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I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006)

Director: Tsai Ming-liang

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From Time Out London

Tsai’s latest movie was commissioned for the New Crowned Hope project – which has already brought us such gems as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ‘Syndromes and a Century’ –  which occasioned the Taiwanese filmmaker to take members of his long-term repertory company to film in his birth country, Malaysia. Here is regular actor Lee Kang-Sheng – some say Tsai’s cinematic alter-ego – playing two characters: the stroppy Kang, newcomer to Kuala Lumpur who annoys some street conmen and ends up in a bloody heap; and a doppelgänger who spends most of the movie in a coma being tended by a nurse (Chen Shiang-chyi, another Tsai faithful). Not too much should be made of Tsai’s change of locale, but in the re-focus of his empathetic eye on a new community of outsiders – the ethnically mixed generation of pan-Asian guest workers left high-and-dry by the burst bubble  of Malaysia’s economic boom – many critics have detected a more explicit tendresse in his always elegant, though tough and challenging, formal examinations of unfulfilled or unfulfillable emotional need.

However true that is, ‘...Sleep Alone’ proves that there has been no fundamental change in Tsai’s unique method of cinematic enquiry: his use of elemental metaphor or motif (especially water); contextualising longshot; his downplay of often inexpressive verbal intercourse in favour of wordless gesture, glance, touch (or sexual encounter) as a way of conjuring up the magic or pain of relationships; or his ability (with his cinematographer Liao Pen Jung) to film urban landscapes so expressively as to make them almost function like characters, often as lonely as the human ones, in his compassionate social architecture. It’s a film not only about social disintegration, but also about grace under undue pressure, where the giving of a cigarette to a stranger means far more than ‘a drop of kindness in a million sorrows’.

Author: Wally Hammond

Time Out London Issue 1943: November 14-20 2007


User reviews of this film

  • yduric said...
    Posted on Apr 12 2010 05:39 DISGUSTING
    In several of his films, like for instance 'Vive l'Amour', or 'What Time is It Over There?' or, most obviously, in 'The River', Tsai Ming-Liang features gay characters: but what strikes me is that he does ALWAYS do so in a negative way, and this is only getting from bad to worse in each of his films.
    But in 'Hey yan qauan', this really reaches a peak: at the end of the film, the Bengladeshi character who is obviously gay, being attracetd by the Chinese man he took care of (played by Tsai Ming-Liang's sooo beloved actor), tries to MURDER him and is only stopped by the fact that the latter awakes and prevents him from doing so. This is clearly disgusting and unforgivable, WE KNOW that Tsai Ming-Liang is homophobic, enough is enough... So in his next film, he should definitely shut his filthy trap, and avoid treating that subject matter for he apparently knows no other way of tackling it...
    Report as inappropriate
  • EDITH AN MISCHA,,X said...
    Posted on Dec 11 2007 10:54 BORINGG
    Report as inappropriate

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Cast & crew

Director: Tsai Ming-liang

Producer: Bruno Pesery, Vincent Wang

Cast: Chen Shiang-Chyi, Lee Kang-sheng, Norman Atun full cast

Genre(s): Comedy, Drama

Duration: 115 mins

UK Release: Nov 16 2007



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