07 July 2008

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Written & Directed by: Tsai Ming-Liang
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B+


The camera moves twice, by my count, in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Hei Yan Quan)—once because a bus stops in front of the lens, and a second time it slides laterally, a few inches, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible. Tsai’s latest is a succession of static images, some only seconds long while others extend several minutes, like a series of page A1, above-the-fold photographs of Malay street life and hospital ritual in motion. It’s cinema with a purity of patience, centered on one walletless vagrant (Lee Kang-Sheng) who’s beaten and left to collapse on the sidewalk. He’s taken to a hospital where Die Zauberflöte usually pumps from the boombox. (Sleep Alone is one of the distinguished films, cf. Syndromes and a Century, financed as part of the New Crowned Hope Festival.)

Tsai teases out subliminal poesy from the film’s deceptive simplicity, using dialogue sparsely to fashion a portrait of contemporary urban loneliness—thus the film’s title, far more overt than the subtle film. He defines his characters through their surroundings—where they eat, sleep, wash their clothes—and, to a lesser extent, the simple things they do in those spaces. So, his camera doesn’t follow the actors; instead, from the prime vantage points Tsai has arranged in advance, it soaks up locations, none more striking than the hospital’s core: a flooded, gutted shell that, Scott Tobias wrote, “has the look of a haunted opera house.”


As I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, set in a crowded city of solitaire souls, progresses, a smoky haze of mysterious origin passes over the city; everyone begins to wear gasmasks, the streets turn a sickly dustbowl gold, and the formerly bleak atmosphere becomes almost post-apocalyptic. Thick and pervasive, the cloud makes kissing without choking nearly impossible. Ending on an image of the three central characters on a white mattress, sailing on an inky, blue-black sea, Tsai’s final analysis of the modern condition is ambiguous, as in the rest of the film: people are together, but alone; a hint of optimism struggles to be heard amid a clamor of pessimism.


Watch the trailer:

8 comments:

Danny said...

The man who gets beaten is picked up and cared for by another man in his squat-like home.
I thought it was another man (with a buzzed haircut) who was catatonic fwho was being cared for more professionaly. He has a catheter and paid caretakers. He is not in a hospital, but a more upscale home, differnet from where the centarl characters (the woman who cares for the sick man, the beaten man and the man who cares for him) live.

I noticed in the credits that the first two listed names are the same. I assume the same actor playing two roles. This might be where some confusion lies.
I thought it was a beautiful film, like watching a hopper painting in action.
Thanks -D

Anonymous said...

WOW!!! what a Fantastic movie.......marvelous.....superb....great story....I loved this story....I think Tsai Ming-liang has done fabulous job of directing this movie because movie is very sweet. I love to watch I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone movie again and again.

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