I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, master of an absurdist minimalism, has crafted a an extraordinary body of obsessive, idiosyncratic films — Rebels of a Neon God, The Hole, and Goodbye, Dragon Inn among them — full of deadpan humour, sexual desperation, broken communications, urban ennui, bad plumbing and decaying buildings — all rendered with a meticulous visual sense that favours longs takes and fixed camera positions. In I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, his eighth feature, Tsai moved from his typical Taipei setting to Malaysia, the country where he was born, and crafted one of his most tender and tantalizing works. A migrating mattress figures prominently in this tale of a homeless Chinese man (Tsai regular Lee Kang-Sheng) beaten and left for dead on the smoke-choked streets of Kuala Lumpur, then lovingly nursed back to health by two strangers, a Bangladeshi immigrant and a coffee-shop waitress. “The film culminates with a transcendent vision of doomsday love. Even by Tsai's elevated standards, the final shot is one of otherworldly beauty” (Dennis Lim, Village Voice). “Tsai may be modern cinema’s reigning genius of camera placement, with an ability to turn simple, homely spaces into zones of psychological mystery” (A. O. Scott, New York Times). Colour, 35mm, in Taiwanese, Malay, Mandarin and Bengali with English subtitles. 118 mins.