11/13/2023 0 Comments I dont like to sleep alone![]() ![]() As he wanders the streets of K.L., intoxicating twangs of wailing dangdut, Bollywood bhangra, and Chinese opera hang in the air-along with increasingly choking wafts of mysterious smoke, which Government officials blame on illegal immigrant workers (and Tsai regulars will recognize as the latest elemental extension of the floods and droughts the filmmaker has revisited throughout his career). (The strains of Die Zauberflöte on the boom box next to him are another residue of origins: the film was financed as part of the Mozart-celebrating New Crowned Hope project.) Soon, however, Hsiao-kang reappears, sporting a grubby grow-out of the carefully clipped facial hair he sported in his former life as a porn star in Tsai’s previous film. When first seen, bald as a watermelon from The Wayward Cloud, Tsai’s pornographic 2005 anti-porn musical, he lies comatose in a hospital bed. Like most movie homecomings, this one is a decidedly emotional affair-a reunion so violently torn between joy and revulsion that the character of Hsiao-kang, the director’s recurrent alter ego (embodied as ever by Tsai’s constant muse, Lee Kang-sheng), has himself been torn in two. ![]() And so with modern Malaysian cinema so stuck on Tsai, how timely it is that this prodigal son should at last come home with I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, his latest meditation on fecal urban anomie and feverish “happy endings,” set among the slummiest side-streets and half-finished architectural skeletons of Malaysia’s monsoon-moist first city, Kuala Lumpur. And second, that Tsai is, in fact, like Lee, a native Malaysian himself-and a crucial favorite of many of that country’s current, politically contentious cinephiles. First, that Lee meant his conflation of the sex-istential longueurs of Taiwan’s second-most-celebrated contemporary filmmaker’s body of work and Trey Parker’s anti-American puppet-prop as an altogether knowing compliment. ![]() In order to appreciate Lee’s peculiarly incisive observation, two things need explaining. Sometimes accused of making films like Tsai Ming-liang, James Lee, one of the leading figures in Malaysia’s independent filmmaking explosion, once told me that Team America: World Police reminded him of Tsai-and in particular, the scene in which an angst-stricken animatronic pretty boy spews copious amounts of vomit in an alley behind a dingy bar. ![]()
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