Review of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

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