I Don't Want To Sleep Alone

This film finally came to Glasgow, and to be honest, the trailer was better. Whilst I admired its bravery and vision it left me cold. I wouldn't see it again. I would look at stills from it - as Espos magazine did recently - for years, all those lovely pastel blues, greys and browns, but it's a hard watch basically.

It follows a nameless, and rather unlikable Chinese immigrant in Kuala Lumpur. He is beaten up and nursed back to health by a fellow immigrant, a Bangladeshi. The Chinese man has a brief affair with a local girl and risks the jealousy of the Bangladeshi man, who has grown attached to him.

This story is entirely emotionless, except for one scene where the Bangladeshi man (neither character has a name by the way!) is persuaded against slicing open the Chinese man's throat with the edge of a tin can. To go from gruesome to forgiveness using just the two actors' eyes is fantastic. And that's where my admiration comes in, ever so briefly. Two things I marvelled at with this film: the bravery of persuing this film using no dialogue. No-one says anything. The majority of the film is silent, and what human voices there are come from the radio that seems to be on in every scene. I admire Tsai Ming Lang's bravery but it doesn't come off. The alienation one feels towards these characters is most probably as a result from the lack of dialogue, and even the lack of names! Thinking about it now, perhaps that was part of the strategy, an analogy for the anonymity of immigrants in great capitalist metropoli, but I don't buy it.

What succeeds entirely is the placing of this anonymity in the context of these great city landscapes. As the group of young Bangladeshis transport a saggy, soiled mattress across the city, they are shown in the corner of the shot, scurrying along the edge of dual carriageways and motorways, the whirr of cars going by and the looming advertising hoardings and skyscrapers behind them. This image is one of vermin, rats scurrying through sewers and in bins. They are portrayed - and treated by the "successful" - as precisely that, forgotten nuisances.