I'm fond of the quality of silence in Tsai Ming Liang movies. In « I don't want to sleep alone » (2006), I think that there is no one word. Silence is distance, the characters are bodily alone in the extrem heat. Eros & sickness are the only ways to join or to be joined by the others. Silence is not loaded with threats (apart from this unique scene in the trailer) or non-dits, like in the French movies. Tsai Ming Liang's silence-distance is full of metaphysical hypothesis.


Here is a photo showing the real smoke that we can see in the film: Indonesian forest fires smoke travelling to Malaysia without passport.

Vive l'amour (1994)
The Hole (1998)