Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time Redux (1994/2008)

Caveats:  I've never seen the predux version of this, nor do I qualify as even a casual fan of wuxia stuff.  I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I liked it, and that probably tells you enough.  (But, hey! My date was from Beijing!  And she liked it too!)

All that said, I loved this movie.  So much that I came away thinking that maybe Wong Kar-Wai should just make nothing but wuxia films from here on out.

Not that it was particularly effective as a wuxia film, I imagine.  I mean, it was hard to follow the story (easier the second time through, though), hard to tell some of the characters apart (that works thematically, though), and hard to follow some of the action sequences.  If I was watching it to get my swordplay kicks, I would probably be frustrated.

But as a visual spectacle it's unmatched, and I think that's in large part because the wuxia genre gives Wong and Doyle unlimited room to indulge in visual splendor.  They make use of nature here in a way that they simply don't in their other films:  the desert's strangely rainbow hues, the moody skies, the dramatic perspectives offered by distant horizons.  Then, too, there are the colors and textures available in medieval costume and not in modern.  But above all there's the imperative to show action - which in this case allows for an experimentation with representing movement and bodies in space that Wong's other films only hint at. 

What this movie is, I think, is a example of what wuxia films, and their analogues in other cultures (samurai flix in Japan, medieval fantasy in the US), have to offer a serious filmmaker and his viewers.  A serious representation of the past it's not, but as a piece of pure film, it's beautiful.

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So what I'm saying is that, storywise, this film is unsatisfying, but the visuals make up for it.  Wait - isn't that kind of the opposite of what I've been saying about the last few Wong Kar-Wai films I've written about?  That for me, ultimately, great visuals don't make up for an unsatisfying story?

Yep.  It's the opposite, alright.

So maybe what I mean is that the fact that this is a wuxia film allows the story to make sense even when it doesn't make sense.  You know each of the subsections is leading up to some kind of showdown, and even if you don't quite understand the stakes, you can follow the emotional tension-and-release without much trouble, and that frees up your mind to appreciate the visuals for their own sake.  The film is borrowing some unearned narrative coherence from the genre (and it works even if you don't know much about the genre).

Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights (2007)

This movie is kind of a disaster.  It's bad in a way that makes me start doubting my reaction for Wong Kar-Wai's other films.

There are a couple of problems, as I see it.  First, the dialogue is atrocious.  This is a writing problem.  Wong is famous for working with only a minimal script, which he changes/fills out/improvises as he goes along.  In this case, that technique doesn't seem to have served him well.  All the characters and scenes are underwritten.  This leaves the good actors in the film mostly emoting madly (David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz) or mugging cutely (Jude Law) to make up for the lack of anything else to do, and the mediocre actor (Norah Jones) fading into the scenery.

None of the story arcs carry any emotional weight.  We just don't care about these characters;  they're either clichés or ciphers, and not in a good way.  And this is what makes me start to doubt Wong's other films.  I don't speak Chinese, and so let's be honest:  I actually have no idea if Tony Leung is a good actor or not.  Any emotional impact I'm getting from In the Mood for Love or Happy Together comes from subtitles (which hide more than they reveal, by their nature:  this is not xenophobia about foreign films, this is experience in watching Japanese films and noting the discrepancies between dialogue and subtitles) and reading those aspects of the performances that are extra-verbal (which I could well be misreading).  It's entirely possible that the dialogue in the other films could be just as bad, the characters just as poorly improvised, the performances just as drastically overmodulated, and I'd never know it.  Of course this is always an anxiety I have when I watch a film made in a language I don't speak:  I care enough about language never to be able to write it off entirely.  But usually I can suppress the anxiety;  this film reawakens it, at least with respect to Wong Kar-Wai's work.

