![]() Long scenes of the comatose Lee, juxtaposed with the other characters moving about desolate urban landscapes, give the film a dream-like air. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is a curious text, in some ways a straightforward love story that unfolds as a series of static tableaux and poetic associations. Norman stalks about after them, eventually confronting Lee and threatening him with violence, before a lyrical ending shows Lee, Norman, and the nurse asleep together on a mattress floating on water. Tsai sets up a love triangle of sorts, as the second version of Lee recovers and begins a relationship with the nurse who cares for the first version of Lee. In one, he is a comatose patient being cared for by his mother and a live-in nurse in the other, he is some kind of drifter who gets assaulted and is taken in and nursed back to health by a Bangladeshi man, played by Norman Atun (Atun’s character is never named in the film). Like all of Tsai’s feature films to date, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone stars Lee Kang-sheng, here playing two roles, almost as if Tsai had split him in two. This socio-economic background is subordinate to Tsai’s aesthetic concerns as a filmmaker, but this fraught history nevertheless instills the film with a very real sense of class struggle and desperation. Bangladeshis had flocked to neighboring countries throughout the ’90s looking for work when the Asian financial crisis of 1997 rocked the economies of multiple countries, jobs dried up but many migrants remained anyway. Ever interested in outcasts, loners, and the downtrodden, Tsai found himself fascinated by the Bangladeshi immigrant community in Kuala Lumpur. In this respect, Tsai’s usual preoccupations with urban isolation and forlorn ennui mirror his own position in relation to his homeland - that of an outsider. ![]() The film was Tsai’s first to be shot in his native Malaysia, where he spent his early years before moving to Taiwan to attend college. I only wanted to film the body - its suffering, sickness, loneliness, fatigue, longing, ageing and desires.” The directors intentions aside, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is inherently political, in ways both obvious and oblique. Speaking in 2008 of what was then his most recent feature, 2006’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang said: “I did not want to make a political film.
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