I Don't Want To Sleep Alone

Ming-liang Tsai - 2006
The direction is a series of long takes with a still camera. The shots are long, covering a lot of space, large rooms or split with open doors to cover other rooms. There are also large shots of outside, people often small against big houses and so on. Space is divided up with a real sense of purpose, two shots of the same spcae are usually very much at a reverse, clearly following different purposes. This long take aesthetic, lots of plan scenes, and the small figures going about their business, called to mind 'Yi Yi' a lot for me.
As did the minimal use of dialogue; in many ways this is a series of warm, light portrayals of humans grooming each other. This can be beautiful in both its tenderness and the pure image. The sense of watching a place live, develop, is accentuated by the focus on sound, of human bodies, scrubbing skin and so on, as well as the sense of life passing, for example the remarkable long take with the struggling butterfly.
The colour palette is warm, greens and oranges throughout. It is like an urban jungle in the literal sense, the stone buildings seem tropical, almost sweating. I felt like I got a real sense of place, the heat, the amount of dirt, and principally the human body.
I didn't really keep up with the plot, perhaps the lack of dialogue, long take aesethetic which didn't really emphasise 'plot points', account for my silly lack of observance. What I got from this was really a series of lovely shots, decentered, complex and full if not bristling, of humans living together, flesh, in confined quarters, strongly but, and this is key, caring for each other. Impressed.