Wong Kar-wai, Ranked

Another ranked piece, this one again commissioned by Film.com. To be honest, it's not one I planned on doing, both because Wong's filmography is small and most of it is of such a quality as to make "ranking" even more irrelevant than usual, but then if it lets me write capsules for this great director's work, so be it.

My list is up at Film.com.

Love Is a Battlefield: The Romantic VIolence of Wong Kar-wai

With Wong Kar-wai's masterful (if you stick to the Chinese cut) The Grandmaster out now, I was drawn to the parallels between this ostensible commercial Wong and the last time he dabbled in populist Chinese genre with Ashes of Time. Both films seem such major departures for their maker, but they reveal Wong's cinema of regret and longing through action tropes, in some ways distilling his work to its most ineffable essence. His violence is thrillingly mounted, but Wong's wuxia films devote most of their time to the corrupting effect of that violence, and both films hold the keys to his entire oeuvre.

Read my full thoughts at Film.com.

Ashes of Time Redux

Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time is a baffling, frustrating but utterly intoxicating film, a long-delayed project that displays its piecemeal construction (possibly more so in this 2008 revision that cuts some scenes while adding others). Ostensibly a wuxia film, Wong's movie plays along genre lines -- including swordplay, romance and Stoicism -- to pass itself off as a valid entry in the martial arts epic while devoting its main focus to subverting as many tropes inherent in the genre as possible.

Based on the characters of Jin Yong's Condor Trilogy, Wong's film actually occurs before the events of the first book, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, charting not the exploits of master swordsmen who take up dominion of the north, south, east and west quadrants of a harsh terrain but what led each character to those positions. There are sword fights, blunt dialogue and elegant martial arts, but what the director primarily cares for is the emotional turmoil under these men (and even a few women).

Occurring over the five months of the Chinese calendar, Ashes of Time spends most of its length with two characters in particular, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) and Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-fai). Old friends who meet once a year to catch up and drink a magic wine, the two serve as the nexus for the film's overlapping narratives, mired in their own emotional crises that in some way incorporate the other characters. From the start, the film's temporal structure warps and bends around the remembrances and present-tense travails of these and other characters, with only Ouyang's narration serving as any kind of tether. But even the condensation of Wong's penchant for crisscrossing narrations into one voice does not provide many clues: Ouyang's monologues are terse, delivering what might be pure exposition but in such a stark, oblique manner that even the most direct of establishing lines dissipate amidst the fractured visual schemata and strands of plot.


The central theme running through this chopped-up story is the pain of love and loss. Ouyang fled a lover to set up an inn, now working as an agent who hires bounty hunters, too hurt from his failed romance to use his own considerable swordsmanship. When Huang meets his friend each year, he drinks a sort of lacunal, anti-Proustian wine that makes him forget the past in the hopes of leaving behind his own troubled relationship. After Huang leaves, Ouyang receives a visit from a man(?), Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin), who wishes to use Feng's services to have Huang killed for standing up his sister, Murong Yin (also Lin), who in turn hires Ouyang to kill her "brother" for suggesting someone kill the man she still loves. Meanwhile, another master swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), wishes to complete one last job to raise the money to return home to see the "peach blossom," later revealed to be the name of his wife, before his creeping blindness ensures he can never see her again.

Wong's camera, filtered through Christopher Doyle's cinematography, is as reckless yet careful as anything the two have put together: their tactile, sensualist approach cuts so coarsely against the grain of wuxia film that it leaves razor bumps and bleeding nicks. During fights, the duo apply the same stop-start, fast/slow-motion tricks that could stretch a half-second moment of light contact into a lovesick man's raison d'être or years of life into a blip to martial arts. Even when Wong gives the crowd the violence they so crave, he shifts the focus off-center: the action in Ashes of Time comes in blurred figures, sped up or slowed down until their form is broken, swinging swords that fly out of frame. Interspersed are splashes of blood that spurt from wounds torn open in the chaos. By getting up close, personal and downright subjective, Wong deromanticizes violence even as he displays one of the most expressive approaches to cinematic bloodshed ever put on film.

In the long gaps between action, the film's yellow and brown tones create an earthen palette, grounding the painterly beauty of the shots of the harsh desert, a place so endless, hazy and slightly off that one keeps waiting for the camera to pan to the side and reveal melting clocks. The swirl of surreal tones mixes with soft, almost watercolor brushstrokes for gentile landscapes, and Wong even stretches his deliberately haphazard editing and framing until some scenes -- especially the action sequences -- border on abstract expressionism, particularly when those gushes of blood squirt out onto his step-printed canvas. The director has always had a painterly touch, but never have so many styles converged into his frame. With its digital touch-up and a Blu-Ray from Artificial Eye that improves the image (comprising film stock of varying and sometimes stunningly bad quality) to its zenith, Ashes of Time must be Wong's most gorgeous picture, placing it near or at the top of the most beautiful films ever made.


Visual symbolism abounds, from the Yin/Yang character to the motifs of water and the desert landscape, but Wong only makes the symbols themselves distinct and easily spotted, not what they stand for. Some scenes are utterly extraneous: Carina Lau, playing the Blind Swordsman's wife (Lau herself has been Chiu-Wai's partner since 1989), is shown wordlessly caressing her horse with such tenderness that the stallion becomes as much a symbol of virility and sexuality as it could without this becoming a very different type of movie, indeed. The shots have almost no bearing on the story and do not even make sense until nearly an hour later, but the experience of them, the suggestive power of cutaways and seemingly extemporaneous juxtaposition, makes for a wuxia film that is felt rather than merely processed.

In fairness, the action scenes, unorthodox as they might be, are stunning. Shots of Brigitte Lin practicing sword skills on a lake explode water in symphonic boisterousness, bending nature around the purity of her mastery. The Blind Swordsman's last job has him saving a village from a swarm of bandits, and the ensuing bloodbath is more visceral than anything to crop up in the last decade's boom of arty martial arts films. Yet even that sequence is undercut by Wong's directorial flourishes, the image bleeding into white when the swordsman looks up and has his already weakened vision bleached out by the sun. The entire scene builds less a sense of heroism than a mounting futility, and when the moment ends with a slit throat expelling blood as if a spittle-filled sigh, Wong attains the instant existential resignation that lined Belmondo's face at the the end of Breathless.

