I Don't want to sleep alone (Hei Yan Quan)

I don't want to sleep alone is a cinematic masterpiece. Tsai Ming Liang is an amazingly patient director and this movie is a testament to his patience. Every scene is wonderfully drawn out. The protagonist peeing. A woman gazing. People sleeping. You know in High Fidelity when that guy asks John Cusack how his records are organized? Chronologically? Nope. Alphabetically? Nope. Then how? Autobiographically. Holy fuck!! That's kinda how I like to store movies in my mind. Autobiographically. I remember I watched I Don't want to sleep alone at the berkeley pacific film archive. Maybe it was an Asian film festival? The theater was really empty. The movie was art house as fuck and a few people walked out. I was with my friend, A. We often watched movies together and she was the perfect partner because she wouldn't dissect it afterwards but we were always on the same wavelength. We'd use really generic and normative phrases to describe the movie but it made sense because we understood, deeply, how we each felt.

The film is set in Kuala Lumpur and it took awhile for this to register because Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Malay people populate the screen. It all starts with this abandoned mattress that is lugged and dragged across the city. This isn't like Danny Boyle's vision of poverty. This is a filthy, grimy and gritty city. Forgive the description (I saw the movie years ago... so I have these gaping holes in my memory)...A man drags the mattress to his apartment and scrubs and cleans it. He finds a badly beaten man on the street and scrubs and cleans him as well. They sleep together on the bed. They don't have sex but the sleeping and gazing is more really intimate, somehow. Oh god, I've forgotten nearly everything about the movie (what a great reviewer) except a few key scenes. The characters rarely speak. In fact, the main character never says a word and we never learn his name. Tsai utilizes gaze and feel much more than words. There's this incredible phantasmic fantasy with fishing and fireworks and an old decrepit warehouse?

Worst review ever. I'll admit it. I need to watch the movie again. Maybe it won't be as good this time around because I'm a hardened pragmatist now. But I loved it once. It was so beautiful.