The other problem is that the visuals just aren't very interesting.  I suspect that even if I knew Chinese, and even if I did as a result discover that the dialogue in In the Mood for Love is just as bad as in My Blueberry Nights, I'd still find the former a much better film, and emotionally effective, because (it almost goes without saying) the visuals are so striking, and carry so much emotional weight.  But here the visuals are uninspired.  Pretty, even atmospheric, but not in a particularly striking or memorable way.  And so we're left to concentrate on the characters and what they're saying.  How much does this have to do with the change in cinematographers?  Has it really been Christopher Doyle's genius we've been responding to all along, and not Wong Kar-Wai's at all?

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (2004)

This is the first Wong Kar-wai joint I've been disappointed by.  Knowing that this was a loose sequel to In The Mood For Love, which I loved, I was expecting great things.  And there are some great things here, but the whole thing isn't a great thing.

Visually it's impeccable - but that kind of goes without saying for Wong and Doyle by now, doesn't it?  They're expanding on their '60s-style-and-texture fetishes of the previous film (there's a shot with a green-tinged Faye Wong in the foreground and a green naugahyde chair in the background shadows that just knocked me out), and adding to them a deliriously mod futurism.  The sci-fi elements in this film, while a disaster for the story, allow them to cut loose with some near-Barbarella level visual play.  Someday I'd like to see them cut loose with a full-on sci-fi flick - I'd expect something along the lines of Fifth Element, style style style.

Unfortunately, the gynoid and Train to the Future bits strike me as silly in unintended ways - Kimura Takuya looks particularly lost in these scenes, and at one point Faye Wong actually starts moving in stop-motion, like every ten-year-old does when imitating a robot...

As for the rest of the film, well, it just didn't do it for me.  Maybe it was unfair to compare it to In The Mood For Love, because in comparison to the clear emotional through-line in that film, in this one the emotional arcs seemed muddled to me.  Maybe it's because Tony Leung's character's motivation was left unclear right up until the end.  As Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki summed it up, it's a movie about a guy who can't get over a past love - but we don't learn that he even had a past love until ten minutes before the movie ends.  Of course if we believe that this is really a continuation of In The Mood, then we already know that - but there are enough shifts to leave us in doubt about that at first, I think.

Maybe I'm just getting impatient with the director's prioritizing of visuals and mood over story;  I know that's his bag, and I expect it.  But in what I consider his best films, the intimations of story that do sneak in support the visuals, and the whole thing comes together.  Not so here.

Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels (1995)

Even if you don't know that Fallen Angels (1995) grew out of what was meant to be a third story in the previous year's Chungking Express, you may find yourself making connections between the two films.  Common settings (the Chungking Mansions), similar structures (two parallel love stories only tangentially related, only this time they're intercut rather than back-to-back), recurring motifs (canned pineapple, blonde hair) take you there.  And thematically this feels very tied to its predecessor, with its emphasis on relationships doomed before they start by - what, ennui?  Modernity's anomie?

I think the film may be less satisfying on its own, though, then it might have been as a third part of Chungking Express.  I gather that the hitman's storyline here is what was planned for Chungking, which suggests that the other storyline, about the mute played by Kaneshiro Takeshi, was new for this film.  I don't think the two mesh very well. 

Visually, of course, they do because Doyle and Wong are mainly interested, here, in exploring neon-smeared nightscapes rather than telling stories.  But tonally the Kaneshiro storyline is just too light, too goofy;  in theory it probably sounded like it would be a great counterpoint to the hyperviolence of the hitman storyline, but in practice it just gives you whiplash. 

The dual storylines do, however, set off one of the great scenes in Wong's oeuvre, when the woman from the hitman storyline and Kaneshiro's mute finally come together, uniting the two halves of the movie.  They get on his motorcycle and ride off through the same tunnel we've seen Kaneshiro zoom down two or three times already, but this time he emerges from the tunnel, while we hear the woman's voice in voiceover talk about feeling closer to this man than she's felt to anybody for a while, and then the camera's gaze turns up at skyscrapers leaning against a gray dawn sky.  It's the first daylight we've seen in the film, the first semi-open sky, and the sense of release and relief are a powerful payoff.