That view of heroism dominates Wong's attention. The heroes of action films, and especially wuxia epics, must harden themselves to human vulnerability, but Wong demonstrates how isolationism eats at those who practice it. Lin's descent into schizophrenic madness arises from rejection, and her malignancy arises from her pain -- when she goes to seduce Ouyang in her pain, we are treated to the quietly repellent sight of the woman stroking the man as both think of other lovers. The Blind Swordsman stayed away from home for so many years, only thinking of returning to his wife when it was too late, when he is doomed and she long ago gave her heart to another. Yet he at least makes a move toward undoing a lifetime of emotional remove, and Hong Qi (Jacky Cheung), a brilliant but unstable bounty hunter, picks up where the Blind Swordsman fails. Where he has spent his entire life counting the money of each job to collect wealth, Hong redeems himself when he ignores money to help a poor village girl who can only pay him a single chicken egg.


No such luck for Ouyang and Huang. In the books to which Ashes of Time serves as a prequel, the two characters are hard-hearted and violent, Huang someone who still believes in love but can never have it himself, Ouyang a man who rejects love entirely. They are not solidified into those roles here, but one can clearly see the arcs that will define their lives: Ouyang has fled from the woman who loves him, while Huang never follows through with the love he inspires in others because he's fixated on the one woman who loves someone other than him. Maggie Cheung arrives near the end of the film to deliver a devastating monologue to Huang. Ouyang's ex-lover, Cheung's character ultimately married the man's brother because she tired of waiting for Feng to return to her. She clarifies the reasons for Huang and Ouyang's annual meeting and the woman who links them in pain, and her speech, framed in a simple, wide-angle close-up without trickery that lets all focus rest on her words, speaks directly and piercingly to the pain of unrequited love. When the story comes full circle and the two main characters discover the uselessness of the magic wine, that the attempt to forget only further ensconces painful remembrances in memory, Cheung's pain is fully visited upon Ouyang and Huang.

For all its production troubles and stop-start construction, Ashes of Time displays Wong's directorial concerns as much as Chungking Express, the film he made in the middle of Ashes of Time. By making a wuxia film set in China's dynastic past, Wong directly tackles the questions of shifting national identity he expressed in his '90s cinema, and by wrapping the genre around his preoccupations with unrequited love and emotional isolation, he reconfigures one skewing of history into his own perspective. As ever, time and place are meaningless and all-important in the director's film, placing the characters at a set point in China's history while communicating themes that are timeless and irrespective of geographic borders.

The more I wrote about Ashes of Time Redux the more I thought about it, and the initial frustrations I had with the segmented, overlapping narratives faded into an appreciation of its beauty. Less accessible than any of his other films and less poignant than several, Ashes of Time nevertheless demonstrates Wong Kar-wai's mastery of form by showing what a great movie he could make far outside his comfort zone. More than any Kurosawa movie, this is a Western infused with a thoroughly distinct eastern flavor, and even the Ennio Morricone-inspired score is undermined as the film continues and pitted against itself to let more lilting sounds arise from its disquieting electronic hum. Re-edited in 2008, Ashes of Time Redux not only consolidated the handful of circulating prints of dubious quality into a better-looking version supposedly without significant alteration but allowed audiences to see how well Wong could play outside his usual style in the wake of his first major misfire. My Blueberry Nights might have set critics back to their laptops to type out instant reconsiderations of the director -- because it is only natural that a mild disappointment should somehow counteract a decade and a half of meaningful, beloved films in the minds of a few -- but Ashes of Time is far greater a stylistic leap than Wong's foray into English-language film. It may not seem like it at first, but the movie's also a perfect fit into Wong's canon and a visual delight worth revisiting as much simply to gawk at as to further analyze its ideas.

Fallen Angels

There is a moment in Paul Mazursky's fitfully remarkable An Unmarried Woman wherein the protagonist, Erica, speaks to a friend who suffers from bipolarity and now takes lithium to stabilize her mood. "Since I started taking Lithium," she says, "I feel more sensible than this month's Good Housekeeping." Then, with a combination of gallant flippancy and deep regret, she adds, "No more black, moody lows. But I sure as hell miss my highs."

Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels almost seems like its director made it to illustrate this point. It lacks the consistency of his previous breakthroughs, the so-ephemeral-it's-practically-spectral Days of Being Wild and the masterful Chungking Express, but for every moment that sags, another is filled with such power, such beauty and such impact that it challenges those daunting achievements for supremacy. Ostensibly a continuation of Chungking Express, what was intended as the third storyline for that film blossoms into a surreal stew of colliding plots, moods and colors to make the kaleidoscopic feel of Chungking seem positively straightforward in comparison.

One can spot the connections to Wong's previous masterpiece, some overt, others more sly. Still rooted in the Chungking Mansions section of Hong Kong, Fallen Angels features characters who work at the Midnight Express hole-in-the-wall, a character who remains mute throughout the film because he ate too many expired pineapples after having his heartbroken (the same actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro, played the character who ate the pineapple in the last film, and they share the same character name), and a female cleans up the apartment where her love goes, albeit in a much darker sense.

Yet Wong turns Chungking on its head, creating a movie where people do not find themselves through relationships but lose their identities through various types of relationships. Rather than forge their personality and move forward, they stagnate, conforming to what they think the other person wants. Exploring this idea curiously instead of cynically, the director digs into the ways that we sometimes try too hard to please people without truly getting to know them, and how romance cannot be built on a lie. He also cares deeply about the changing nature of relationships in the modern age.

After all, every relationship in Fallen Angels recalls a business transaction of some sort. A listless hitman played by Leon Lai relies on his partner, played by Michelle Reis, to set up his engagements so he never has to make any decisions, and he rejects her affection for him with the corporate mentality of not sleeping with co-workers. He even fakes a romance through business measures, having paid a woman $30 to pose for a photo so he could pass her off as his wife to inquisitive people, and he got a child an ice cream cone to be his "son." He Zhiwu, the mute (who speaks in voiceovers), breaks into businesses in the middle of the night in order to serve customers to make money but also perhaps a friend or two. When he meets a woman (Charlie Yeung), the first thing she does is demand change so she can call a former friend and cuss her out for stealing her boyfriend. When she hangs up, Charlie then drags the uncomfortable man back as he attempts to slip away and hilariously commands him, "Let me cry on your shoulder!" When he starts to develop feelings for Charlie, He Zhiwu refers to himself as a store and her a customer, and that he hopes she will shop there for a while.

