“Ashes of Time” - Wong Kar Wai (1994)

“The root of man’s problems is memory.”

The films of Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) range across a number of genres – film noir, sci-fi, wenyi pian (Chinese melodrama) and wuxia (Chinese martial arts) – but they all carry Wong’s renowned flavor of romantic melancholia no matter what the setting. So Ashes of Time (Dongxié Xidú; literally: "Eastern Heretic, Western Poison", 1994), which was Wong’s lone foray into the popular wuxia genre, did not devote much screen time to the kinetic swordplay typical of wuxia films, and instead focused more on philosophical and personal motivational issues.

The story for the film was inspired by the popular wuxia novel by Jin Yong (Louis Cha) The Legend of the Condor Heroes (1957) that was set in the late Song dynasty.  But Wong did not follow that novel’s narrative, and Ashes of Time only drew elements from some of the novel’s characters.  Wong was more interested in pursuing his own intuitive themes in accordance with his unique mise-en-scene.  Since Wong and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, often made  changes to what they wanted on the shooting set, his films often ran well over their intended production schedules and budgets, and these problems were compounded by the location shooting of Ashes of Time in an arid, desolate area of western China.  So it was not particularly surprising that the film took two years to complete and ran way over budget. 

When the film was "completed" and originally released in 1994, it was not much of a commercial success.  But it did seem to go down well with the critical community in Hong Kong and elsewhere.  For the 1995 Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, it won the awards for Best Film, Best Director (Wong Kar Wai), Best Actor (Leslie Cheung), and Best Screenplay (Wong Kar Wai). And at the 1994 Venice Film Festival, it won the award for Best Cinematography (Christopher Doyle).

In some respects, though, Wong may always be reluctant to think his films are ever really “complete” – there are always some desired changes that may come to mind later.  So in 2008 when Wong went to rescue the endangered negatives of Ashes of Time, he used the occasion to make some further changes to the film.  This involved correcting the color palette, adding some intertitles, reducing some screen time devoted to wuxia swordplay, and introducing moody theme music by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.  Altogether these adjustments probably reflected Wong’s evolving aesthetic which in the meantime had resulted in his excellent films  In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). I have not seen the original 1994 version of Ashes of Time, but I have no doubts that Wong’s changes improved the film.  The resulting re-edit is known as Ashes of Time Redux (2008), and my review is based on that version [1,2].

The story of Ashes of Time concerns the activities and desires of four master swordsmen in that long ago era.  What is the makeup of such men?  What drives them?  Wong offers the viewer four different takes on these issues and hints that ancient Chinese metaphysical notions of qi may provide insight on these matters.  Qi is vital “energy”, two essential forms of which are yin and yang [3,4,5].  Yin and yang pervade everything in the world to various degrees.

“yang was associated with the masculine, the forceful, and the bright, while yin was associated with the feminine, the yielding, and the obscure.” [3]

“The underlying polarity of Yang and Yin thus begins with light vs. dark and extends not only into high vs. low, creative vs. receptive, firm vs. yielding, moving vs. resting, and masculine vs. feminine, but also into many other areas of human concern, including the sun and the moon, the weather, the parts of the body, and even the distinction between gods (all Yang) and ghosts (all Yin).” [4]

Yin and yang are always present, like two sides of an object, but they can often be out of balance – one of them can be overly dominant – which can lead to disasters and suffering.  In Ashes of Time the balance of yin and yang is manifested in the characters to varying degrees.  This effects two basic areas of their desires:

• fame, fortune, and honor – which I would interpret as yang-oriented,
• love – which I would interpret as yin-oriented.

The four martial artists of interest are

• Ouyang Feng (played by Leslie Cheung).  He is a skilled swordsman, but now spends his time as a broker who hires other skilled swordsmen to commit murders for his clients.
• Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-fai) is a famed swordsman from the east who makes yearly visits to his friend Ouyang Feng.
• The Blind Swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is a friend of Yaoshi and is losing his eyesight, so his days as a skilled sword fighter are numbered.
• Hong Qigong (Jacky Cheung) is a local (to Feng’s area) ruffian who works for Feng and  seeks fame as a martial artist.

