It is always a challenge to “translate” Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinematic language into a verbal form since his films rely on ambiguous audio-visual metaphors that defy concrete and rational explanation. Produced as part of a project celebrating Mozart’s 250th birthday, I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone (2006) marks the eighth feature film by Tsai Ming-Liang, the youngest of the Taiwanese New Wave directors. From Tsai’s transcendental, abstract vision, inspired by “The Magic Flute,” comes a story of three drifters in Malaysia, the director’s native country.
Lee Kang-Sheng (Tsai’s main actor and frequent collaborator) plays a Chinese man – identified as Homeless Guy in the film’s credits – who wanders the streets of Kuala Lumpur. One day, he collapses on the street after being beaten by a gang of hooligans. Rawang, an immigrant worker from South Asia, carries him home and nurses him back to health. Homeless Guy then meets Coffee-shop Waitress (Chen Shiang-Chyi – another main actor in Tsai’s films) and begins to pursue her romantically.
Rawang, Waitress, and Homeless Guy represent a part of the population of vagrants who freely and aimlessly roam around Kuala Lumpur. Rawang works at an abandoned construction site – an incomplete building whose lower levels have been flooded – and lives in a makeshift house along with other South Asian laborers. Waitress works at a nearby coffee shop and the film shows her delivering coffee and walking around the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The film utilizes an old mattress, retrieved from a dumpster, scrubbed, dried, and reused by Rawang, to draw a parallel to the nomadic status of Homeless Guy. Both are filthy, both have been discarded, and both move from place to place.
These three lonely, wandering souls are contrasted with another set of lonely yet “stationary” characters – Paralyzed Guy (also played by Lee Kang-Sheng) and his mother, Coffee-shop Lady Boss. Paralyzed Guy is literally fixed to his bed while being nursed by Waitress. Her dispassionate treatment of Paralyzed Guy, however, is nothing like the gentle and loving care that Rawang provides for Homeless Guy. Coffee-shop Lady Boss also appears unhappy and burdened by the fact that she has to look after her paralyzed son. Her character mostly occupies interior spaces such as her apartment and her coffee shop tendering to her son and her customers as if she is imprisoned by her circumstances.
Like in his previous films, the sense of loneliness and longing prevails throughout the film as Tsai continues to explore his central themes of urban isolation and unfulfilled desires. Tsai’s signature minimalist style is also at work in the film, which includes long static shots, the absence of dialogue, and the prominent use of ambient sound. The director’s preoccupation with water further facilitates an auteuristic approach to this film’s reading. Simply put, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is organized around water’s (in)ability to flow. The image of water and liquid appears in a variety of forms – herbal syrup that Rawang gives to Homeless Guy, the water that Rawang uses to wash the mattress and clothes, water drops from a constantly leaking tap, a drink in a shopping bag that Rawang uses to reduce Homeless Guy’s fever, Homeless Guy’s urine that Rawang helps release, the water used by Rawang and Waitress to clean Homeless Guy and Paralyzed Guy’s bodies, respectively, and the surge of water along the river bank where Homeless Guy attempts to have sex with Waitress for the first time. Functioning as a central motif in this film, water circulates through human bodies and flows through the city of Kuala Lumpur while giving and renewing life and linking solitary people.
The notion of water is associated with unfulfilled human desires in Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinematic world. Water flows from one point to another, as do human desires. For instance, Rawang longs for Homeless Guy who, in turn, longs for Waitress. Both Waitress and Lady Boss long for Homeless Guy but fail to have sex with him (although Lady Boss is “serviced” by his hand). Stagnant water, on the other hand, also causes problems as it becomes polluted, which is visually represented by a pool of water at the bottom of the abandoned building. Paralyzed Guy and his mother, Lady Boss, are figuratively linked to this dark, stagnant body of water. These two “stationary” characters occupy lower-level spaces – both the coffee shop and the apartment in which they live are located downstairs – while the three vagrant characters (Rawang, Homeless Guy, and Waitress) live, or more correctly, sleep in upper-levels. Toward the film’s ending, Lady Boss even steps into a dark pool of water and ends up submerging half of her body after unsuccessfully following Homeless Guy and Waitress in the abandoned building.
Yet, the stagnant pool of water in the building may not be as lifeless as it appears. Neither is Paralyzed Guy. Perhaps, the film depicts Paralyzed Guy’s wandering mind in his daydream reflecting his desires of not wanting to sleep alone. The fact that Lee Kang-Sheng plays dual roles of Paralyzed Guy and Homeless Guy supports this reading. One of the most beautiful scenes in the film features Homeless Guy’s encounter with a butterfly. This scene hints at the life-giving possibilities of the water since Homeless Guy is holding a fishing rod into the pool. At the same time, this scene recalls the well-known parable of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream where the ancient Chinese philosopher once dreamt he was a butterfly happily fluttering around but after waking up he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly still dreaming he was Zhuangzi. I am tempted to draw an analogy and read this film as Tsai Ming-Liang’s modern reinterpretation of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream. The film ambiguously suggests that we do not know whether Paralyzed Guy is dreaming of being homeless, wandering through the city of Kuala Lumpur, or it’s in fact Homeless Guy who is dreaming that he is paralyzed and fixed in one place.
As a director, Tsai Ming-Liang himself is a vagrant, a homeless drifter in the world of international art cinema. Tsai was born in Malaysia and lived there for about twenty years before moving to Taiwan to attend college. He doesn’t own a home and has lived in different cities around the world – in his own words, he’s “a citizen of the world.” An image of the director comes to my mind: Tsai is listening to Mozart’s “Magic Flute” in a hotel room or in an apartment where he has a temporary lease; and he envisions a story of failed human interaction between drifting foreign laborers in Malaysia where he spent his childhood and teenage years. I wonder how much of Tsai’s diaporic identity (and his homosexuality, if I could stretch identity politics a little bit) plays into his imagining of this film. I wonder if I find this film poignantly beautiful because of my own diasporic subjectivity as a Korean-born US resident. The film ends with another beautiful image of the three drifters (Waitress, Homeless Guy, and Rawang) sleeping together on the old mattress that slowly floats on a pool of seemingly stagnant, lifeless water. They’ve finally found a shelter in each other’s arms, albeit temporarily. Perhaps, it’s the temporary quality that makes this image emotionally resonant with me. Shot in the director’s native Malaysia for the first time, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone visualizes transient beauty, without being overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness, found in the midst of urban disconnection and repressed human desires.
JaeYoon Park © 2009
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