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'Sleep' dreamily meditates on sexual connection
True romantic desolation, the feeling that you'll die if no one touches you, is a spiritual condition the movies rarely get right. But the Taiwanese writer and director Tsai Ming-Liang has been building an amazing body of work out of the urge for sexual connection. The title of his eighth feature, "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," sums up the forlorn thread running through most of his films, from "The Hole" to "Goodbye Dragon Inn." But those anticipating a Judd Apatow-load of rambunctious carnality should pace themselves. The hormones here don't rage so much as unfurl over two exquisite hours. For Tsai, lust takes time. "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" was commissioned as part of a celebration of Mozart's 200th birthday. For the occasion, Tsai transfers from his usual Taipei setting to Kuala Lumpur (he was actually born in Malaysia), which for his purposes is a pan-Asian wonderland - a damp, disease-ridden, squalid one, but a kind of wonderland all the same. It's not the squalor being romanticized. It's the reality that millions of people thrive in these less-than-ideal conditions. With sublime detours into the surreal, the movie is like a blossom pushing up through concrete, a hazy urban comedy. This is the sort of place where you should expect to see a mattress hauled across town from a trash heap into a ruin of an apartment building. And by the time the mattress reaches its destination, the two guys who started out carrying it might have multiplied into a gang of five or six. And maybe when it's lowered to the floor there might be someone lying on it. That someone happens to be played by Lee Kang-Sheng, who has been Jean Marais to Tsai's Jean Cocteau, a muse of enduring mysteriousness. Of course, where Marais seemed angelic, Lee is utterly earthbound. We never catch the name of either character he plays, but one of them spends the movie lying paralyzed on a hospital bed. The other, the fellow on the mattress, doesn't really speak, either. He's been badly beaten but later rescued by a Bangladeshi named Ranang (Norman Atun), who lovingly washes him, feeds him, changes his underpants, and sleeps beside him. He found him, like the mattress, in the street; and, like the mattress, he can be disinfected and rehabbed with soap and a little affection. The mattress actually becomes a character in itself as it's dragged across the city for sleep and sex. Eventually, the man who's been living on it gets up and wanders around the city, too, running into a young woman who works in a coffee shop, played by Chen Shiang-Chyi, another Tsai regular. She looks after the paralyzed man, who's been moved from the hospital into the junkyard of an apartment she shares with her aggressive boss, a lady with a libido you don't see coming. To explain this movie any further would be a disservice to how surprising and supremely well made it is. It would also be misleading since any attempt to summarize a Tsai Ming-Liang production automatically neutralizes its strange sensual magic. I could tell you about the sex scene with the makeshift gas masks (a plastic bag for him; a Styrofoam bowl attached with string for her), but you'd really have to experience its uncanny eroticism for yourself. Besides, enumerating narrative details misrepresents the film's spectral atmosphere, its perfect deployment of opera and pop songs, and the magnificent composition of each shot; the camera rarely, if ever, moves. Tsai practices emotional, sexual, and spatial geometry in an almost literary fashion. As the film goes on, not only do you come to understand the characters and how they relate to each other. You come to better grasp the dimensions of the physical and psychological spaces they inhabit. The shots go on long enough for you, too, to feel like you're in the dank rooms and smoky restaurants. When things darken in the last act, with the arrival of viciously hurt feelings and one toxic airborne event, suspense and dark comedy seize the movie. Yet all the math - or most of it, anyway - makes sense. There might even be a formula. Dialogue doesn't deepen the characters. But behavior over time does equal development. The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.
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