This perception of love and friendship suggests modern alienation in big cities filled with giant billboards and a hodgepodge of corporate franchises (Leon meets the woman he takes as his lover at a McDonald's), which Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle emphasize through the mise-en-scène. Characters are grounded in focus in the foreground, while people in the background pass out of focus, either captured by a shallow lends or sped up into blurs. Even when a fight breaks out behind Michelle, Doyle does not switch focus and roots on her eating with a bored look on her face while fuzzy images of a fistfight crash in the background. People in small towns always seem to know each other, but cities are so populous and so busy that fewer connections are made. Faced with infinite possibilities of an urban jungle, people instead retreat into isolation, sticking to familiar haunts, tuning out the bustle with portable music players. Wong and Doyle make Hong Kong into a swirling cascade of colors and sights, but their frenzied rush through all the stalls and apartments overload the sensual enticement of the images and turn them into something intimidating and off-putting.

Therefore, love becomes another aspect of life that becomes isolated and one-sided. As free-spirited and joyous as Wong makes the sequence of Faye cleaning Cop 663's apartment in Chungking Express, he's also showing this woman imagining herself being the man's domestic partner without actually telling him about her feelings and maybe crafting a real relationship. Likewise, Leon reveals a mutual attraction with Michelle -- it would be hard not to find the former Miss Hong Kong sexy -- but he sticks to his silly code and finds a surrogate for his lust in the form of Blondie. Meanwhile, Michelle stays home and morosely masturbates to the fantasy of Leon, and in the film's most heartbreaking sequence, Wong cuts between Leon fulfilling his desire with Blondie as Michelle writhes on her bed masturbating and sobbing as if she can see her love bed another woman even as she still tries desperately to get off on the thought that he's thinking of her while sleeping with Blondie.

Doyle captures this sexual frustration through a series of amusing and wrenching visual metaphors. He Zhiwu breaks into an abattoir and toys with a whole pig carcass as if a lover, massaging it like he's engaging in foreplay and jumping up and down on it in an overtly sexual manner, and later he and Charlie vent their pent-up sexual aggression by kicking the hell out of a blow-up sex doll without simply acknowledging each other. As Michelle lies on her bed in agony and ecstasy, she wears a plastic sheath over her silk dress, clashing a modern, Westernized accessory with classical Chinese clothing but also conveying how she has encased her sensuality. Doyle would bring an eroticism to the silk clothes that could top pornography in In the Mood for Love, and for him to obscure it here shows how much Michelle is wasting by not moving on.

Yet, for all the somber, mangled looks at crumbling interpersonal connection in the world, Fallen Angels contains more comic moments than any of Wong's other features. Leon shows off his fake family photo to an old classmate he meets on a bus while escaping from his first filmed hit (the murders themselves are amusingly choreographed like classic John Woo shootouts but shot in Wong's artier style), and the man enters into a one-sided conversation as he excitedly tries to catch up. The forgotten friend offers to get Leon a good insurance rate, and the killer tunes the guy out by musing whether a hitman could get insured. Later, the director literalizes the idea of the characters changing themselves to fit their partners' tastes when He Zhiwu, who has to console Charlie constantly over her hatred for Blondie, actually starts turning blond himself. Much of the visuals are non-sequiturs anyway, and Wong never attempts to stifle their absurdity with his weighty, insightful themes. Who else would insert a scene of Michelle warning a hidden Leon to stay out of sight because cops are searching the apartment complex for him, only for him to clearly give away his position in a cramped cupboard by continuing to smoke inside it. Only Godard at his earliest would put in such a loopy goof on a criminal.

One of the all-time great cinematic romantics, Wong has a particular interest in the transience of love. When he breaks off his relationship with Blondie, Leon does not feel too guilty for breaking her heart. "For her, I'm just a stopover on the journey of her life," he says. "I hope she reaches her destination soon." What he doesn't realize is that we are all stopovers, that the transience these people force themselves into is not a contrast to the supposed permanence of normalcy when it is really just a self-absorbed perversion of the wayward nature of life that we all experience. Cramped in their withdrawn lives, they retreat from contact and seem to look for answers in false copies of life (i.e. the typical depiction of romance in the movies). One of the biggest breakthroughs in the film is delivered so plainly that you might miss it: as He Zhiwu lets Charlie cry on his shoulder for the umpteenth time, he notes in his narration that she will never sort out her issues on the phone, and that she won't feel better until she has a real conversation face-to-face. When he sees Charlie later, she's a flight attendant and doesn't recognize him, but he accepts that her path has taken her elsewhere and has now built enough of his own identity to take it in stride. Leon doesn't have this epiphany, and he realizes too late that he should have been more open and made his own decisions. As for Michelle, she ends up cleaning up an apartment after her partner just as Faye did for her love, but Michelle's wash has a much darker context. Where Faye cleaned to cheer up her crush and set him up to accept her, Michelle scrubs away the memory of Leon, somewhat literally. Hideous as the act is within context, it too frees her, and when she accepts a motorcycle ride home from He Zhiwu, Wong sets up the two characters who have learned to accept the ephemeral nature of life for a possible romance. "I haven't ridden a motorcycle for a long time," Michelle tells us, practically confiding in the audience. "Actually, I haven't been so close to a man for a while. The road isn't that long, and I know I'm getting off soon. But at this moment, I'm feeling such lovely warmth."

After watching and loving all of the director's output, I only just now pin down what I adore about his cinema: Wong Kar-wai is the William Faulkner of filmmakers. His stories occur out of order but typically without flashback. Snatches of stirred passion and denied love, Wong's movies cross several perspectives that can stand entirely outside each other even as they add greater dimension to the overall narrative. The first shots of Fallen Angels convey the different points of view of Leon and Michelle: the camera weaves around Michelle as she walks through the subway as if flirting with her and taking on her unfulfilled passion. When Wong shoots the same location for Leon moving through the area, he does so in a series of quick edits of static shots. This is a man of purpose and denial, and he will not even acknowledge his romantic side. It is when the director crushes these styles together, along with the different approaches of the other characters, that Fallen Angels crafts a more wholesome vision of love, lust, repression and regret.