The film’s narrative is sectioned into five seasons, each of which are introduced by lines from the Chinese Buddhist Canon and the Tung Shu (aka Tung Shing), which is an ancient Chinese book of divination.

1.  Spring
In the opening section Yaoshi makes his annual visit to Feng and offers him some wine that he was given that makes a person lose his memory. The wine-giver had told Yaoshi that this wine was useful, because "the root of man’s problems is memory." Yaoshi then drinks from the wine jug, but Feng abstains. Later Yaoshi visits his best friend’s (the Blind Swordsman’s) home town to attend his friend’s wedding to a woman named “Peach Blossom” (Carina Lau).  Something goes wrong, and we will later learn that Peach Blossom is in love with Yaoshi.

Later Yaoshi and Feng, separately and on separate occasions, meet what appear to be a brother and sister, Murong Yang and Murong Yin (both played by Brigitte Lin), but who later turn out to be two sides of a single person with a split personality.  Murong Yang and Murong Yin are fundamentally at odds with each other because of their contrasting yang and yin dominance.  Both siblings want to hire Feng to commit murders that they think will solve their problems.  This section includes a scene where Murong Yin approaches Feng while he is sleeping and furtively gives him sensual caresses, which he senses.  But for both of them, the caresses invoke dreams of someone else that they love but have lost – Murong Yin dreams of Yaoshi, and Feng dreams of the woman (Maggie Cheung) who spurned him to marry his brother.   As Feng says, “some people don’t realize who they love until they’ve left that person behind.”  (Hereafter I will refer to the character played by Maggie Cheung as OFSIL – Ouyang Feng’s Sister-in-law).

2.  Summer 
In the summertime an impoverished girl (Charlie Yeung) with only a mule to offer comes to Feng hoping he can arrange a revenge killing of some militia men who murdered her brother.  Feng, who is only coldly interested in money, refuses her offer, but he is attracted to her because she reminds him of OFSIL.

Then the Blind Swordsman arrives.  He, too, is attracted to the girl with the mule, because she reminds him of his estranged wife, Peach Blossom. Feng has arranged for him to fight a band of about a hundred bandits who have been harassing a local village.  With his sight rapidly failing the Blind Swordsman hopes that the sunlight will be bright on the day of the battle.  In the event, though, the sun passes behind a cloud momentarily obscuring the Blind Swordsman’s poor vision, and he is killed.

3.  Autumn 
This section introduces Hong Qigong, a barefoot swordsman with dreams of glory.  Feng arranges for him to fight the bandits, and despite a heavy sandstorm to interfere with things, Hong Qigong fights them off.  But Hong Qigong wants more than Feng’s money, he wants honor, and he agrees to fight the revenge battle for the girl with the mule.  Although he loses a finger in the ensuing battle, he does enact the sought-for revenge, and he treasures his honor.

4.  Winter 
In this section the subject is lost love.  Although Huang Yaoshi is loved by Murong Yin and Peach Blossom, the woman he really longs for is Ouyang Feng’s sister-in-law (OFSIL).  So both Yaoshi and Feng yearn for the same unattainable woman (although OFSIL still seems to have a hidden love for Feng).  Every year after his visit with Feng, Yaoshi visits OFSIL to let her secretly know how Feng is doing.   OFSIL had rejected Feng because he was too proud to tell her that he loved her. So it was a battle of (yang) egos back then.  But now she is fatalistic about love; she tells Yaoshi:

“Nothing really matters anymore. I used to think some words were so important.  Once spoken, they’d last a lifetime. But looking back, I realized it makes no difference. Everything changes. . . . I always thought I was the winner . . . until one day I looked in the mirror and saw the face of a loser. . . . During the best years of my life, the person I love was not by my side.“

Then there is this exchange between OFSIL and Yaoshi:

OFSIL: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go back to the past. . . . You’re his good friend.  Why haven’t you told him I was here?

Yaoshi: “I made you a promise, so I kept silent.”

