Review: AFTERNOON, A Moving, Intimate Conversation On Life And Art

I might as well get to the point right off the bat: Afternoon, the latest work by Taiwan’s master auteur Tsai Ming-liang, is to my mind, one of the most absorbing, humorous, movingly poignant, fascinating, and just plain loveliest films that we’ll get to see all year.

 

In a commercial cinematic landscape that is, more often than not, afflicted with a painful dearth of true beauty, that in itself is a minor miracle. But what’s even more miraculous is that Afternoon, at least on the visual surface level, is as minimal as cinema can possibly get. It’s a fairly lengthy (137 minutes, to be exact) film that consists solely of four static shots – of varying lengths, separated by cuts to black – of two guys talking. That’s all, folks.

 

But, as Afternoon gloriously proves, that can be more than enough; within that framework, this film brims with emotion, profound meditative qualities, amusing anecdotes, and, it appears, a sometimes uncomfortably intimate inside glimpse into one of cinema’s most immensely fascinating and creatively fecund partnerships.

 

What greatly helps in terms of this work’s impact, of course, is that this isn’t just any two guys talking – those two guys just happen to be Tsai himself and his constant lead actor and perennial muse Lee Kang-sheng. The single camera setup of Afternoon shows us Tsai and Lee sitting in green easy chairs that are turned toward each other, Tsai on screen left and Lee on screen right, in a bare, dilapidated space, an upper-story deck of the house which the two men share.

 

They sit on opposite sides of a corner of the room, and behind them are two large windows on opposite walls where lush greenery sways gently in the breeze, and where we can glimpse a mountainous landscape. The sharp contrast between the somewhat drab and dark interior – which forms an interesting visual analog to Tsai’s statement during the conversation that “our films are all ruins” – and the vibrant, light-rich natural world that exists just outside their door creates a wonderful aesthetic dynamic that greatly enhances both the visual and psychological space that forms the background to Tsai and Lee’s talk.

 

The thematic meat of the film, of course, is in this conversation, a wide-ranging discussion that ranges from acting and filmmaking techniques, to food, travel, friendship, and mortality, giving us a fascinating insight into what motivates them and what makes them tick. Probably the best way to describe Afternoon would be to call it the My Dinner with Andre of Asian art cinema – except that it takes place during the daytime, and there’s no dinner; they’re just drinking tea. What is revealed during the conversation, at least in what is presented to us in the duration of this film, are some of the intimate specifics of a relationship that is best expressed in the terms of Facebook status parlance: it’s complicated.

 

Tsai and Lee made their fame, if not much of a fortune, in collaborating on such enduring cinematic works as Vive L’Amour (1994), The River (1997), The Hole (1998), What Time is It There? (2001), Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), The Wayward Cloud (2005), and Stray Dogs (2013), many of which explored Taipei-set urban anomie, loneliness, isolation, and sexual longing, all of which featured at its center the inimitable presences and performances of Lee Kang-sheng. (Lee has also directed two fine films of his own: The Missing [2003] and Help Me Eros [2007]).

 

Much more than merely an actor, Lee is an essential, and probably the essential material without which Tsai will not, and probably cannot, create his work. Tsai stresses several times during the conversation the importance of Lee to his art, without which it essentially wouldn’t exist, and repeatedly expresses to Lee his gratitude for giving so much of himself to the creation of these films, for which Lee often sacrifices financial stability and much of his personal life as well.

 

One of the most remarkable, and more than a little unsettling, aspects of Afternoon is how much the subject of death figures into the conversation. Stray Dogs, besides being one of Tsai’s masterworks (and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice), represented his farewell to narrative and commercial filmmaking, however marginal in that latter aspect. Tsai has long had a rather antagonistic relationship with the mainstream Taiwanese film industry, and has expressed much of his impatience with the limitations and the rigid conventionality of the film landscape within which he must fight for audiences and screen venues.

 

Tsai’s response to this problem has been to opt out of the system altogether, forgoing narrative features in favor of projects closer to moving image artworks than to commercial cinema, with his work now more often showing up in art galleries than in movie theaters. This was the case with Face (2009), which was commissioned by the Louvre and has its first showings there, as well as with Stray Dogs.

