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Derek Malcolm's rating
Leaving a trail
By
Derek Malcolm
15 Nov 2007
The Wayward Cloud
NC, 112 mins
**
It's unusual for two films from the same director to be shown in the same week. But Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is an astonishing talent and the current retrospective of his work at the BFI Southbank is essential viewing.
That said, The Wayward Cloud is not one of his best. Lee Kang-Sheng, Tsai's muse, shoots skin flicks with Japanese porn star Sumumo Yozukura, while Mandarin pop songs from Tsai's youth punctuate the scenes (one of which includes a surprising use for a watermelon).
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, however, is extraordinary. Shot in Tsai's native Kuala Lumpur, it has Lee Kang-Sheng in two parts, as a foreign worker lying comatose in bed, and a Chinese drifter attacked by hustlers and nursed back to health by another worker (Norman Bin Atun).
Shot largely in a half-finished multi-story building site with long, often static takes in deep focus, the film is a memorable study of loneliness and dislocation. It may be slow as a snail, but it leaves a trail.
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