Venice. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.

"Static plans, musical moments introduced as a resonance of the characters' inner world, very few dialogues, suggestion privileged over a straightforward plot, Tsai Ming-Liang's style remains incomparable, proving once again the filmmaker's capacity to thrill us with his unique aptitude to be grotesque and poetical at the same time," writes Vitor Pinto for Cineuropa, and we may not get a much clearer picture of what to expect from I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, set in Tsai's native Malaysia, until it screens in Toronto.

Updated through 9/6.

Screen Daily's Dan Fainaru pretty much sounds one note - if you like Tsai, you'll like this one, and if you don't, you won't - but does add that, unlike most of the New Crowned Hope projects, this film's actually got a nod to Mozart.

For Reuters, Mike Collett-White has a bit more, noting that Alone "explores poverty and alienation among foreign workers in Malaysia who were left jobless and homeless by the late 1990s Asian economic crisis" and "centers around a mattress that is lugged from one place to another and where many of the scenes of care and intimacy occur. Tsai said he used the mattress because it reminded Malaysian viewers of the mattress produced in 1998 as evidence in the corruption trial of former Finance Minister Anwar Ibrahim."

"A highlight of the festival so far," declares Cristina Nord, writing in die taz (and in German).

Update, 9/6: "There's more genuine tenderness in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone than in perhaps any of Tsai Ming-Liang's previous films," notes Jay Weissberg. "Perhaps it's the new locale, but there's more of a sense of solidarity here than in Tsai's past films. For years the foreigner in Taiwan, now he's filming foreigners in Malaysia, capturing their sense of being cut off from the society around them and making the intense sexual drive - never love, but a need for companionship - more meaningful."

Posted by dwhudson at September 5, 2006 2:17 AM