Afternoon – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

After­noon – first look review

17 Sep 2015

Words by David Jenkins

A man in a black shirt standing in a verdant outdoor setting, covering his face with his hand.
A man in a black shirt standing in a verdant outdoor setting, covering his face with his hand.
Tsai Ming-Liang and his collaborator/​muse Lee Kang-Sheng have a long, deep con­ver­sa­tion about their relationship.

Akin to lay­ing strand­ed on a par­adise island and allow­ing the warm waves to lap at your toes, Tsai Ming-Liang’s bliss­ful After­noon is a film which explores death and lone­li­ness in the most serene and poet­ic way imaginable.

It takes place in a dilap­i­dat­ed room with­in his own remote house which sits on the side of a moun­tain, as the direc­tor selects a pic­turesque nook in which to have an extend­ed con­ver­sa­tion with his long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor and lead­ing man, Lee Kang-Sheng. The pair slouch low in leather chairs – colour coor­di­nat­ed to work with the greens of the rur­al back­drop – and sip water and tea, with Lee chain-smok­ing on white-tipped cig­a­rettes – a sig­ni­fi­er of who dom­i­nates the conversation.

Both are sat in front of a wall with an open­ing which faces out to the sur­round­ing jun­gle, each with their own far-off hori­zon in the back­drop. There’s a moment where Tsai picks his toe. And then lat­er he brush­es a fly from Lee’s arm. Some­times, a man’s tar­tan flat-cap enters into the cor­ner of the frame. This for­mal inac­tiv­i­ty helps to par­lay the focus on to these minor details, and works well when jux­ta­posed with the the­mat­ic grav­i­ty of the dis­cus­sion which begins and ends on the sub­ject of mortality.

Yet this is not a depress­ing film – it’s a joy­ous ode to a very spe­cial kind of work­ing rela­tion­ship, one that its par­tic­i­pants find it almost impos­si­ble to define. We learn that Tsai has reached a point in his career where death anx­i­ety con­sumes his pro­fes­sion­al life, and this pos­si­bly stems from the extreme pro­tec­tive­ness he feels for Lee. It seems unlike­ly he’ll make anoth­er film, but if he does, Lee will be in it and it will, by nat­ur­al exten­sion, be about him. Their rela­tion­ship tran­scends love – the pair live togeth­er in this house, Tsai cook­ing and paint­ing, Lee tend­ing to the gar­den (inter­net blog­gers are start­ing to refer to him as a pota­to farmer” now) and walk­ing his dogs. Lee doesn’t star in Tsai’s films, Tsai’s films are win­dows onto Lee’s dis­tinc­tive process.

What’s ini­tial­ly inter­est­ing is that a writer/​director who makes films with very lit­tle dia­logue is him­self so relent­less­ly gar­ru­lous. He’s weep­ing and laugh­ing with­in the first five min­utes. Indeed, there are points that this feels more like an extend­ed ther­a­py ses­sion, with Tsai employ­ing Lee as a human wail­ing wall while he sits, silent, con­tent­ed, expres­sion­less, as the words flow out of his con­flict­ed mas­ter. It’s inter­est­ing, though, that both men remain psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly sim­pati­co, nei­ther goad­ing or search­ing for accep­tance from the other.

Tsai, how­ev­er, comes across as being far more sen­si­tive to crit­i­cism and val­ues his cre­ative inde­pen­dence above all else. Though their rela­tion­ship has reach a point which tran­scends con­ven­tion­al norms, After­noon depicts the men as very dif­fer­ent to one anoth­er, and there’s no sense that Tsai has mould­ed Lee into an intel­lec­tu­al play­thing or a mod­el for him to manip­u­late. He loves him for exact­ly who he is.

From it’s open­ing gam­bit of Tsai admit­ting that he feels like he’s about to die, the film is instant­ly con­tex­tu­alised as a last will and tes­ta­ment, and that it nev­er slips into maudlin intro­spec­tion is emblem­at­ic of the pair’s hushed per­spi­cac­i­ty and the admis­sion that they’ve both feel amply con­tent­ed their lives thus far. At one point the con­ver­sa­tion strays onto the ques­tion of whether they plan to meet in their next lives, to which Lee wry­ly pon­ders whether he could be the direc­tor this time.

Though pri­mar­i­ly an attempt to define a rela­tion­ship (the film is cen­tral­ly about the impos­si­bil­i­ty of this task), After­noon func­tions also as a bril­liant film about work­ing as a direc­tor, work­ing as an actor, and how those two worlds con­verge. It places Tsai’s 2013 film Stray Dogs in a new light, with the pair going into intense detail on how they cre­at­ed the sequence where Lee rav­ages an entire cabbage.

Lat­er, when we hear of the hard­ships of mak­ing this kind of cin­e­ma – Tsai and Lee have long had to phys­i­cal­ly sell tick­ets on the street for their movies in order to coax peo­ple inside – Stray Dogs’ explo­ration into the indig­ni­ty of pover­ty is sud­den­ly reframed as a film about moviemaking.

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