After 15 years abroad, Kuching-born international director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) has set a film in his native Malaysia for the first time. Part of the New Crowned Hope festival initiated by the city of Vienna to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (黑眼圈) may well be Tsai's most accessible and emotionally saturated feature to date as it blends the director's cinematic trademarks with a personal commentary on the social underclass in a time of social unrest.
In the film, set in multi-ethnic and multilingual Kuala Lumpur, Tsai's muse, Lee Kang-sheng (李康生), plays dual roles: a homeless Chinese drifter and a comatose man (the first character may well be in the dream of the second). Robbed and beaten up by street hustlers, the itinerant is taken in by a group of illegal foreign workers, part of the influx of laborers lured to the country by the economic boom in the mid-1990s but stuck in the foreign land after the Asian financial crisis. The immigrant worker Rawang (Norman Bin Atun) lets the stranger sleep by his side on an old mattress, lovingly nurses him back to health and is content to have someone to look after.
In another part of the city, the paralyzed son of a cafe owner (Pearlly Chua, 蔡寶珠) is dispassionately tended to by waitress (Chen Shiang-chyi, 陳湘琪), who is forced by her female boss to masturbate the comatose man.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HOMEGREEN FILMS
Upon gaining the strength to explore his dilapidated surroundings, the drifter becomes enamored with the waitress and her boss. As a toxic fog descends upon the city, the dreams, desires and loneliness of the men and women emerge as glimmers of light in the distance.
While most of Tsai's motifs return in the film — the impossibility of uprooted individuals connecting with each other and their yearnings for companionship and reciprocation — the director turns has turned his sober gaze to the illegal foreign labors in Malaysia that were left homeless and jobless in the Asian economic crisis with a pronounced sense of warmth and tenderness. A hint of social realism pervades the film and takes Tsai's signature minimalist approach use of symbolism to its subject, exploring alienation among people stripped of their identity and cut off from social and cultural interaction and their struggle for survival.
The film's primary setting, a rundown building abandoned during construction serves as a poetic and ideal backdrop for the narrative as it is a remnant from the Malaysian government's economic development plans in 1990s. The symbolic use of a stained mattress reminds a visual reference to the mattress presented as evidence in the trial of former finance minister Anwar Ibrahim in 1998 on charges of sodomy.
The auteur's signature elements are all presented here: water, muteness, sex, sentimental songs, small gestures of life devoid of narrative causation, long, fixed-camera shots in which actions take place at a slow pace. Items and spaces are poetically used to reflect characters' silent emotions and loneliness. From the pool of dark water that lies in the center of the abandoned building to the smog-enveloped streets, all the movie's elements serve as resonating revelations of the characters' inner worlds, subtly lingering from scene to scene.
With lavish colors and the astounding use of light and shade, the film also shows Tsai is an adept visual artist who pays meticulously attention to mood and texture. Saturated yellows, reds, blues and greens play a convoluted game with the vertical and horizontal lines of the characters' surroundings. Simple acts such as the waitress cleaning the comatose man's face or Rawang holding up an injured man in the painting-like scenes are prolonged and become almost hypnotic. The film illuminates a world of displacement with stunning beauty and its uncanny poetry is likely to haunt audiences long after they leave the theater.
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