(As usual, the film is most satisfying from a purely visual standpoint.  The big-city-at-night shots are the equal in atmosphere and beauty of anything ever accomplished.  The combination of omnipresent blackness and lights of sickly intensity and unnatural hue stays with you.)

Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997)

I'm a story person.  Reading, thinking about, writing about, talking about stories is, no joke, my stock in trade.  And so it's probably inevitable that my default approach to films is as stories.  I guess I see filmmaking as, essentially, dramaturgy.  As far back as history records, humans have acted out stories to one another;  film is simply what has replaced live theater for most of us in the modern era.  I know that doesn't do film justice - that it doesn't account for what's unique and specific to cinema as an art form - that film doesn't have to tell stories - but in practice, almost all films do tell stories, and so my approach serves me well almost all the time.

But every once in a while I encounter a film that doesn't tell a story, or tells it in such a way as to make it clear that dramaturgy is the furthest thing from its mind, and I'm reminded that there are other ways to look at film. 

Like Happy Together.  I mean, it does have a story, but two things about this film convinced me that the story wasn't quite the point.  One of these things is a legitimate reason for me to think this, the other not quite so much.

The legitimate reason is what Wong's (and Doyle's) camera is interested in, which is not always, maybe not even usually, the story.  It's interested in textures, patterns, views.  Like the tiles in the guys' apartment - they're having a knock-down drag-out, but the viewer's eye is caught less by the action than by the oddly lush concatenation of colors and patterns and textures in the tileage on the bathroom wall.  Or like the scene of Tony Leung riding around on a boat in the harbor feeling depressed:  we start out feeling his pain, but the camera lingers so long on odd angles that before long we're just captivated by the black water, the blank sky, the looming shapes of boats and face.  It's abstract.

The film is abstract.  And, in case it's not clear, I'll say that I found it quite beautiful.  Maybe the most amazing thing I've seen by Wong so far.  It's just an unexpected beauty:  he goes to all the trouble to film in Buenos Aires but we get virtually no cityscapes, no local color of the kind one might expect. This could have been filmed anywhere - but maybe not.  Those tiles. 

The second thing is not contained within the movie proper, but in the documentary on the DVD.  It must be watched.  If you've seen In the Mood for Love you know Wong Kar-Wai's method:  he shoots far more material than he could ever use, almost all of it improvised, and settles on the story in the editing room.  Here the documentary gives us nearly an hour of unused footage, and it's basically an entirely different film.  New characters, new storylines for familiar characters - familiar characters being redefined.  It's almost as good as the film we have.

Which was really fucking disconcerting, to tell you the truth.  Because, the foregoing notwithstanding, I liked the story I thought Wong was telling:  it was a moving depiction of a relationship, made all the more powerful by the fact that it was a relationship between two gay men.  Like, that mattered and it didn't matter:  the specificity of it, but also the universality of it.  Despite the disjointedness of the narrative, you really felt like you came to know these guys.

Then you watch the doc and realize that the story you just saw was, basically, accidental.  Like, depending on how you cut it, maybe these guys aren't even gay, maybe they're in Argentina for completely different reasons, maybe they're not even the main characters... 

On one level it's genius:  it demonstrates the illusory nature of storytelling in film.  We always think we're seeing an organic story being acted out before our eyes but in fact we're only ever seeing a collage, disparate pieces that were assembled to make us think we're seeing a story.  (Ever have one of those moments when you see an over-the-shoulder shot of someone talking and you remind yourself, oh yeah, that shoulder probably belongs to a stand-in?  Or when you realize you're watching a stun double?)

This is Cinema 101, I know, but it's particularly easy for me to forget it.  Happy Together reminded me of it. 

Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express (1994)

I saw this for the first time in Tokyo in '96 or so, and now it mostly brings back memories of the go-go '90s, of burgeoning Asian chic, of night in the world's biggest cities, and oh yes of my 20s, of innocence bruised but not yet broken, of that particular ennui that comes from spending too much time in both discos and used bookstores.