In Wong's films, as in Faulkner's novels, time and place are as vital to unraveling the meaning of the story as they are irrelevant to the telling of it, and the looming shadow of Hong Kong's handover is as key here as it is in his next film, Happy Together. The focus on transiency and adaptation speaks as much to the director's concerns over Hong Kong as it does humanity: the perfect blend of Eastern and Western aesthetic and customs, Hong Kong may well swing toward Chinese tradition when it's absorbed into the mainland. The final shot, of He Zhiwu exhaling a puff of cigarette smoke that Wong tilts up to follow, visualizes how everything in life drifts and dissipates, yet he also lingers on a skyscraper in the frame as if contemplating its future as well.

With its dark, sickly surreality, Wong's Hong Kong becomes the traumstadt, a dream city that can fit all emotions and moods because it does not really exist. Yet by not existing, it can break all the boundaries that prevent us from seeing things as they are, and Wong can shoot in a stream-of-consciousness style, such as cutting to a man shivering in fear with a tray of food as Leon blazes past cutting down his marks. Fallen Angels may be the sloppiest of Wong's films, but its messiness is part of its beauty and its intelligence. If the point of the film is that life itself is convoluted and discombobulated, then is there any other way to capture it than an insane mash-up of melodrama, comedy, humanism and the choked eroticism that marks Wong's cinema? Whether it's his best film is irrelevant; Fallen Angels is but one of the director's several examples of pure, atmospheric meditations on the distances, physical, emotional and completely artificial, we place between each other. Perhaps when someone else approaches him, we can fuss over ranking his oeuvre.

Happy Together

You know you're in for a unique experience when a film opens with a splash of color before cutting suddenly to a stark, black-and-white depiction of two gay lovers engaging in rigorous sex. Though not as ambitious, nor as aesthetically innovative, as the previous collaborations between director Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Happy Together is no less worthy an entry in Wong's canon, as well as that of modern world cinema, as Chungking Express or Fallen Angels.

Wong and Doyle's aesthetic across their '90s output is nearly indescribable in its allure. The camera placement has the ability to be intensely off-putting -- using canted angles, various filters that stretch and contort the image, and offbeat color palettes -- yet perversely engaging; no one can see the world this way, as a fish-eye distortion, yet Doyle and Wong can trick you into thinking we do. They turn cinema, despite the loft poetics of their aesthetic, into a physical act, not an assault on the audience but certainly something that breaks a few lines that separates them from the film. Thus, when Wong opens the film on an act that remains fairly taboo even in current American cinema, whatever alienation the act, and its exhibition on black-and-white film, dissipates almost immediately as the director bursts through the dividing wall and involves the audience.

As one of the lovers, the calm, reserved Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung), speaks in a voiceover, the reasons for the use of black-and-white film soon become apparent. Despite the passion and romance of their first shown interaction, Lai and Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) are in the last stages of their romance, or of its latest incarnation, anyway. Lai confides in the audience that he and Ho have broken up and reconciled repeatedly; each time Lai convinces himself he's through with the more coquettish, unhinged Ho, the more volatile lover coaxes him back with the promise that they "could start over." Happy Together opens in monochrome because it captures the couple in the middle of their break-up. Having traveled to Argentina in an attempt to get away and save their relationship, they instead drift further apart, and Lai ends one argument by walking away from Ho while the two are pulled over on a highway and does not return.

Deciding to stay in Buenos Aires, Lai subsequently gets a job as a doorman for a tango club, the black-and-white that starkly captured the sadness of the break-up now a symbol for the ennui of such a dead-end job. Then, Ho returns, dressed to the nines like a Chinese Belmondo in one of Godard's early, faux-gangster pictures as the properly attired Lai can only try, and fail, to suppress his surprise. Arriving with new flame in hand, Ho appears not to notice Lai as he and his entourage sashay into the club, but we see him look in the rear window of his limo when he departs, leering at the heartbroken Lai with an evil smirk. He continues to bring different men to the club to torment Lai, who teeters on madness when he returns every night to his cramped hotel room. Just as he nears the breaking point, Ho shows up at his doorstep, battered, bloodied and barely conscious.

Color appeared in snippets of the film to this point -- most memorably a leitmotif shot of the Iguazu Falls, Lai's reason for wanting to visit Argentina and a metaphor for the film's conflicts that becomes decreasingly obvious as the narrative progresses -- but Wong switches entirely to color as Lai drives Ho home from the hospital. His badly injured hands entirely bandaged, Ho cannot fend for himself, so Lai takes him in to help his ex recuperate.

The reversion to full color clearly reflects Lai's excitement, despite his better judgment, at the prospect of nursing Ho back to health and possibly reigniting their relationship, the monochrome of his depression replaced by the vivid spectrum of hope. What it instead captures is the vibrant effrontery and the complexity of Ho's manipulation of Lai's crippling codependency. Wong's precise casting allows the audience to better understand the divide between these two characters. Cheung, who of course appeared in Wong's Days of Being Wild, where he also toyed with his image as a founding member of Cantopop, plays Ho like a rock star without the stardom, a balls-out loon with thirsts incapable of being slaked. Leung, on the other hand, is one of the most subdued and affecting of any actor of any nationality (or generation, for that mater). His strength lies not in the explosive movements that Cheung brilliantly unleashes but in the internalization of his feelings and thoughts until they bubble into his eyes, where they become unmistakable and devastating. To see Lai hurt is to see Leung hurt, which only compounds the effect of the poor man's tribulations on the audience. Lai attempts to shield himself, resisting Ho's physical and emotional teases, but his desires get the best of himself and he reenters into a romance with Ho, restarting the cycle.

