I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone – Beautifully lit and composed, Tsai Ming Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is, also, hollow and pretentious. A lot of critics admired this film, commissioned in 2006 for Peter Sellars Vienna Mozart festival (“the New Crowned Hope” festival), but I disagree with their assessments. In my view, there’s little substance to this film – it’s an ink blot that the viewer construes around certain themes predictable in art cinema: loneliness and anomie, sex, pollution, AIDS, the plight of so-called “guest” or migrant workers… At first glance, it seems amazing that the film crams all of these topics into a running time less than two hours. But these subjects aren’t really explored. Rather, they treated as glamorous allusions – shorthand for subjects that the art house audience will find resonant and may think it fashionable to briefly consider. There is no doubt that the movie is extraordinarily pretty in a desolate kind of way and some of its elliptical techniques compelling – but this beauty is the sort of thing, you used to find on LP record covers in the early seventies or in fashion magazines like Vogue, mildly transgressive and romantically desolate images that are designed to attract your attention but don’t really reveal anything. A man seemingly brain-dead is fed through a tube, scrubbed like a piece of furniture, and rubbed with lotion. In one scene, the brain-dead guy gets a hand-job from the horny proprietor of a café. His empty face and staring eyes seem to be a trope for the camera that regards the semi-abstract wastelands of Kuala Lumpur from motionless vantage points for immensely long periods of time. Another guy, a homeless Malaysian gets himself beat half to death by a gang led by a fortune-teller/ numbers runner. A guest worker from Bangladesh, rescues the wounded homeless man, carries him back to his squat (which he shares with a dozen other construction workers from Bangladesh) on a mattress retrieved from a dumpster, and, then, nurses him back to health. The construction workers’ ministrations to the homeless guy are parallel to the care provided to the brain-dead paralytic and, similarly, all the washing and rubbing of lotion sloshes over into what appears to be something like a love affair. (Interestingly, the homeless guy and the paralyzed guy are played by the same actor although this is not at all evident until the final credits). Everyone seems to desire the homeless guy, although the nature of his appeal is unclear to me – he looks dirty, unkempt, and scruffy. (It seems to be about 120 degrees at all times and everyone runs around in almost no clothing, the men wearing faintly ridiculous sarongs). A girl who is caring for the paralyzed patient, and sleeping overhead in some kind of airless loft with convenient holes in the floor through which she can observe the brain-dead man, seems attracted to the homeless man and ends up having sex with him in the middle of a smoggy haze so intense that everyone has to wear gas masks – the girl has a styrofoam cup attached to a rubber band over her nose and mouth. The relationship between the girl and the homeless guy upsets his benefactor, the soulful construction worker from Bangladesh and he threatens to cut the sleeping man’s throat, on their filthy mattress, with the edge of metal can. No one speaks to anyone else; other than music on the TV or radio (a couple arias by Mozart to justify inclusion in the festival), the movie is effectively silent. Maybe, no one speaks the same language. I don’t know. But this is the sort of contrivance that is so abundantly and massively foolish that professional critics simply ignore it. In fact, no one speaks because any dialogue in these situations would be absurdly comical – “Dude, but I thought you were gay!”, “let’s masturbate the brain-dead guy!” “How come you’re fishing in the flooded basement of a construction site?” The point is no one speaks in this kind of film because the situations are so inherently ridiculous and contrived and that it would be impossible to construct any kind of plausible dialogue for the characters – so the affectation is that the characters merely stare at one another with a longing gaze and, then, sometimes, clumsily grapple as if to have sex, but, usually, reconsider due to the general squalor, the humidity, and suffocating smog. In a weird way, the film resembles Antonioni’s The Red Desert with its immigrants, industrial wastelands, and thwarted sex. Liang has a lot of brilliant ideas about how to make a movie – I particularly admire his use of an extreme kind of shot/reverse shot in which the reverse angle is so remote from the original shot that it sometimes takes a full minute to decipher that we are simply seeing the earlier vantage but from a very peculiar and distant reverse angle. In many respects, the very long takes are necessary since it takes quite a while in most cases to decipher how the shots are related to one another. The problem with the film is that brilliant ideas about how to make a film don’t, necessarily, equal a good movie.