Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This Chinese Taiwanese film is depicting the life of young people in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. It is showing one of these tigers of Asia in their development at a crucial moment when things seem to be halted and yet they go on maybe just at a slower pace. But people remain what they are, people with human values. They will help a man who had fainted on the sidewalk. They will wash him, feed him, take care of him just as if he was one of the family, though he is unknown. They will take care of a man who is absolutely reduced to a vegetable state, unresponsive, and yet there, alive even if totally blank. And then the impulses of the women or of the men are the same as everywhere in the world, and yet what these young people really want is not that instantaneous and future-less of not futile moment of bliss. They want to be close to someone else, feeling his or her heart and blood pressure and emotions and sentiments and heat, share that feeling and just sleep into it, dream into it. Let's go beyond this world of imperfection and never satisfied failure or success, it does not matter. Let's get into the deep mellowness of empathy, sympathy, compassion, sharing and gathering our minds and all our senses into some kind of communion that is one step closer to the path to enlightenment. That's what at least the Buddha in the café tells me, though we see him from the back and Buddhism is only second to Islam in Malaysia, but the two religions have that thing in common that the mind and the heart are only one same thing and they are the only guides that can take us to a higher more humane level of humanity. And that is all contained in that big mattress they find on the sidewalk and they transport together from one place to another with only one intention, to share it, to use it together. A mattress as a symbol of the Buddhist Dukkha, that never ending cycle from birth to rebirth and every time some people abandon the mattress, it dies, but then some other people come and give it a new life through a rebirth of love.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

tzeyingw Honestly, I can't bring myself to like this movie, though I've to admit that the cinematography is gorgeous, and Lee Kang-sheng was very believable as the brain-dead patient. Many of the long, static scenes, especially the ones with the dark pool and the brain-dead patient with his urine bag, are completely pointless, and the scene with the lady boss masturbating the brain- dead man with Chen Xiang-chyi's hand filled me with disgust. I know it is a film that can't be judged by normal standards, but what's disgusting is disgusting, whether it's in the name of art or whatever. I really don't understand what kind of message Tsai Ming-liang was trying to convey in many of the scenes, and I doubt whether he himself knew what he was doing. Most of the time it just seems like a hodgepodge of random (and meaningless) ideas pieced together. OK, it's made by an auteur and it's supposed (or I should say, normal?) to be so, but it's definitely not what we called good story-telling. The relationships depicted here are so unclear (there's nothing apart from lust), and I find the characters (except the one played by Norman Atun) hard to sympathize with. The healthy Lee Kang-sheng was a dreadful hypocrite (not to mention being an ungrateful bastard), and the other two women are just soulless, sexually dissatisfied characters that afford some erotic excitement in the movie.

author-21 I am always a little surprised to see negative reviews of Tsai Ming-Liang films in web communities populated by film enthusiasts. And that's not because I'm about to argue that all film enthusiasts should like Tsai Ming-Liang movies, far from it. Rather, what surprises me is that film enthusiasts -- people motivated enough to have IMDb logins and, further, motivated enough to write reviews -- would be unfamiliar enough with Tsai Ming-Liang and his work, prior to viewing any particular film, that they could end up being surprised by what they get. Like all of Liang's films, this is a very, very, VERY quiet movie. That's the whole point: long takes, minimal dialog, you get out of it what you're prepared to concentrate hard enough on to see the subtlety of. I own all of his films and I watch them again and again -- and that doesn't make me a better person than the other reviewer, either. He's an acquired taste and if you don't like quiet, light-brush-stroke movies you won't like this guy's stuff. But I can't imagine anyone not knowing all of that before they start, and then complaining about it afterward.

erahatch "What Time Is It There?" remains my favorite film by Tsai Ming-liang, but it's fascinating to follow his work and see how he builds his own imaginative world -- close to, but not exactly, our own -- film by film."I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" took me a little longer to get into than any prior film by the director, but by about the half-hour mark I was fully absorbed. Thankfully, "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" rewards patient viewers by reserving some fantastically humorous, mysterious, and even hypnotic moments for its last acts. Whereas in previous films, familiar visual tropes such as umbrellas and watermelons have played recurrent symbolic roles, here it's mattresses and anti-smoke facemasks, somehow used just as evocatively. Other obsessions -- dripping water, holes in floors and ceilings, mysterious and unspoken attractions -- recur here in ways that recall the director's previous works without depending upon them.I wouldn't suggest curious viewers start with this film, but rather delve back as far back as possible into Tsai Ming-liang's back catalog and proceed from there -- easier than ever before to do now, what with the increased DVD availability of early gems such as "Rebels of the Neon God." For those unsure if they want to make that level of commitment, check out "What Time Is It There?" or "Goodbye Dragon Inn." But for the already converted, rest assured that "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" is a strong, worthy addition to Tsai Ming-liang's body of work.