Though the situation rapidly deteriorates, Wong maintains the use of color stock, forcing us to experience this even more searingly than before. Yet the director softens Lai's misery when he has the protagonist leave the nightclub to get work at a Chinese restaurant. There he meets Chang (Chang Chen), a Chinese ex-pat whom he befriends. Chang is everything that Ho isn't: like Lai, he is calm and measured, a placid individual just looking for normalcy. So tuned to Lai's frequency is he that Chang gets his own voiceover lines, in which he discusses his life and his budding friendship with Lai. He might even be gay: an attractive female co-worker makes a pass at him, but Chang lightly rebuffs her, explaining his actions to Lai with the excuse that he dislikes her voice. Chang prefers women's voices to be "deep and low," and when Lai sets down the phone to quickly perform and errand, Chang sees this and rushes to the phone as if checking the line just so Lai can brush against him when he returns to grab the receiver.

As Ho continues to push his relationship with Lai to its latest breaking point, Lai's bond with Chang strengthens. Chang relates how he got exceptional hearing from an eye problem he suffered as a child that strengthened his other senses. ""I couldn't see," he says, "so I listened." Thus, he is more empathetic and understanding of Lai, who'd long ago been blinded by the supernova of Ho's diva-like radiance. Though their relationship never progresses to the romantic stage -- at least so far as Wong shows us -- the intimacy between the two, at last fully reciprocated for Lai, gives the beleaguered lover the courage to finally break from Ho for the last time. Once he does, however, he finds that Chang has left Buenos Aires, off to see another Argentine landmark.

Now alone after closing one door and having the other closed on him, Lai spirals into his darkest depression yet, stooping to meaningless sex in bathrooms and theaters to dull the pain. The sex in Happy Together constantly degenerates, from the passionate intercourse that opens the film to the loathing -- much of it self-directed -- in Lai's later tryst with Ho. Finally, it becomes anonymous, something that Lai, once the person who longed for love, engages in for the visceral kick. The like-minded Chang's "rejection" of him edges Lai closer to Ho's characteristics, and his usage of cheap sex without stakes gives Lai an insight into Ho's behavior. Lai's shift toward Ho's mannerisms is contrasted with Ho himself, who rails against his ex for the break-up but, secreted away from prying eyes, bursts into uncontrollable sobs of regret. Perhaps Ho's flaw was not Machiavellian evil but an inability to properly express his feelings, which we can plainly see in private hem much closer to Lai's typical mindset.

It's tempting, and oh-so facile, to compare the film to Midnight Cowboy, that other story of the perils of gay love in society. Yet that film relied on naturalistic acting to tell an otherwise oversimplified and unrealistic story, while Wong uses poetic aestheticism to spin a believable tale. Too, Midnight Cowboy forced one of its characters to die for the film's homoeroticism, a sort of false redemption that spoke more to its pulled punches and attempt to play to more conservative audiences. Wong, on the other hand, uses the physical pain inflicted upon one his gay characters to examine the emotional, even existential, plights of the pair. Furthermore, Wong presents this tumultuous love affair as the sort of turbulent romance that couples of any sexual preference could experience. Schlesinger condemned his latent homosexuals for their sin, while Wong, without ever breaking out a soapbox, demonstrates how gay love should not be separated from what some obsolete members of society consider to be "true" love. Ho and Chang could easily be two ladies vying, whether they know it or not, for Lai's attention -- in fact, the structure of an exploding, id-driven hedonist and the supportive, empathetic emotional rock standing at polar ends from a confused but ultimately affable protagonist somewhat prefigures an equally devastating account of broken love, Two Lovers.

However, as enthralling as the narrative is, Wong uses his characters for more than a mere love story. One of the film's first shots, of Lai and Ho heading out to Argentina, shows a customs official stamping a passport. The dated stamps recall the expiration dates used in Chungking Express; in my review of that film, I noted the connection some critics established between the usage of expiration dates to the planned transfer of ownership of Hong Kong from England to China and called it a tenuous point. That was poor phrasing: the date stamps clearly reflected the Hong Kong handover date, but I objected to using those fleeting images as a basing for reading the rest of the film. Here, however, the characters openly come to symbolize Hong Kong's transition. Lai and Ho represent the relationship between Hong Kong and the British power that once controlled it. British rule had its benefits -- Wong, after all, is working with considerably more freedom than his contemporaries in the rest of China received -- but the crown also exploited and manipulated the colony. It's possible, then, that the Chang, less adventurous and inspirational but sturdier and more relatable to Lai, represents the China that would reacquisition Hong Kong in the same year. On the flip side is Chang, whose Taiwanese heritage reveals that he has his own unexamined issues dealing with colonization and cultural appropriation, in his case stemming from Chinese aggression.

This subtext might explain why the central idea of Happy Together is displacement, as Hong Kong fits neither with England nor, with its use of Cantonese over Mandarin, much of the rest of China. Lai, the clearest representative of an uncertain Hong Kong, wanders between two partners, weighing his pros and cons when with one and feeling utterly alone when completely separated from both. Lai says that his "happiest days" with Ho occurred when the more careless man got himself attacked and had to rely on Lai, thus forcing the volatile lover to calm down. Following World War II, Hong Kong recovered almost instantly from Japanese occupation as Mao's Cultural Revolution led many of China's businesses to relocate their industries to Hong Kong. While Britain was busy waging battles in India to delay the inevitable, Hong Kong enjoyed prosperity and development. But the desire to be a part of their own people must have weighed on the denizens of Hong Kong, and for all the fear of change there is an anxiousness to get away from Britain (Ho) to be with the more similar China (Chang). Hong Kong was one of the last British colonies that the once-mighty empire retained, and its transfer affected both. No wonder, then, that Ho breaks down so completely; he's crying not only for his own loss but the end of the final chapter of British imperialism as that nation's avatar.

Though the story occurs in Argentina, Lai's actions bring him closer and closer to a return to Hong Kong to set aside his feelings of displacement and anomie: first he works as the doorman of the nightclub, always standing outside the club looking in, before moving to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and, finally, to a slaughterhouse, where he notes that the odd hours re-tune his body to Hong Kong time. His time with Chang, beside prompting the final split with Ho, also inspire Lai to return home, where he must face penance for stealing his father's money to finance his trip. The film's original Chinese title, Chun gwong cha sit, is an idiomatic expression meaning "to expose something indecent," less a reference to its display of homosexuality and more to its demonstration that indecent love is far more complex and harmful a situation than which genders are involved. The English title, taken from the Turtles hit that appears in the film as a cover by Danny Chung, is more germane to portraying the actual depths of the love story. At first it is a bitter ironic headline above the acrimony between partners, but Lai's infatuation with Chang and their compatibility suggest that the title really applies more to their relationship. By traveling to the waterfalls before returning to Hong Kong and subsequently stopping in Taipei to take a photo of Chang from his family's shop, Lai sets up a pursuit of Chang and the possibility for stable love between the two as they reenter China. Lai and Chang, the symbols of Hong Kong and China, respectively, may indeed find happiness together, forming a symbiotic bond that advances them both. Who'd a thunk this emotional gut-punch could end with such a hopeful implication?

