I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
Tsai Ming-liang, 2006, 115 min

“Kuala Lumpur replaces Taipei as Tsai’s metropolis of choice in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, but the return to his country of birth certainly doesn’t yield any fondness or nostalgia – a sense only strengthened by the Malaysian Censorship Board’s outlawing of the film. Oppressively grimy, littered with half-built corporate structures and neglected shantytowns, and eventually draped in the smoke of a nearby wildfire, the Malaysian capital is portrayed as an eerie labyrinth of alienation, where vagrants and loners of various cultural backgrounds scrape by on low-paying construction and service jobs. Lee Kang-sheng embodies a pair of such figures, both unnamed in the film: one a battered immigrant labourer found on the street by a nurturing young man named Rawang (Norman Atun), the other a paralyzed figure who is taken in by a tender coffee shop waitress (Chen Shiang-chyi). As ever, Tsai makes breathtaking use of space, juxtaposing the cramped and tangled interiors of apartment buildings with the cavernous gorges of multi-story construction sites. A peaceful night’s sleep with a warm body proves to be the elusive objective of the uniformly taciturn ensemble, and, as such, mattresses join Tsai’s rotating set of pet motifs, ultimately featuring prominently in a closing image of exquisite serenity.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Screening as part of our Histoire(s) du cinéma series