I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (Screen Daily Review)

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I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (Screen Daily Review)

Postby dleedlee » Tue Sep 05, 2006 11:32 am

http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?st ... 507&r=true

I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (Hei Yanquan)
Dan Fainaru in Venice 04 September 2006

Dir: Tsai Ming Liang. Tai-Fr-Aust. 2006. 115mins.

Tsai Ming Liang is an acquired taste: either you like what he does or you don't and there are no two ways about it. If you do, then you will not be surprised by I Don't Want to Sleep Alone’s static shots, absence of any visible narrative, lack of dialogue, apocalyptic visions of a world systematically self-destructing and lonely characters desperately yearning for companionship and love.

That it is all served at a snail's pace will not bother Tsai’s admiring film critics, arthouse circuit exhibitors and festival programmers one bit. They will adore his new feature, as usual, and add more prizes to the already considerable collection he has amassed during the 14 years since he delivered Rebels Of The Neon God.

If you are not a Tsai follower, like the vast majority of audiences and critics, then you will join the rest in heading for the exit sign, as many have done on previous occasions. This is definitely not the Tsai Ming Liang film to change your opinion of him.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is one of the New Crowned Hope projects, commissioned by the city of Vienna to mark Mozart Year and push the boundaries of art beyond its usual confines. It may not be that much of a step forward for Tsai himself – in many respects he simply goes over old themes - but it is still many miles away from anything else on cinema screens today.

The film, which competed at Venice ahead of a Toronto appearance, does at least mark one change for its director: it is the first film to shoot in Tsai’s native homeland, Malaysia, where he emphasises the multiplicity of races and the unusual choice of locations he found in Kuala Lumpur.

Homeless hobo (Tsai regular Lee Kang-Sheng) is beaten up by gamblers before being found by Rawang (Norman Atun), a Bangladeshi worker, who takes him home and nurses him back to health.

At the same time, a young man (again Lee Kang-Sheng), lies unconscious in bed, looking to all intents and purposes as if he is in a terminal coma. Constant and loving care come from his mother (Pearlly Chua), who owns a small coffee shop, and the young waitress (Cheng Shiang-Chyi), who works for her.

In the ensuing scenes - calling them a story would be too farfetched - nothing much happens to the paralysed patient, save more intensive and intimate care. Meanwhile the hobo becomes the sexual hub of attraction for the waitress, her boss and the jealous Bangladeshi boy who saved his life. No one, as the title indicates, wants to sleep alone.

But before romantic conflict can erupt, Kuala Lumpur is engulfed by plumes of dense heavy smoke, blown in from the forest fires in neighbouring Indonesia, which envelop everything in a bluish-gray haze, making masks mandatory and sex impossible.

Followers of Tsai will have no difficulties identifying here his trademark signs, repeated from one film to the next. They include his obsession with water or plastic bags, the end of the world lurking just around the corner and redemption only being possible when man finally breaks out of his own solitude and has the opportunity to live with others (one notable absence here is his obsession with time).

Locations, as usual, play an overwhelming part in Tsai's film, for the look of his work is defined by where he shoots it. Here he opts for an abandoned and partially built skyscraper, started in the 1990s but abandoned as a skeletal frame once the economic boom left the region.

Tsai uses a pool of water that he found at the bottom of the building’s central shaft several times during the course of the film and also as the location for the final frame, which, as usual, he uses to express poetic humanism in a highly imaginative visual manner. This time, a mattress, the piece’s symbol of cohabitation, floats on a subterranean body of peace and quiet, bearing two men and a woman. It indicates, among other things, how by the end of I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, a blissful truce has been established between the gay and straight characters.

After working with Tsai in half-a-dozen previous films, cameraman Liao Pen-Jung is by now an expert in the visual language expected by the director, composing masterfully planned frames in which depth plays as much of a role as height and width.

Unlike other contributors to the New Crowned Hope, Tsai actually keeps in mind the Mozart celebrations. Tamino's aria from The Magic Flute already announces the love theme in the opening shot, to be followed later by the Queen Of Night aria from the same opera. For the finale, however, Tsai chooses a pure-voiced Chinese a cappella version of Chaplin's Smile, a tribute to another film-maker who just like Tsai, preferred not to squander words.

Production companies/backers
Homegreen Company
Soudaine Compagnie

International sales
Fortissimo Films

Executive producers
Simon Field
Keith Griffiths

Producers
Bruno Pesery
Vincent Wang

Cinematography
Liao Pen-Jung

Editor
Chen Sheng-Chang

Production design
Lee Tian-Jue
Tang Shiang-Chu

Main cast
Lee Kang-Sheng
Chen Shiang-Chyi
Norman Atun
Pearlly Chua
???? Better to light a candle than curse the darkness; Measure twice, cut once.
Pinyin to Wade-Giles. Cantonese names file
dleedlee
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