Chungking Express

In her essay for the Criterion release of Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, Amy Taubin likens the Hong Kong director's opus to Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin, féminin, an apt description. Masculin worked as a snapshot of mid-'60s youth with Paris as their focal point, and Wong surveys the attitudes and issues facing mid-'90s youth by way of Hong Kong. Yet Wong has an advantage in the Chungking Mansions from which the film's title is derived: the Chungking Mansions have some of the cheapest housing in Hong Kong, and the area has become something of a cultural hub, housing not only natives but Africans, other Asians and Americans. Wandering through this area, as Wong does for most of the first part of the film, allows for a feeling of universality, as if this supremely cluttered, low-rent ethnic center contained the secret for world unity somewhere in its dense mire.

Where Godard painted a matter-of-fact image -- philosophically and artistically minded, of course, but still forged of his recent conversion to structuralism and his adoption of verité, Wong crafts Chungking Express into something of an abstract. Its opening shots, of sped-up, overexposed film stock following a police officer chasing a suspect, set the stage for the rest of the film, though the director will soon adopt a more coherent presentation for the action. As it did in Days of Being Wild , the narrative elides over information, not in Godard's jump-cutting way, in which he skipped over what he considered useless information. No, Wong is content to leave out the elements that might form something of a narrative. Godard cuts intellectually, Wong emotionally. One film is a photograph, factual and objective, and the other is a portrait, subjective and more readily informed by its creator's feel.

He splits Chungking into two parts, each following a police officer dealing with a breakup and finding a new woman to entice him. The first cop, He Qiwu or no. 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), roams the Chungking Mansions after his girlfriend, May (whom we never see), broke up with him on April Fool's Day. Qiwu's birthday is on May 1, so he gives them a month to reconcile. If on his 25th birthday they haven't gotten back together, Qiwu will know that it's not mean to be and will move on. To commemorate this ludicrous ultimatum -- which we can infer May does not even know about -- Qiwu buys a can of pineapples a day ("May loves pineapples," he says) set to expire on May 1.

Qiwu's story brings out the feelings of loneliness and aimlessness that ran rampant in the '90s. He clearly neglects his police work, capturing only one suspect in the film, the first bust he's made in six months. The asinine gesture with the pineapples suggests that he's gotten his notions of romance from cheesy flicks, and it makes Qiwu out to be the sort of hopeless romantic who perhaps gets off on being a hopeless romantic. Qiwu tosses out potent quotables like, "The body loses water when you jog, so you have none left for tears" and the ponderous "When did everything start having an expiration date?" They are the sort of phrases that oscillate between depth and naïveté, poetic wisdom from the mouth of a doofus too self-absorbed to contemplate what he's saying. He places a cosmic importance on those damn pineapple tins, a meaningless display that his ex-girlfriend neither knows nor cares about that allows the police officer to shape himself into the hero of his own personal narrative. When he finally realizes, with mere hours to go until his birthday, how this ruse won't work, he eats all 30 tins of expired fruit, eating away the pain and physically rejecting his pain when he vomits the stuff back up.

Now filled with despair, he gets drunk in a strip club and meets a woman in a blond wig (Juliette Lin), whom we saw in that opening frenzy. The camera stopped upon her in the opening scene, pausing on her before the film resumed, and Qiwu takes that moment as a sign, because meeting someone is never quite so interesting as being fated to meet (it lets you know right away that that someone is "special"). By now the audience has seen the woman in her own part of the narrative: a drug smuggler dealing with double-crosses, the woman is just as lost and uncertain as Qiwu, but her issues stem from professional, not personal, doubts. (This is highlighted by the use of a can of sardines sent to the woman with a expiration date of May 1; both of these characters have to figure out their problems by then, or they'll lose something, a relationship in Qiwu's case and a life in the woman's.)

Another director would have then crafted a story of a cop falling for a criminal, leading to a doomed romance genre picture, but Wong sidesteps the matter entirely. The two get plastered in the strip club, head to a hotel room where the woman promptly passes out and Qiwu eats four chef salads and watches movies on TV. Yet this chaste moment reinvigorates the two: the woman clears her head and takes care of business, while Qiwu can move past May. He's not quite ready for love, though, as he's still too focused in his own projection of the world when the vendor at the local snack shop he frequents suggests he ask out Faye (Faye Wong), the new waitress. Qiwu thinks that the shopkeeper is talking about the Indian employee washing windows and says that he's "not into boys." There his story ends, frozen for a moment when he bumps into Faye on the way out and appears to have another one of those cosmic collisions, but Qiwu notes in his voiceover that she was about to fall in love with another man.

We then meet the unnamed officer no. 663 (Tony Leung), another cop who frequents the snack shop. Unlike Qiwu, an officer so incompetent he twice meets a woman wearing a wig, large sunglasses and overcoat -- a downright comical disguise that couldn't make her more obviously a criminal if she carried around a neon sign announcing her as such -- and cannot recognize her as a suspect, 663 appears professional and capable, but that hardly gives him any more satisfaction in life. His flight attendant girlfriend dumps him at the start of his arc, leaving behind a giant stuffed bear as one of those consolation presents that just make everything so much worse. Faye comes to love the cop through his frequent stops at the stand, and when 663's ex sends him a letter containing his apartment key, which Faye takes. Saddened to see her crush so upset, Faye takes it upon herself to go into 663's apartment and clean up the place to bring him some cheer.

By only slightly altering the setting between the two story arcs, moving the action out of the Chungking Mansions by way of one of its snack stands and then into another part of the city, Wong generates two entirely different moods and feels. The first half is softly lit by the fluorescent lights that adorn the interiors of East Asian housing, creating a mood somewhere between alienation and comfort (for a further explanation of this odd dichotomy, check out Apichatpong Weerasethakul's notes on his recent short film, Phantoms of Nabua [and watch it too while you're there]). The second act takes place in the daytime, out in the marketplace where the trippy artificial softness is replaced by the reassuring natural warmth of the sun. Wong calms down the camera movement to adjust to the shift, dispensing with much of the verité-like hand-held camerawork and using more static shots.

