I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Tsai Ming-liang returned to the country of his birth, Malaysia, to make this, set in Kuala Lumpur. Lee Kang-sheng plays two roles: a patient lying comatose in bed and a homeless labourer beaten and injured in the street. The injured man is carried home on a mattress by a group of men including Rawang, a Bangladeshi migrant worker. That mattress is the centre of the film. It is carried through the city, slept on, shared and fought over, and Tsai keeps it in a place where the difference between care and desire, between taking someone in and taking possession, dissolves. In the background is haze from forest fires in Sumatra settling over the city, so that difficulty breathing is both physical and the condition of the narrative. It premiered at Venice on 4 September 2006. The Malaysian censors banned it on 4 March 2007 for showing the country in a bad light; the ban was lifted after Tsai agreed to the cuts they demanded, and his own edited version opened in Malaysia on 17 May 2007. Who it is for: viewers who value Tsai Ming-liang's nearly wordless cinema of long takes. Who it is not for: anyone wanting narrative, explanation or pace.