OFSIL: “You are too honest.”

Shortly afterwards OFSIL falls ill and passes away.  Before she dies, she gives Yaoshi the magic bottle of wine mentioned in the film’s beginning that makes one forget, so that Feng will forget about her.

5.  Spring  
The final section is even more elegiacal.  Yaoshi stops visiting Feng, who later learns of OFSIL’s death.  Feng then solemnly reflects on what he has accomplished in life by his selfish ways.

“I learned that the best way to avoid rejection is to reject others first.”

He finally decides to drink from the memory-cancelling wine jug, but to no avail.  He then reflects:

"That wine was just a joke she played on me.  The more you try to forget, the better you’ll remember.”

In the end, Ashes of Time is not really about wuxia heroism.  It is more about Wong’s themes on the memories of missed romantic connections, and the film’s English title is well chosen.  The wuxia battles that do appear in the film offer a blizzard of blurry action shots, mostly in closeup, but they are merely chaotic and have no real progression to them.  Some people might like some of the stop-action slowmo effects, but I thought that the fight scenes were just a distraction and Wong was right to cut some of them out.  Overall, however, the cinematography is very effective, with emotive closeups and atmospheric landscapes that convey the emotional landscape.

In fact it is the crisscrossed human relationships that intrigue one as the film moves along. Gradually one learns that the Blind Swordsman loves Peach Blossom, who loves Huang Yaoshi, who is also loved by Murong Yin but who really loves OFSIL, who loves Ouyang Feng, who in turn loves the no-longer-available OFSIL. However, the yang-driven pride and acquisitiveness don’t provide much satisfaction in this story.

• Ouyang Feng just wanted money in order to arrange for murders.   And it was his pride that blocked him from declaring his love to OFSIL.
• OFSIL’s pride caused her to reject Feng.
• Huang Yaoshi wanted fame and honor
• The Blind Swordsman vowed revenge on Yaoshi concerning Peach Blossom, but was blocked by his poor eyesight from carrying it out.
• Hong Qigong wanted personal honor.
• The girl with the mule wanted revenge.
• Murong Yang wanted revenge
• Murong Yin wanted Feng to kill Murong Yang (i.e. suicide).
• And an offhand reference is made to Feng and Hong Qigong much later engaging in a duel that resulted in them taking each other's life. 

Where did all these prideful feelings get them in the end?  It all adds up to just wanting to kill memories and/or score points on some mythical scoreboard.  When Ouyang Feng and the Blind Swordsman do, on separate occasions, try to engage romantically with women, their actions are clumsy and self-centered.  The only one who seems to treasure the present is Huang Yaoshi, who loves visiting OFSIL:

“Though I have always loved her [OFSIL], I have kept it a secret, because I know that untouched fruit is the sweetest."

But this is a limited consolation.  In the end what we see in Ashes of Time, and perhaps Wong is suggesting in wuxia stories generally, is that yin and yang are out of balance on this stage.  Wong effectively conveys in this film the feeling that there needs to be more consideration and support given to yin.
★★★

Notes:

1. Fernando F. Croce, “Ashes of Time Redux”, Slant Magazine, (26 September 2008). 
2. Stephen O. Murray, “No Longer Opaque, but Complicated and Difficult Wong Kar-wai Movie”, Epinions, (3 March 2010). 
3. Franklin Perkins, “Metaphysics in Chinese Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2 April 2015).  
4. Charles E. Osgood and Meredith Martin Richards, “Yang and Yin to and or but”, Language, Vol. 49, No. 2, (June 1973), pp. 380-412.
5. Robin R. Wang, “Yinyang (Yin-yang)”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (September 2006).  

“2046” - Wong Kar Wai (2004)

“Love is all a matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. . . . If I'd lived in another time or place, my story might have had a very different ending.”

– Chow Mo-wan in 2046

The films of writer-director Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) always seem to be laden with a romantic expressionism that is not just a background mood but the very substance of what is being told.  It is as if the viewer is presented not so much with a story, but with a visually orchestrated “tone poem” [1].  This was particularly true of the string of films Wong made from 1990 to 2004, which culminated with his magisterial 2046.