The change in atmosphere and style makes this arc the more inherently romantic of the two, though perhaps that's because its true protagonist is the female character, Faye. Like Masculin, féminin's Chantal Goya, Faye Wong enjoyed a career as a real-life pop star, but Wong Kar-wai does not make a pop singer out of her character, and the only nod to Faye's career comes with an occasional use of her cover of The Cranberries' "Dreams." Yet the director does work music into the character, repeatedly using, to constantly interesting and resonant effect, "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & the Papas. Like the constant use of a single pop song in a Jarmusch film, the ubiquitous appearance of "California Dreamin'" becomes something of an anchor, commenting on the current scene as it links the rest together.

The Faye/663 story serves to build upon the optimism that appears at the tail-end of Qiwu's arc, and for all the listlessness and and uncertainty in these characters, Chungking Express is a work of surprising and deeply felt sunniness. Remember, the lighting of both sections, each so evocative of different mood, is warm. The elliptical storytelling allows Wong to skip over the sadder details of these rocky romances: we don't see what drives May or 663's girlfriend to break up with their significant others, glosses over some of the darker moments of post-heartbreak narcissistic self-pity (Qiwu may be self-absorbed, but all things considered he's nothing more damning than a bit naïve). When Faye suddenly suffers a change of heart when it appears 663 reciprocates her feelings for him and takes a job as a flight attendant, Wong jumps forward a year, bypassing the arbitrary ultimatum Faye set for her own relationship. She returns to find the old snack shop converted into a proper restaurant by 663, who plays "California Dreamin'" to remind himself of her. The result of their reunion remains ambiguous, but the film ends as it should, with that moment of elation that comes with reconnecting with a lost love, a happiness so pure it can only briefly register the possibility that the rendezvous might not lead to anything. All that matters is the present.

The finale underscores the fundamental difference between Masculin, féminin and Chungking Express. Godard's film is political and scathing, a sharp contrast to the softer, more emotional tones of Wong's work. Taubin argues for a slight political subtext to Chungking, its constant use of expiration dates a pointer to the turnover of Hong Kong to China three years hence, but even for a film this abstract I find that a tenuous proposition (though it's important to note that Hong Kong citizens knew years in advance about the eventual handover). A literal translation of its title, Chungking Jungle, reflects the true spirit of the film and its setting, and the American translation, taking the Express from the name of the snack stand that holds the film together, becomes the method of transportation through that setting. Chungking Express is fast but never too fast, on a set path but relaxed enough that you don't remember all the details. And if it is less polemical than Godard's youth movie, that is because politics didn't matter so much to the post-Cold War crowd, and Wong takes the slackers of Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith films and attunes them to the harmony of the world, making every-men and women out of outcasts and somehow directing the grand nothingness of Generation X into something beautiful and resonant.

Days of Being Wild

Wong Kar-wai's first film, As Tears Go By, was a cookie-cutter crime drama that borrowed heavily from Scorsese's Mean Streets but left out all of the original's flair. It did, however, introduce some of the director's visual preoccupations, chiefly his expressive color palettes. But it was his second feature, Days of Being Wild, that crystallized his style -- lush visual poetry, elliptical character dramas, the way we, not just the Chinese, guard ourselves with perceived "appropriate" behavior even we are bursting with passion -- and announced the arrival of the first Hong Kong director who could rival the skills of the contemporaneous Fifth Generation filmmakers. A depiction of rejection, empty hedonism and the tragedy of dreams, Days of Being Wild is a devastating reverie worthy of the auteur who would go on to make even more draining masterpieces.

Set in 1960, Days makes inescapably clear the director's nostalgia. It opens with a shot of a red Coca-Cola cooler, made somehow to look redder than anything you've ever seen. A handsome, mysterious young man, Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), enters a stadium concession stand and chats up the clerk, Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung). She rebuffs his advances, but he returns, again and again, until she at last relents. Wong cuts to a breathtaking shot of the two post-coitus, giving off such heat that the mise-en-scène takes on a muggy, humid quality. The moment is short-lived, however, as Yuddy promptly trows her out, already bored.

As we shall soon see, this is Yuddy's M.O. He has an ambiguous, rocky relationship with his adoptive mother, an aged whore who was once a high-class escort, accompanied by a pimp Yuddy will find any excuse to beat. She will not tell him about his biological mother, and Yuddy projects whatever buried feelings he has onto the women he seduces and discards. Or perhaps not; a Freudian analysis seems to simplistic for so evocative a film.

Yuddy stands in the center of a group of people joined by their collective sense of longing and trepidation. Su falls into a deep, reclusive depression, and Yuddy's new squeeze, the outburst-prone bar dancer Mimi (Carina Lau) outwardly emotes at her mistreatment. Both women look for love but find only the blank wall that is Yuddy, but they find no reprieve from their sorrows from any other the other men -- Zeb (Jacky Cheung), Yuddy's street hustler friend lovesick for Mimi, nor Tide (Andy Lau), a police officer who wants to become a sailor. These people all want something they can't have, save Yuddy, who understands that to want nothing is to have everything and to want it all is to be left empty-handed. As he and Zeb ride a train after a violent confrontation in the Philippines, Zeb thunders that they almost died because of Yuddy. "You can die any minute," Yuddy retorts; he knows the future is uncertain, and that is the only certainty in his life.

He's portrayed with a bravura performance by the late, great Leslie Cheung, who channels a bit of the three main late-'50s, early-'60s rebels -- James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones and especially Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (his constant hair-combing recalls to an extent Michel's habit of running his thumb over his lips) -- Cheung adds that degree of tragedy to a man hell-bent on self-destruction. He does not break down like Jim Stark, nor is his detached image a hip feint like Michel's; no, this is a man truly cut off from the world around him, who accepts that there's no time like the present and thus sets no goals for himself and rejects anything that might pin down his future. Cheung's connection to on-screen rebels also reflects his days as a pop star; indeed, any fan of Hong Kong cinema should be delighted to see baby-faced versions of Leslie, Jacky, Maggie, Carina Lau, even Tony Leung in a cameo at the end, all of them known at the time as pop icons or kid TV stars putting in serious dramatic work.

