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O farther sail! Both Tsai Ming-liang‘s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Emanuele Crialese‘s Golden Door, two recent films dealing with the immigrant/guest worker experience, end in flourishes of hydration, with overhead shots that obliterate perspective and set the characters randomly adrift–in a water-filled Piranesi-like grotto in the first, a sea of Grade A homogenized in the second. As explanatory metaphors, they’re too literal by a half–Crialese’s amniotic milk bath seems almost comical–but as images of open-ended possibility, of ambiguous/anomic encounters with infinity and the void, they’re terrifically resonant and moving. A few lines from Whitman suggest the overall searching tone:
Ah who shall soothe these feverish children? Who Justify these restless explorations? Who speak the secret of impassive earth? Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural? What is this earth to our affections? …
