Hei yan quan

This is a strange film, very strange, and not the type of film to get a release outside of a festival. There was virtually no dialogue for two hours - mostly visuals with background noises and music (played in the scene, not dubbed over). We see various strugglers in the streets and buildings of Malaysia and get a strong sense of alienation.

The film is almost a photo essay, constructed largely of beautifully composed shots of urban decay. There's the flooded building site, modest abodes, a huge butterfly and the surreal-looking streets choked in smoke from Indonesian bushfires. The film challenges an audience's patience and I was surprised there were only a few walkouts at the Melbourne International Film Festival I attended. My partner left after 90 minutes, and shortly after a little more action started to appear.

A sex scene interrupted by the smoke was amusing. The final take is particularly poignant and poetic. The film is not something I would generally recommend to mainstream audiences, but if you like something unusual during a festival, it might be worth a look in. Just be prepared to be patient.

This may be Tsai's first film set and made in his homeland of Malaysia, but he doesn't stray at all from Tsaiville. Which isn't much of a problem, really, if you're a fan of the director. Sure, we could complain that he's been hitting the same notes for eight features now, but there are artists in every medium that are like this. Either we get sick of it, or we like it and we stick with it. I'm sticking with Tsai. His moods and rhythms haunt my mind. He captures images like no other director, and he's definitely one auteur whose work you could identify from just one shot (granted, you have about ten times as many frames in that one shot as you do in your average auteur's work!). I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is probably my least favorite of all of his films (all of which I've seen except his previous, The Wayward Cloud – I've seen the first five minutes and am aching to finish it). This is mostly because I wasn't too sure what was going on through much of it. The plot seems to concern a young Chinese man (played by Tsai's boytoy/regular Lee Kang-sheng) who gets beaten senseless in Kuala Lumpur. A construction worker saves him and nurses him back to health, mostly with lustful intentions. But when the Chinese man is up and about, he goes off and sleeps with some women, which understandably pisses off his savior. Then there was a bunch of stuff I didn't quite understand, notably a guy in a coma (also played by Lee Kang-sheng). A lot of my favorite shots involved that guy, but I'm not 100% sure what was going on in that plot line. The images here are top notch, and though there is little dialogue, Tsai's use of sound – and music – is wonderful. Much as Tsai uses Taipei, Kuala Lumpur is an area of urban alienation. Late in the film smoke drifts over from a nearby Sumatran forest fire, covering the city with a thick haze. Many of the scenes are set in a crumbling building (not quite sure what this was all about, really), which reminds me of the post-apocalyptic landscape in my favorite Tsai film, The Hole. I actually think I might have enjoyed this more had I watched it when I was less tired. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I want to give it another chance with the awful DVD, courtesy of Strand Releasing. It's cropped, for one thing. The image also looks a lot less crisp than any of Tsai's other films, though that may have been his stylistic choice this time around.

"What Time Is It There?" remains my favorite film by Tsai Ming-liang, but it's fascinating to follow his work and see how he builds his own imaginative world -- close to, but not exactly, our own -- film by film.

"I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" took me a little longer to get into than any prior film by the director, but by about the half-hour mark I was fully absorbed. Thankfully, "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" rewards patient viewers by reserving some fantastically humorous, mysterious, and even hypnotic moments for its last acts. Whereas in previous films, familiar visual tropes such as umbrellas and watermelons have played recurrent symbolic roles, here it's mattresses and anti-smoke facemasks, somehow used just as evocatively. Other obsessions -- dripping water, holes in floors and ceilings, mysterious and unspoken attractions -- recur here in ways that recall the director's previous works without depending upon them.

I wouldn't suggest curious viewers start with this film, but rather delve back as far back as possible into Tsai Ming-liang's back catalog and proceed from there -- easier than ever before to do now, what with the increased DVD availability of early gems such as "Rebels of the Neon God." For those unsure if they want to make that level of commitment, check out "What Time Is It There?" or "Goodbye Dragon Inn." But for the already converted, rest assured that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" is a strong, worthy addition to Tsai Ming-liang's body of work.

I am always a little surprised to see negative reviews of Tsai Ming-Liang films in web communities populated by film enthusiasts. And that's not because I'm about to argue that all film enthusiasts should like Tsai Ming-Liang movies, far from it. Rather, what surprises me is that film enthusiasts -- people motivated enough to have IMDb logins and, further, motivated enough to write reviews -- would be unfamiliar enough with Tsai Ming-Liang and his work, prior to viewing any particular film, that they could end up being surprised by what they get. Like all of Liang's films, this is a very, very, VERY quiet movie. That's the whole point: long takes, minimal dialog, you get out of it what you're prepared to concentrate hard enough on to see the subtlety of. I own all of his films and I watch them again and again -- and that doesn't make me a better person than the other reviewer, either. He's an acquired taste and if you don't like quiet, light-brush-stroke movies you won't like this guy's stuff. But I can't imagine anyone not knowing all of that before they start, and then complaining about it afterward.

Director Tsai Ming-Liang sets this film in his native Kuala Lumpur. Hsaio-Kang (Kang-sheng Lee) is beaten up by street hustlers and is carried back to a abandoned half-completed building, home to the homeless and downtrodden, by a group of Bangladeshi men. There he is meticulously, even lovingly, brought back to health by Rawang (Norman Bin Atun), where they share a salvaged, stained flea-ridden mattress.

Once his strength comes back, Hsaio-Kang ventures out and meets waitress Chyi (Shiang-chyi Chen) and her older boss (Pearlly Chua). Chyi is made to care for a bed-ridden paralyzed man.

One of the interesting aspects of this film is the depiction of a poor district of Kuala Lumpur: multilingual (Malay, Bangladeshi, Mandarin), hopelessly derelict, dirty, and run-down. The characters silently struggle to survive day-to-day, and strive to make human connections with one another amid their squalor.

The central abandoned half-finished concrete office building, with its exposed rebar and flooded basement, is a perfect set.

A haze descends on the city, a result of fires in far-off Indonesia, which sets the stage for a tragi-comic attempt between Chyi and Hsaio-Kang to make love while wearing improvised surgical masks and through hacking coughs.

This minimalist film moves very slowly, lingering on each shot for sometimes one or two minutes. Simple acts such as washing a paralyzed man's face, or a cigarette enjoyed next to the flooded basement's pool, become almost hypnotic.

All that said, when I walked out of the theatre, I was sure I did not like this film, due to the slow pace and almost total lack of spoken dialog. But the next day I found myself thinking of the film all day long, its characters and silent relationships. Maybe in that sense, this film accomplished its goal.