Throughout his career, Wong has employed an off-the-cuff production style whereby he has begun shooting his films without a script in hand and has more or less made things up as he has gone along.  This has invariably led to massive cost and shooting-schedule overruns, as Wong has continued to reshoot, cut out, and re-edit major aspects of his works in progress.  And these improvisational production habits seem to have expanded over the years.  Wong’s preceding film, In the Mood for Love (2000) took 15 months to shoot, and 2046 was five years in the making [2,3,4].  Although those two films were originally conceived as two separate and unconnected works, their overlapping and evolving production led to 2046 being a direct sequel to In the Mood for Love.

The story of 2046, like the earlier Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love, is set in Hong Kong during the 1960s, which was a turbulent period of rapid growth for the city that perhaps may be an historically mythic image for today’s Hong Kongers in the same way as the “Roaring Twenties” has been for Americans.  The title “2046" has several references, the futuristic one of which led some people to assume (partly encouraged by some misleading pre-release publicity) that 2046 would essentially be a sci-fi film.  There is indeed a sci-fi narrative fantasy thread in the film, but the film is very much situated in the 60s.

Since those three Wong films occupy successive periods of the 60s and have some common personages in their stories, they are sometimes referred to as a trilogy.  However, the linkage with Days of Being Wild is rather weak, and familiarity with that story is not necessary for appreciating 2046.  On the other hand, I would say you really need to have seen In the Mood for Love first in order to fully appreciate what is going on in 2046. (Note that Wong once commented that it would be best to see 2046 first [2], but I disagree.)  One might argue this close dependence on another film for narrative background is a flaw (one of several) in 2046, but the film has enough virtues to overcome such weaknesses.

The story of “In the Mood for Love” is set in the mid-1960s and concerns the growing but tantalizing affection between a man and woman, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen,  who are already married to separate spouses.  They discover that their two spouses are having an affair with each other, which brings Chow and Su together in sympathy but places moral inhibitions in the way of their own mutual ardor. The entire film is a moody rendition of romantic longing and missed opportunities to express deep feelings.  Eventually Chow and Su abandon their tacit hopes of getting together and go their own ways unfulfilled.

The story of 2046 picks things up where they were left off in the preceding film, with Chow Mo-wan (played again by Tony Chiu Wai Leung) now back in Hong Kong in 1966 after working some time in Singapore. He still moons over Su Li-zhen, but he now seems to be a changed man.  For one thing, there is no mention of his unfaithful wife, so he is evidently disconnected from her.  And whereas in In the Mood for Love Chow was a sensitive and upright individual, in 2046 he is seen to be a more callous, role-playing ladies’ man.  Over the course of 2046, the viewer sees his relationships with several woman with whom he becomes involved. Each of these relationships give Wong Kar Wai the opportunity to explore different sides of time and memory. Part of this cinematic narration involves sequences that are out of time order, suggesting that they are memories that spontaneously emerge in Chow’s mind as he proceeds with life.

There are some stylistic commonalities between the two films of course.

• There is again the moody music of Shigeru Umebayashi, who also composed the music for House of Flying Daggers (2004).  He fills the air with smooth, melancholy rumbas and other dances.
   
• The cinematography again bears the signature of Christopher Doyle (due to the film’s lengthy production period, Doyle once again had to depart at some point, and so the cinematography was also performed by Kwan Pun-leung and Lai Yiu-fai).
   
• The production design and editing was again supervised by William Chang.

But there were also some significant differences in the way the two stories were told.

• The focalization in In the Mood for Love” was balanced between Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen, but here in 2046, the focalization is almost exclusively from Chow’s perspective.  Nevertheless, as with other Wong films, though the focalization is from the male perspective, the focus is squarely on the visages of the women yearning and aching for love that is out of reach.
   
• There is much more dialogue and voiceover in 2046.
   
• Amorous fulfillment and physical eroticism, which were basically absent in In the Mood for Love, are prominently featured in 2046.
   
