The Cruelty of Life, Slowed to a Crawl
Back in the go-go 1960s, it was thought that the bobbing, handheld camera made movies look real, that it put the verité in cinéma verité. But now that the moving camera is a familiar feature even of TV shows like "The Office" and "Lost," it's grown so familiar that it doesn't look real anymore. Now you signify reality by planting a stationary camera with a wide-angle but deep focus shot and having your actors wander in and out of the unmoving frame in enormously long takes while ambient, mostly off-camera noise takes the place of dialogue.
It's the reality of the surveillance camera. It's also tremendously boring, unless you've schooled yourself into an appreciation of the style. If you have done so, Tsai Ming-Liang's "I Don't Want To Sleep Alone" may be the movie for you.
Using the aforementioned techniques throughout, and with almost no dialogue, Mr. Tsai — whose previous films include "What Time Is It There?" and "The Wayward Cloud" — manages to tell a complex story of love, loneliness, and economic upheaval in Kuala Lumpur in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s.
Set mostly in the unfinished and abandoned concrete shell of a high-rise building whose subterranean storeys are filled with rainwater, Mr. Tsai takes us into the demimonde of foreign guest-workers — mostly from Bangladesh and Indonesia — who came to Malaysia in the boom times and stayed illegally after the crash, living a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets or in improvised squats.
Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng), an ethnic Chinese who apparently speaks no Malay, joins a crowd surrounding a street huckster who promises to sell winning lottery numbers. When he is found to have no money and to be unable to speak their language, several in the crowd beat him up. He is found by a group of Bangladeshis who have scrounged an old mattress and are taking it back to a squat belonging to Rwang (Norman Atun). They put Hsiao Kang on the mattress and take him along with it. Rwang nurses him back to health, and the two young men sleep side by side on the mattress. There are hints that a sexual relationship develops between them, but this is never made explicit.
In the story's other strand, Mr. Lee plays a young victim of paralysis — or perhaps catatonia — lying in a hospital bed in his family's apartment above a café run by his mother (Pearlly Chua). In several long takes, we watch Ms. Chua attend to his physical needs — or as he just lies there, immobile, while arias from Mozart's "Magic Flute" play on a boom box beside him.
The Mozart is partly an acknowledgment that the movie was commissioned by the Mozart New Crowned Hope Festival of Vienna last year, but it also has echoes of the opera's plot — in which a prince must undertake a quest to release (and marry) a captive princess.
In this case, the captive princess is Chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a waitress in the café who sleeps in a tiny attic room immediately above the paralyzed youth, whose bed she can see through the floorboards. Chyi is mistreated by the paralyzed boy's mother, who is in turn badly used by another son (Samantha Toh SuYee) who is trying to sell the café out from under her.
At one point we see the Lady Boss anointing herself with some kind of lotion before turning to Chyi, in what at first seems a stray gesture of kindness and humanity, and putting some of the lotion on her hand. But she drags the girl to the bed where her son lies and forces the now-lubricated hand down the front of his diaper.
Like the vast, largely empty narrative spaces of the film or the imposing ghost of economic prosperity represented by the abandoned high-rise, these are images of desperate loneliness and stagnation. Eventually Chyi, Rwang, and the Lady Boss all become rivals for the romantic attentions of the recovered Hsiao Kang — whose own passivity toward them rivals that of his alter ego, the paralyzed boy dreaming of Mozartian romance.
It's a tragi-comic scenario, and a romantic scene between Hsiao Kang and Chyi, coughing and wheezing through their improvised face-masks as a cloud of pollution descends on the city, plays to the comic side of the film. So perhaps, in the film's, final scene, does the Mozartian sense of all-enveloping forgiveness borrowed from "The Marriage of Figaro" rather than "The Magic Flute." But to get to this point you must come equipped with enormous patience for the film's own immobility.
Through May 15 (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).