 

His artistic output these days is most embodied by the series of films he has made in recent years – which include Walker (2012), Walking on Water (2013), and Journey to the West (2014) – which feature Lee Kang-sheng as a silent, wandering monk who makes his slow, deliberative movements in various urban spaces, his contemplative actions forming an unspoken critique of the shallow rapidity of modern everyday life. These short and medium-length films are much more at home in museums and art galleries than in ticketed movie theaters. However, these works are often indeed shown in movie theaters, and they are no less cinematic than his previous work.

 

In Afternoon, however, it’s revealed that Tsai’s retreat from narrative filmmaking was a result of not only his disillusionment and disdain of the commercial film industry, but poor health which plagued him greatly during the making of Stray Dogs. He even says that he thought he would die during the editing of the film; early in Afternoon, he expresses, more than once, his overwhelming feeling that he will die soon.

 

Tsai recalls the recent death of a close family member, and that family member’s action of always sweeping the floor, an action that has become a habit of Tsai himself. Talking about this brings him to tears frequently in the early portions of the film, and this idea of impending death remains an undercurrent, even during the more lighthearted moments of the conversation.

 

Another revealing aspect of Afternoon lies in how we see the two men relate to one another, and the vast contrast in their personalities. Tsai does the lion’s share of the talking here, holding forth in an ebullient, voluble manner, punctuated often by a nervous giggle that makes him rather endearing. Lee, on the other hand, speaks very little, and is essentially silent for much of the first hour, simply listening to Tsai and not responding much to him, his reactions mainly limited to staring into the distance and puffing on a cigarette. As opposed to Tsai, who seems to have his emotions very much on his sleeve, Lee remains mostly an enigma, and it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, if indeed he’s thinking much of anything.

 

Adding to these contrasts are the stark differences in the way they conduct their private lives. In what perhaps is a desire to put to rest certain “rumors,” as Tsai refers to them, about the exact nature of their relationship, it’s revealed here that, even though they’ve lived together for a long time and frequently travel together, they’re not lovers. Tsai is gay, but Lee is not; he currently has a steady girlfriend, while Tsai has not had a significant other in his life for a long time, if ever.

 

Tsai's love life seems to largely consist of hookups in gay saunas and bathhouses, with Lee often anxiously waiting outside to take him home afterward. In one telling exchange, Tsai rather nervously asks Lee if his sexual orientation ever bothered him. Lee says it doesn’t, though he allows that his close relationship with Tsai has somewhat limited his opportunities to meet women, and also that he’s sometimes frustrated that he’s very often called upon to play gay men by other directors.

 

So, as we see, Afternoon very much takes the form of an intimate, unguarded conversation between two close friends, although their closeness makes “friends” a rather inadequate word to describe them; they seem, on the evidence of what we see, to act much more like a long-time married couple, albeit a strictly platonic one. However, though this is left unstated, one strongly gets the sense that Tsai wishes things were much different between them.

 

On the other hand, Afternoon is also a very constructed and self-aware work. Tsai says at one point that he feels as if he’s performing for the camera. We are made aware of the presence of the film crew at certain points; a boom mike will drop in to the frame, a crew member’s head or hand will appear, or someone off-screen will ask a question during a lull in the conversation. There are long silences during the conversation, a sort of verbal negative space that proves to be just as revealing as the conversation itself.

 

The way Afternoon manages to, in effect, be simultaneously a documentary and a kind of performance art is probably its most brilliant conceptual stroke. (Although I must say, as someone who has personally met both these men, that the dynamic of the extremely talkative Tsai and the extremely taciturn Lee is most definitely not an act.)

 

I spoke of miracles earlier in this review, but perhaps the biggest miracle of all is that these two men, with such different personalities and philosophies toward life – Tsai is often anxious, agitated, and death-haunted while Lee is much more sanguine and willing to go with the flow – found each other and made such beautiful, emotionally and intellectually stimulating works. Which, of course, includes this one.

 

Of course, as much in love as I am with Afternoon, I do recognize that a two hour and seventeen minute film of two people talking is practically the dictionary definition of “not for everybody.” And the one potential artistic and conceptual limitation of this movie is that it may not easily stand alone outside of the context of Tsai and Lee’s body of work.

 

It’s hard to say if viewers coming into Afternoon cold, without familiarity with the other films they’ve made together, will get very much out of it. But I suspect that there’s enough expressed here of the beauty of two people offering us a glimpse, however briefly, of their deep artistic and personal connection, such that being an art film aficionado is not required to enjoy this lovely work, and perhaps even emerge from it profoundly enriched, both experientially and spiritually.