An excerpt from the booklet essay by So Mayer

Tsai Ming-Liang’s Days (Rìzi, 2020) is an ‘intentionally unsubtitled’ film of around 60 shots, lasting 2 hours 7 minutes, and spanning a number of days in the lives of two men, Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) and Non (Anong Hougheuangsy). The number of days feels strangely uncountable, although day follows night, and we see both sunset and sunrise. There is a suggestion that the film starts in monsoon season and ends in another season, but this relation of days and nights to each other – like the relation of Kang and Non – is almost entirely inferred.

With the absence of dialogue and intertitles, the only evidence of the characters’ names comes in the end credits which scroll in black type on a white screen, inverting film’s standard monochromatic palette for stating its business. The opening title Days is similarly written in black on white, in calligraphy by Lee, star of Tsai’s films since Rebels of the Neon God (Qīngshàonián Nuózhà, 1992), and business partner in the director’s Homegreen Films. The equality of their partnership is written into the very skin of the film by Lee’s brushwork, a powerful gesture that balances the vulnerability he shows on screen, as Tsai films his longtime collaborator and friend – they live together in the jungle house where the film opens – receiving electroacupunture with moxibustion for his equally longterm pain problems from a slipped disc.

The film’s complete clarity, the way it works on the viewer’s attention and sense of connection, is all the more remarkable given that Tsai shot the film’s material, particularly the scenes with Kang, over a number of years. The edit, by cinematographer Chang Jhong-Yuan, creates this clarity through a precise visual poetics that foregoes match cuts or rhyming shots for something more complex; for example, in each of the first four shots, the subject in the frame is shown looking off towards one of the four corners of the screen, completing a cycle. While referring to the 180º rule, it also breaks it, as the subjects are alone in different spaces – yet are suggestively linked by this rotation, which also invokes the cardinal points of the compass, as well as the hands of the clock.

Part of the strangeness of the film’s passage of time is Kang’s pain, the sense of being trapped within a body that is itself trapped in endless repetitions and their attempted release, as when we see him stretching his neck. Time also torques around the stillness with which the pain shapes his hold on himself, whether sitting unmoving, or walking gingerly. Pain and its temporalities and intensities – its dislocations – shapes the aesthetic of Kang’s sequences, rendering Tsai’s increasingly preferred long takes as a formal relation to Kang’s bodily experience, both a grace extended to the actor’s need to move slowly or sit and breathe, and extending the experience to the viewer.

So Mayer's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.