However, the chief draw of the feature must be its astonishing visuals. Days marks the start of the bountiful collaboration between Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, beginning a modern director-cinematographer relationship offering the most rewarding aesthetic partnership second perhaps only to the Coens' work with Roger Deakins. Some shots are simply perfect, such as a shot of the adoptive mother lying on a bed gazing at herself in a mirror. Surrounded by the pale, sickly fluorescent green glow that would pervade Chungking Express, she looks like a well-preserved corpse in a museum, a relic of some long-ago epoch were her kind were regal but now simply something to be ogled at through glass. In Yuddy's haste to break free of his mother, we should not forget this image and realize that she, too, didn't get what she wanted out of life.

Days of Being Wild is not only a touchstone of the auteur's career but a landmark of Hong Kong cinema, one that took its primarily Western influences, mixed them with the unique cultural aesthetic crafted by Tian Zhuangzhuang and particularly Zhang Yimou, and spit out arthouse beauty universally appealing to cinephiles (though the film did flop upon its original release). It frames its characters in mirrors, reflecting their images back at them, and to us. The film is all about images, the way that we perceive them and remember them. When Yuddy at last convinces Su to go home with him, Wong inserts a shot of a clock, a dull thud amidst the visual poetry that marks the time and date of the event, as Su will never forget when she allowed herself to be abused. Wong also frame his characters quite often behind bars of some kind, containing them as they trap themselves in their tangled web of desire and loathing. The entire film is a flashback, traversing different point of views and unfocused time duration, but the message is clear: with Days of Being Wild, Wong Kar-wai displayed a deep understanding of the cinema, that when all else is stripped away, we still have images, and thus we must derive our emotions, our very being, from them.

In the Mood For Love

True visual splendor is surprisingly rare in the new millennium. Oh, high-resolution digital cameras and video have progressed to the point that even home movies can look "better" than the real world, and computer effects open infinite possibilities. But the majority of films that stake a claim to eye-popping visuals tend to overload with the digital stuff at the expense of looking sterile and safe, even in ostensibly tense action and suspense sequences. No, I'm talking about good, old-fashioned beauty, the kind that auteurs have been assembling long before George Lucas' brain tank at ILM signaled a new age for Hollywood. Directors such as Orson Welles, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock (to say nothing of the precise craftsmanship of the French New Wave filmmakers) produced some of the most resplendent films ever made. Wong Kar-Wai, in contrast to the most commercially successful efforts of his contemporaries Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, very much looks to the old style of filmmaking for inspiration.

In the Mood For Love, Wong's 7th full-length picture, is one of the most meticulously crafted films I have ever seen, and a better argument for the importance of Hong Kong cinema than Lee's or even the early output of action legend John Woo. Its craftsmanship is even more impressive when you consider the director's improvisatory nature; indeed, he began with little more than actors Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who slowly crafted their characters and a story, and somewhere along the way Wong set up a camera and documented the rest. But I invite everyone who watches this film to spot a moment of sloppy editing or plotless meandering.

Set in 1962 Hong Kong, In the Mood For Love charts the paths of a platonic romance between two neighbors. Leung plays Mr. Chow, a newspaper reporter, while Cheung is Su Li-zhien, an executive assistant. They both have the capital to live in far more comfortable conditions, but space is an issue in the rapidly overcrowding region (both Su and the friendly landlady, Mrs. Suen, are from Shanghai and speak that dialect as opposed to Cantonese, reflecting the influx of different cultures into the city). The two meet and gradually strike up a friendship, then they realize with horror that both of their spouses always seem to be missing at the same time.

The revelation of their spouses' infidelity brings the two closer. They meet more often, and not in romantic, glamorized locations. Very little time passes before both evidently fall in love, and Wong reflects this by turning all of the grotty urban sprawl that they traverse into something beautiful. It strikes me as Scorsese's New York, where such decay reflected the hopeless emotional turmoil of his leads. But Wong softens his city with bright colors and floral patterns; after all, even though our characters may be doomed, they're in love. But they do not allow themselves to consummate their relationship, saying it would make them no better than their spouses. Both agree to this out of...what? Social norms? Personal ethics? They clearly want the other to say "That's a load of rubbish. Why can't we be happy?" but they're both afraid to say it.

So the film becomes a paean to unrequited love, one in which the camera has to do all the work we expect the characters to do. That is to say, every pan, every tilt, every cut contains a sexual undertone. The two meet in claustrophobic locations, or the camera makes open spaces seem cramped, highlighting their proximity yet their perpetual uneasiness. Su's dresses become a sort of fetish, her bright floral outfits piercing the muted colors of the world around her and making her that much more attractive.

They even go a bit mental after the pressure builds a little too much. One scene in particular stands out: at the start of the scene, Su turns to Chow and bluntly asks "Do you have a mistress?" The conversation begins to play out until, at last, we discover that the two are engaged in a sort of game, role-playing their cheating significant others in order to get answers they're too cowardly and restrained to demand of the real person. Wong compared Tony Leung's character to Jimmy Stewart's in Vertigo and, while Chow isn't nearly as intense or deranged, they both harbor an inner turmoil belied by their charming outer appearance. For the two to play out these sick fantasies to both string along their own flawed sense of moral duty and find hollow comfort shows just how deranged their spouses' affairs have made them and how Chow and Su are preventing themselves from moving on.

The ending brings an inevitable conclusion, but a surprising one, given the American mindset when it comes to romance. Love in Wong's world hearkens back to the unrequited poets composing sonnets for the women who barely acknowledged their existence if they noticed at all; in this world, relationships are imagined and eroticism and sex are reserved for fantasies with the one you adore. With gentle camera movements and elegant mise-en-scène, Wong Kar-Wai captures these feelings (and a great many more) in ways that appear simultaneously stylized and real. The deleted scenes on the Criterion DVD set up a meeting between the two past the film's official end, a brief moment that doesn't add or detract anything but somewhat undercuts the reality of it all. Many times love simply doesn't pan out, and that's the beautiful tragedy of it all.