the audience applauded

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This movie is so sweet in an odd way. You can see the struggle of each character to find love and companion in a difficult environment. Locations are oddly satisfying

Let me start off by saying I am a Tsai Ming-Liang fan, having seen just about all of his films. He is a master of the long shot, as well as telling a story with minimal dialogue. This story is about a street person (Tsai's muse Lee Kang-Sheng), who gets beaten up by a gang. He gets rescued by Bangaladeshi immigrants, who take him back to where they live (it is not a home, more like a construction site). They nurse him back to health. His character (the characters are not named, an interesting way of telling the story) meets and also spends time with a waitress (Chen Shang-Chyi, a pretty veteran of Liang films). This causes jealousy, both with the immigrant who saved him and the mother of the waitress. The mother and daughter also care for an invalid, bed ridden brother, who is also played by Lee Kang-Sheng. This story, set in Tsai's home country of Malaysia, is indeed oddly touching, an exploration of loneliness, the need for human contact, jealousy and survival. This is not for everyone, certainly not lovers of action and fast moving films. All of Tsai's films are slow and methodical, and this one has a heart. He is fairly unique in his storytelling, I like that emotions can be conveyed with so little said. I always liked the combination of Keng-Shang and Shang-Chyi as a couple in his films, they seem very comfortable with each other. That being said, check out these Tsai films first for a primer into his style: "The River", "What Time Is It There" and "The Hole". I liked this, the film has heart.

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

When I left the theater two nights ago after seeing I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, a woman exiting with a friend in front of me turned to her companion and said "I'm so sorry, I thought it would be good"....but to me it was good, if not excellent. This movie is really such a great example of how film can define one's aesthetics. You like slow movies or you don't. You like people wearing plastic trash bags over their mouths while attempting love-making or you don't. You like subtle expressions of desire or you don't. Tsai's films let you do the exploration, instead of having a tour-guide with a megaphone pointing out the most important highlights of the experience.Funny, a few years ago when I saw Lost In Translation a similar thing happened. A young couple leaving the theater talked about how nothing happened in that movie and how boring it was. At precisely the same time I was thinking how moving the film had been to me.See the film--you might find it boring but I would be surprised if you don't think about it a lot more after viewing it than almost any Hollywood blockbuster.