Hei yan quan

I've attended the Singapore gala premier of Tsai Ming Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone 3 hours ago, and here's the verdict: The movie calms you down, and let it search for you want. That's what the supporting actress Pearlly Chua said to the audience before the movie begins. And indeed, it calms you down.

Tsai's 1st attemp in his country of origin Malaysia has proved to be a success, despite being banned by the government back in Malaysia for portraying the other side of Malaysia, where it so happens that 2007 is a significant year for Malaysia, as it is a year where Malaysia is drawing people around the world to visit Malaysia for its beauty and unique blend of culture. However, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone tells the other side of Malaysia, in terms of the lifestyle of Malaysian Chinese and Bangladeshi workers and the surroundings, makes the government feel that the film is damaging the image of the country.

And why is that so? In the film, were were introduced to a homeless man and a paralyzed man (both played by Lee Kang Sheng, Tsai's muse cum favorite actor), a foreign worker (Norman Atun), a waitress in a neighborhood cafe (Chen Hsiang Chyi) and her lady boss (Pearlly Chua), who was the mother of the paralyzed man. The homeless man was robbed by a group of thugs and was saved by a group of foreign workers. A worker showers care and concern for the homeless man and gave him food and lodge, and a share of the old mattress found at a garbage dump. On the other side, waitress works in a neighborhood cafe and takes care of the paralyzed man. The homeless man met the waitress and share the feelings for each other by following each other around in the neighborhood.

Compared to his previous The Wayward Cloud, a musical that discuss sex, desire and crave for one another in a unusual manner (think of using watermelons to express love), Tsai is going back to his usual style of presentation in I Don't Want. Do not expect any dialogues among the cast, let alone the expression of love for each other using songs and dance. What you get is 115 minutess of peace, without any music to go along with. What you see and hear are sounds from the surroundings in our daily life. Think scrubbing of dirty clothes, the honks in a crowded traffic, songs from radio stations and Indian musicals from a home video shop.

The film greatly explores the cravings and desires every human being wants. The worker isolates himself from his peers and stick with the homeless man, the homeless man follows the waitress and eventually, the lady boss had sex with the homeless man at the backyard. Tsai uses the emotional world of ordinary human beings to explore the desires and cravings thru something that one tend to missed out from the daily life.

For moviegoers who finds 3 minutes of motionless scenes a drag, I Don't Want is definitely not a film for you. At the start of the movie, we see a paralyzed man lying motionlessly on a bed for about 2 minutes. And be prepared that for the next few scenes, it would be focused for an average of 2 minutes per scene.

And so I Don't Want works out under this formula: Malaysian film + Tsai Ming Liang = I Don't Want To Sleep Alone.

Overall, it is peaceful and quiet, without much dialogues to go along with. If you are getting tired of normal noisy flicks, let I Don't Want to Sleep Alone to cleanse your preference of movies.

Go see it. You will feel calm after the show. Malaysian film + Tsai Ming Liang = I Don't Want To Sleep Alone.

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.

Tsai Ming-liang manages to squeeze emotion into every facet of his films. The spoken and the unspoken, urban sprawl and emptiness. It gives his work this interconnected feel where everything that exists and is shown, exists as a consequence of something else. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone poses questions around reciprocation. We can show love without love in return, but without it being returned, loneliness takes hold. Nature takes an oppressive yet romantic role, often being the subject of escapism through music, and a limit in love through fire. Yet these are all contained within the walls of human influence, acting as obstacles for our true nature. As long as we are trapped in lifeless cities, compassion will be stifled, society will leave us unrewarded for our fulfillment of its expectations.

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.

"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.