 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
|
 |
|
A
group of men in Kuala Lumpur clumsily but determinedly carry a discarded
mattress through the night streets – eventually rolling up a wounded, homeless
stranger from Taiwan (Lee Kang-sheng as Hsiao-kang) inside
it, in order to transport him to a temporary resting-place. What better (or,
indeed, funnier) way to convey, across a few relentless, statically filmed long
takes, that we are to witness a story about the keen longing for home and contentment
– both of which, in the modern world, are damnably hard to find?
Tsai
Ming-liang’s films increasingly resemble a certain kind of performance art that
came to the fore in the 1970s: a sequence of quasi-ritualistic, intensely
physical, frequently enigmatic actions played out in almost total silence, with
little or no conventional character psychology attached. Only that, in cinema
as opposed to theatre, Tsai chooses to locate these odd rituals in real spaces:
the usually run-down, unfinished, off-the-tourist-track sites of various
metropolitan centres.
After
the many visions of his adopted home city of Taipei and his trip to Paris for What Time is It There? (2001), Tsai returns to his birthplace of Malaysia for I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. His long-lived
sense of estrangement as a Malaysian in Taiwan here expands, imaginatively, to
include an entire cast of displaced immigrant Asians: Indian, Thai, Chinese, Indonesian … They can scarcely speak to each
other, but that has never stopped Tsai’s characters from relating in a
sometimes brutally primal way: furtive sexual encounters are portrayed in a
flat, unromantic manner that inevitably (but discreetly) recalls pornography;
violence looms and sometimes erupts in the streets; and, more than ever, people
tend, with delicate intimacy, to each other’s obscure physical ailments (the
shadow of AIDS is never far away).
Tsai’s champions are keen to herald each new film as a
bold breakthrough in his career. His work, however, does not really progress in
a linear fashion; rather, it circles back, obsessively, reworking this or that
previous element from his filmography in a slightly different context or
constellation. In many respects, I Don’t
Want to Sleep Alone returns us to the period of The River (1997) and The Hole (1998). There’s physical
malaise; a vision of urban decay evoking an imminent or recent apocalypse;
epidemic disease carried in the misty air; and, of course, water everywhere –
as a primal force of nature, as private bodily fluid, and as the prime means
whereby society enters and affects its citizens.
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone – an oblique
response to the New Crowned Hope arts festival project devised for Mozart’s 250th anniversary in 2006, which funded it as part of an impressive film package –
also has (unusually for Tsai) a specific political subtext. Its Chinese title,
referring to black circles around the eyes, alludes to the case of Malaysia’s
Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, brought down by accusations of sodomy in a
1998 trial involving a semen-stained mattress as evidence. Although the
conviction resulting from that trial was overturned in 2004, with Anwar
released from prison, the persecution of homosexuality dogged him for years to
come.
The musical fantasy interludes of The Wayward Cloud (2005) or the glimpses of screen magic in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) are gone,
leaving us amidst the dingiest, filthiest locale that Tsai has yet found. The
awfulness of the surroundings heightens the rampant, polymorphous desire
unleashed by the entrance of Hsiao-kang into the lives of those around him –
and, as in Tsai’s cinema since Rebels of
the Neon God (1992), such desire is almost always unrequited or
unconsummated, certainly unfulfilled at the imaginary level of a longed-for
total fusion of bodies, hearts and minds. Indeed, one particular attempt at
sexual congress appears to be thwarted by the city itself, its air increasingly
filling up with a toxic haze.
But what is new for Tsai – complicating and deepening
the Teorema-type fantasy of the rough
street-angel wanted by all, male and female, young and old alike – is the dual
casting of his adored Lee Kang-sheng as both Hsiao-kang and the unnamed son,
paralysed and mute, of Lady Boss (Pearlly Chua). Both these male figures are
simultaneously objects of desire and objects of care – and, as for Stephen
Dwoskin in Intoxicated by My Illness (2001) or Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), it is
impossible to tell, in the gestures of washing, inspection and massage, where
charity (as administered by the character of Lady Boss’ submissive maid, played
by Chen Shiang-chyi) ends and lust begins. As in The River, the act of masturbating another (a central trope in
Tsai) has at least as much to do with kindly stress/pain-relief as with any sexual
gratification.
Ultimately, the two men incarnated by Lee seem like
the two halves of the same character. Tsai teases us, along this line, into
imagining a more convoluted sequence of narrative events (is the story a
time-shift between past and present?) or a more baroquely fantastic explanation
(does the paralysed man, looking up into the room above, conjure his more
active double?) – before deciding that, as always in his cinema, what we see is
exactly what we are going to get.
Things may simply happen in Tsai’s world, presented to us in the simple, eloquent geometry of his
framing and timing, but they are no less emotionally mysterious for that. Just
as Tsai (much to the chagrin of some queer cinema proselytisers) tends to blunt
the radical edge of his sexual explorations with an almost teenage dreaminess,
he also artfully equivocates, in the superbly haunting final image, between rapture in both its senses: either the
two man/one woman trio of Rawang (Norman Atun), Hsiao-kang and Chyi has found
its earthly Utopia of togetherness, asleep on Rawang’s mattress, drifting through
the watery building site – or it has floated off on a sea of socially-induced
death, surrounded by cheap, colourful sparklers.
MORE Tsai: Journey to the West, Stray Dogs © Adrian Martin October 2007 |
