A week full of titles by important authors: the great directors are the protagonists of the weekend in theaters, starting with Tsai Ming-liang with his latest feature film, “Days”.
Among the most loved names by cinephiles passionate about oriental cinema, Tsai Ming-liang (born in Malaysia but naturalized Taiwanese) has chosen to tell the encounter between two solitudes: two men who spend a few moments of intimacy in a hotel room , before plunging back into an empty existence made up of repetitive gestures, day after day.
Seven years after the equally powerful and poetic «Stray Dogs», Tsai Ming-liang returns to the feature film (but in the meantime he has made interesting shorts, medium films and even VR works) with a film substantially devoid of dialogue, consistent with the poetics of a director who has (almost) always focused more on images than words.
In this sense, we can recall the remarkable “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” of 2003 (a melancholy reflection on cinemas) or the touching ending of “Vive amaour” of 1994, the film with which Tsai had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
A nice tribute to Charlie Chaplin
If “Days” can be considered a sort of “silent film” of the present day, it is certainly no coincidence that within the narrative there is a great musical homage to Charlie Chaplin: it should never be forgotten that the latter was the most important example of a film artist who continued to make films without words even several years after the introduction of speech.
In addition to the almost total absence of dialogues, it should be highlighted how the film is not a product for everyone, also for its strongly anti-narrative approach and characterized by a static rhythm undoubtedly far from contemporary canons: Tsai Ming-liang, always , loves to experiment and it is precisely in the silences and in the images, precisely static, that the beauty of a feature film with a strong poetic impact emerges, capable of telling and describing feelings much better than the vast majority of films we are used to. Suffice it to note, for example, the prolonged gaze of one of the protagonists towards the conclusion, but also all the attention that the author reserves to human beings, to their inner disturbances and to the problems they have to face. -sheng, who has always been a fetish actor in the director’s cinema.