I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Rawang, one of them, looks after him, feeds him and washes him with a devotion that is mingled with desire. Shiang-Chyi, a waitress in a coffee shop, also falls under the spell of Hsiao-Kang. She also cares for a patient: her boss's son who is plunged in an irreversible coma. Hsiao-Kang, who has nothing and dreams of a free life, becomes the object of everyone's desire. In the meantime, a thick fog invades Kuala Lumpur inexorably. 

"And of course there is Tsai Ming-Liang's trademark erotic charge: an improbable blend of triviality and delicacy, an unexpected eruption, a gentle frenzy in a world as cold as death. In one shocking scene we thus find the old innkeeper greasing the waitress's hand with hair cream and getting her to masturbate her nearly dead son. This individualised homage to the wretched of the earth holds true of Tsai Ming-Liang's oeuvre: as a presentation of the death throes of film and as a renewed faith in the faculty of this art to arouse the dead."  Jacques Mandelbaum, Le Monde, 6 June 2007  

Tsai Ming-Liang, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. Malaysia-Taiwan, 2006, 118 min, 35mm, colour, original version with French subtitles 
With Norman Atun, Pearlly Chua, Lee Kang-Sheng, Chen Shiang-Chyi  

Preceded by: 

Tsai Ming-Liang, Madame Butterfly. France-Taiwan, 2009, 35 min, video, colour, original version with French subtitles 
With Pearlly Chua 

In this very free adaptation of Puccini's opera, Baozhu, a woman from a remote little town arrives in Puduraya train station in Kuala Lumpur for a secret date with a man. The following morning, the man has gone, leaving Baozhu with an enormous unpaid bill. 

"In Tsai's films, the fiction rarely directs all the events: he chooses an actor, an actress, in this case Pearlly Chua, an old associate, and plunges them in a décor left intact. It is then up to each to let themselves be taken, carried away by each other. The actress blends into the crowd, but she is also the painful point that focusses it. And the fact that this suffering concludes almost comically with a lisp, a hair on the tongue, the sole memento left by the mouth of the fly-by-night lover, nicely completes this arc that starts with a multitude and ends with such a slim and single stroke."  Jean-Pierre Rehm, catalogue of the FIDMarseille festival 2009