听 Taiwanese-based film-maker Tsai Ming-Liang returns to his native Malaysia for I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, an enigmatic fable of longing and loneliness in present-day Kuala Lumpur. The director's signature actor Lee Kang-Sheng plays the two different roles of Hsiao-Kang: he's both a man lying comatose in bed and a Chinese drifter who's attacked by a gang of hustlers and nursed back to health by a foreign worker Rawang (Norman Bin Atun).
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone was commissioned as one of the six feature films in the New Crowned Hope project, which celebrated the composer Mozart's 250th birthday. It certainly requires a degree of patience from the viewer: there's scant dialogue, the pacing is noticeably unhurried, and the contemplative visual style favours static long takes photographed in deep focus.
"A BLISSFUL CLOSING SHOT"
Ming-Liang observes characters, who also include Chen Siang-Chyi's waitress-cum-carer Shiang-Chyi, who exist on the margins of Malaysian society. Theirs is a world of cheap cafes, grubby tenements, and second-hand mattresses, whilst a key location is a half-finished multi-storey building with a flooded basement. Mysterious clouds of smoke suggest an impending catastrophe, and in a scene of deadpan humour these fumes interrupt an erotic encounter between Shiang-Chyi and Hsiao-Kang. However there's an endearing tenderness to the way Rawang cares for a left-for-dead stranger, and Ming-Liang finds unlikely beauty within this humid urban environment, not least through a blissful closing shot.
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is out in the UK on 16th November 2007.
The closing shot must become one of the all time greats.