Or something like that. Another way to say it might be that at the time I was (probably) in love with Faye Wong, and it was a love that seemed both real and realistic; now I'm in love with someone flesh and blood, and Faye Wong in this movie strikes me as (duh) a cute cinematic construct: the kind of girl a young man might fall in love with. Tony Leung? Not so much...

But then, what do I know from Tony Leung? His character is largely a cipher in this movie. He's a policeman.

What's a policeman to Wong Kar-Wai? Here and in Days of Being Wild they seem to have a kind of iconic significance. Is it the anonymity - the tendency he gives them to hide in the shadows of their caps, and to identify themselves by their badge numbers? Is it that the authority makes them a shorthand for masculinity, of a particularly repressed variety? Is it something as simple and universal as the allure of a man in uniform - even when, like Kaneshiro Takeshi here, he doesn't wear a uniform?

(As with As Tears Go By, I find that the original Chinese title of this film, 重慶森林 or Chungking Jungle, gives it a specificity of place that the English version lacks. The outdoor escalator that provides such memorable visuals in the second half also dates the film - that is, it would have been a signifier of up-to-dateness in 1994.)

Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild (1990)

The most impressive shot is an amazingly long tracking shot down a Manila street, up some stairs, and through the second floor of a railway station. It's a tour de force, but me and the Mrs. disagreed on its effectiveness: I thought it was so amazing that it crossed the line into stunt territory - by the end I was just wondering how they did it, imagining how they must have cued the actors to start moving and speaking when the camera entered the room, etc. Mrs. Sgt. T just thought it was an amazing shot.

That was the only thing I thought overdone about the movie, though, and I can forgive it as a moment of exuberance by an artist just starting to glimpse his potential. Days of Being Wild is, as everyone seems to agree, where Wong Kar-wai became Wong Kar-wai; I'm not sure I completely agree (I certainly enjoyed As Tears Go By, and saw a lot of Wong's trademarks there, I think). But it is a great film, and a departure from his last, and the thematic and stylistic connections with In the Mood for Love are obvious.

No doubt a lot of what makes it the real arrival of Wong Kar-wai is that it's the arrival of Christopher Doyle. I now realize how much credit he deserves for Wong's success. I liked the visuals in ATGB, but they're nothing compared to this: instead of the steroidal neons of the earlier film, we get bled-out browns and grays and greens that manage to suggest both passion and confusion. The Philippine jungle seen at the beginning and end of the film is a great example: instead of lush, tropical colors we get an almost sickly washed-out green, simultaneously suggesting the milky richness of nephrite and a kind of spleeny bitterness...

The look of the film I don't find nearly as stylish as In the Mood for Love, but the themes here don't call for that anyway. Instead of tidal passions barely repressed, here we have outpourings of emotion with nowhere to go. So instead of opulent, entrancing surfaces we get confusing mixed hues and textures. Combined with the frequently odd camera angles and perfectly unbalanced compositions we have a a perfect visual representation of passions too strong and untamed to be dressed up. It's a monsoon movie. The best scene is the first one between Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau, at night in the rain, her heart aching so bad she can barely think, her face shining between thick black shadows of buildings, his face barely visible under his shiny black policeman's hat...

Doyle's visuals serve Wong's new narrative technique perfectly. I'm not sure if it's a technique; abandonment of narrative is what I want to say, but that's a little too extreme. It's just that he's decided that he's really only interested in the emotions, and he jettisons all the realistic story details that a normal movie would include, but that are really irrelevant to understanding the emotion. We know next to nothing about Maggie Cheung's character: we get only the barest bits of information about her background, and the passage of time in the movie is so murky (despite the camera's obsession with clocks) that we don't know much about how she gets from one emotional state to another. What we know about her is mostly how she feels: tentative love, passionate heartbreak. The same goes for all the characters.

