minimalist pictures, especially Stray Dogs and Journey to the West, felt cramped in cinema theaters, extending beyond the screen frame. Their mesmerizing meditative and durational form implied a perception mode that doesn’t fit into the format of a regular screening session. In those pictures, cinema stepped onto the territory of contemporary art, abiding on the intersection of film, installation, performance, and video art.
In Days, Tsai Ming-liang does the opposite, transforming contemporary art into cinema or, rather, blending the two together. The result is a transparent and somewhat primordial visual language created from time and space, human presence and the movement of human bodies, sounds of a megalopolis and deafening silence, wherein the characters are immersed. Intimate and at the same time monumental, Days does not require words: there is almost no dialogue in the film, and there where there is speech, it remains deliberately unaccompanied by subtitles. The world premiere of Days took place at the 70th Berlin Film Festival (2020).
The film has no dialogue.
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang
Taiwan, 2020. 127 min, 18+
