It took a few minutes to get in sync with austere Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's (Viva L’Amour, Goodbye, Dragon Inn) deliberate pace. (The title prophetically announced the amount of time one felt it took for the first couple of long takes to play out.) Neither one of our principals is called by name, so rather than referring to them as Old Man (Lee Kang-sheng) and Young Man (Anong Houngheuangsy), we’ll go with the actor’s forenames. Lee sits alone on his porch watching the rain. If his subsequent visit to a medieval acupuncturist and need for a rubdown are any indication, the pained look on his face comes naturally. From beneath a kitchen table, we watch as Anong prepares dinner in a pair of makeshift kilns. The most out of place item in the apartment — a shocking pink dinner plate propped up against the wall — begins a leitmotif, visual music for a film in which the soundtrack is determinedly diegetic. It also signals a steady and vibrant reminder — a pink-lighting if you will — of both men’s sexual longings. Anong was hired to give Lee a full body massage; the first time the two men meet is in a hotel room at around the one hour mark. As it happens in life, the two men were thrown together for a brief time, and in the morning they parted company, only to return to the forlorn empty spaces they call life. Anong gets the curtain shot, seated at a bus stop at twilight. A pair of pink lights flash in the distance as if beckoning the young man’s attention. After a minute, he rises and heads towards the rosy glow. It’s about as close as Days came to pulling off a second happy ending. (2020) — Scott Marks