Ben ri gong xiu
本日公休
½*/****
starring Lu Hsiao-fen, Fu Meng-po, Annie Chen, Shih Ming Shuai
written and directed by Fu Tien-Yu
by Walter Chaw Fu Tien-Yu’s Day Off is heartfelt pap in the Garry Marshall style: soft-focused, episodic, sprawled like a drunken floozy across a flight of stairs in a Tennessee Williams melodrama. It’s a movie scored, every inch of it, with the kind of music honey and treacle would make if they had sticky little tentacles. The film is insinuating, probing for soft spots to geek for uncontrollable emotional gag reflexes: dying fathers, generational trauma, reunions, separations, triumphs… You know that minor chord you learned in your first guitar lesson? Think about a sad day and play that chord. Play each of the strings individually. Slowly. Close your eyes. You want a job, kid? Day Off is genuinely awful. It shares a personality with Precious Moments figurines. Moreover, it shares a vibe with the lonesome old lady you somehow got trapped in a conversation with who is shoving her Precious Moments figurines in your face and asking what you think. “This is A Decade of Dreams Come True, isn’t it sweet? And this is My Heart Beats For You, isn’t that adorable? ISN’T IT?” It isn’t. It’s sad, a lonesome transference of underdeveloped and frustrated social longing onto a plaster mold of literal children pretending to be adults.
A Rui (Lu Hsiao-Fen) is the barber; she cuts the hair. But unlike the Coen Brothers’ iteration of the barber in their The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Rui is everywhere. She’s the most important person in her clients’ lives, the bedrock for every perfect stranger’s sense of normalcy and consistency. There’s actually a good version of this film where her narcissistic madness causes an unbelievable number of complications for her family, who wish she were as interested in them as she is in people who don’t know she exists. There’s an awkward power dynamic in service industries where the roles are essentially cast as master and facilitator for the duration of a prescribed interaction. Day Off is a sick fantasy I’m having trouble playing off as a cultural peculiarity so much as just, you know, a diseased self-delusion to provide meaning to the part of a person’s life that doesn’t have any. It’s called “day off,” incidentally, because on one of the rare days off this selfless paragon of humanity allows herself, she travels to give a last haircut to a client who, during a decades-long patronage, has said only a single word to her, not in kindness but to brag about his son. That the son seems so surprised to hear this speaks to another cultural illness in which parents tend to be better at bragging to strangers about their children than telling their children directly that they’re proud of them.
I’m sensitive to this message, obviously. It pushes my buttons. I love many things about my parents’ culture–and this is not one of them. I don’t think Day Off is touching. I don’t think there’s any nobility to it. I think it’s manipulative claptrap pushing a dangerous agenda. Consider the unintentionally terrifying sequence in which A Rui is cutting a coma patient’s hair and flashing scissors around the gravely-ill man’s head, with neither a dropcloth to catch hairs that might itch nor an organic alarm system to let her know if she’s drawing blood. Day Off is also irritating as fuck in exactly the same way my mom was whenever she stopped listening during an argument. In exactly the same way an older generation decided for me to bury my atheist dad in a religious ceremony. It is, in fact, the perfect metaphor for sticking fingers in ears and widening the divide between generations. Day Off is a horror film not unlike Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is a horror film, except Wang is wise to how the “old ways” can be horrific. All Day Off does is insist its sickness is a virtue. I guess what I’m saying is, this movie can go fuck itself.