To me this meant that the movie struck me as melodramatic, in the best possible way: its emotions (not just Maggie Cheung's, but Carina Lau's and of course Leslie Cheung's as well) are almost operatic in their intensity and abandon. Mrs. Sgt. T, however, said she was impressed by how emotionally dry the film was - certainly it depicts strong emotions, she said, but with a curious distance. I can see that, too, kind of: it's almost as if the radical foregrounding of the characters' emotions at the expense of the realistic details of their lives objectifies those emotions, rendering them static icons of emotion, rather than states of feeling that people pass through.

Thoughts On Stuff's Patrick-san accounts for the movie, and its place in Wong's ouevre, much better than I can. His post is worth a read.

Wong Kar-wai's As Tears Go By (1988)

The plot of As Tears Go By ("a small time gangster trying to keep his smaller time gangster friend out of trouble," as Wikipedia says, crossed with what Mrs. Sgt. T called the old Uptown Girl-Downtown Guy motif) is pretty conventional. That matters - for about fifteen minutes.

After that, the movie's fervid pacing and fevered visuals, not to mention the frantic performances, make you believe. It helps if you have nothing against good old-fashioned melodrama, because that's what the gangsters here provide - Andy's Lau's main character is cool and collected, but his "brothers" are so hot-headed they make Sonny Corleone look prudent, while also being so inept they make Fredo look like a real gangster.

So on the one hand Andy Lau is trying to keep the lid on gangland tensions involving his charges, and on the other he's trying to start up a romance with his gorgeous cousin Maggie Cheung. Here's where the English title and the subtitles obscure some of the (perfectly hackneyed) subtext: he's from a particularly seedy part of Kowloon called Mongkok (which the Chinese title references), and she's from an island in the harbor. Different sides of the tracks, so to speak, so to him she represents not just all the feminine allure that Maggie Cheung represents for all of us, but also, you know, Escape. Again, nothing new here. But Lau does a great job of showing us a man torn between his loyalty to his street and his longing for her island - he's convincingly too cool for Mongkok, but too rough for Maggie's world.

And the visuals. That's what it comes down to. I lived through this era, and Mrs. Sgt. T was living in Hong Kong in this era, and Wong perfectly captures a certain vision of the era. The oversaturated reds and blues, the smoky darknesses and harsh angled lights: it was the Blade Runner vision of East Asia, as seen through the masterful lens of a young and gonzo Wong Kar-wai - and inhabited by characters dressed in stone-washed jeans and muscle shirts. The opening shot, where our cheeks are pressed up against a wall of glowing cathode-ray tubes, says everything: we're going to be thrust right into an electrified, staticky night world, long on passion and short on class. Red Lips Bar, one setting is called. Yeah, dude.

It's all set to a soundtrack that could only have come at the awesome end of the Giorgio Morder synth decade. "Take My Breath Away" sounds even better in Sandy Lam's version than Berlin's.

Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love (2000)

Saw this for the first time last night. Among this film's many splendors perhaps the least, but the one I found myself marveling at incessantly for the first half, was how Wong's camera manages to make Hong Kong in 1962 feel both authentically cramped and unbelievably stylish.

The crampedness: the film is almost entirely interiors, and the whole point is that these two people are trapped by the close quarters in which they're living - trapped against each other, and once they begin to figuratively embrace each other trapped by the observant eyes of everyone around them. The only way to be free is to leave the country - and of course even then they can't bring themselves to be free... The camera, though, puts the viewer always about three feet away from these people - no farther than you could get walking past them in a crowded apartment hallway or tiny living room. There's a bit of the Ozu trick here of shooting from a point of view that makes you feel like you're in the room, in the scene - but of course Wong's camera is so mobile that it would make Ozu seasick. Anyway, it brilliantly creates a sense of social claustrophobia.

At the same time the film manages to make this life seem incredibly glamorous. It does it through an incredible sense of style and beauty - dresses, furnishings, neckties are all impeccably chosen. It does it through lighting and color control - every shot is immaculately composed and seductive. But it also does it through the physical presence and performances of the actors - Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are not only beautiful, but they comport themselves with such dignity and grace that it makes their characters seem to thrive in this social claustrophobia.