• And as already mentioned, Chow Mo-wan is less innocent and more selfish in 2046.  But to a certain extent we can understand him a bit more here than, for example, we could understand Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, because we know more about Chow’s past.

The number 2046 in this story has several references and meanings, all of which relate to time and memory.

• 2046 was the apartment room number in In the Mood for Love, where Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen sequestered themselves in order to help Chow write his wuxia (Chinese martial arts) serial novel.  Those were the happiest times for Chow, and 2046 represents a state-of-mind that he would like to return to.
   
• 2046 is also the hotel room number in 2046 that Chow finds when he returns to Hong Kong in 1966.  It turns out to be successively occupied by several different women of interest in this story.
   
• 2046 is the final year of the 50-year agreement (“One Country, Two Systems”) that the Chinese government made with the UK on 1July 1997 to allow Hong Kong to retain its self-governing status for fifty more years.  For many Hong Kongers that suggests that the year 2046 has no perceived future for them.  Thus 2046 symbolizes timelessness.
   
• The sci-fi portion of the film seems to have been directly inspired by a 1959 Twilight Zone episode, “The Lonely” [6]. In it a man in the year 2046 has been condemned to be imprisoned alone on an asteroid for fifty years.  A sympathetic supply-spaceship captain gives the lonely prisoner a feminine android robot to keep him company, and the recipient prisoner gradually falls in love with “her”.

When Chow-wan engages in writing a sci-fi story in the film, he calls it “2046" to suggest a mystical time and place one can go to retrieve lost memories.  Later when he tries to write a more optimistic story about undying love, he calls it “2047".  Although both stories are set in the future, they are, of course, all about Chow’s present state of mind.

The principal women characters with whom Chow has relationships are performed in this film by an all-star lineup of astonishingly beautiful and emotive actresses: Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung, and Carina Lau. They each embody different perspectives on lost love:

• Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), who was Chow’s out-of-reach love in In the Mood for Love, only appears in a few brief flashback shots in this film, but she still haunts his memories.
   
• “Black Spider” (Gong Li) is a mysterious professional woman gambler that Chow met in Singapore after the end of his relationship with Su Li-zhen.  Chow is attracted to her because she reminds him of his lost love, and he is later surprised to learn that Black Spider’s real name happens also to be Su Li-zhen (but she is a different woman).  Black Spider is romantically attracted to Chow, too, but she seems to have her own painful romantic memories that she is trying to flee, and to a certain extent she mirrors Chow.  That fact seems to dissuade her from advancing their relationship.  Chow recalls how he invited her to come with him back to Hong Kong, to which she said she would agree  only if he could beat her in an unwinnable (because she is a skilled cardsharp) card draw.
   
• Lulu (Carina Lau), who now uses her stage name, Mimi, was a major figure in Days of Being Wild.  In that film she was in love with the narcissistic and doomed Yuddy, and here in 2046 she is shown trying to bury her memories by dissolving herself in a string of jealousy-laden affairs. For this desperate woman there are now no memories, only the present. When she meets Chow after having known him (perhaps intimately) earlier, she cannot even remember him. She is the first occupant of room 2046, which is next door to Chow’s.  Her relationship with Chow is only briefly covered in the film, and I wonder if more material concerning the two of them was the victim of Wong’s late-in-the-day editing cuts.
   
• Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong) is the beautiful daughter of Chow’s landlord and is the second (and later the fourth) occupant of room 2046.  She is passionately in love with a young Japanese man (Takuya Kimura), whose marriage proposal to her is blocked by her father’s angry memories of the Japanese War.  Chow develops a platonic relationship with Jing-wen, and during her later occupancy of room 2046, the two of them collaborate on Chow’s sci-fi novel writing.  This innocent authorial teamwork together echoes Chow’s earlier collaboration with Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, and similar to that occasion, a growing affection for Jing-wen creeps up on Chow.  And as was also the case in that earlier film, Chow is hesitant to express his true feelings for the woman;  eventually he even facilitates the re-engagement and marriage of Wang Jing-wen with her Japanese lover.
   
• Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) is a beautiful nightclub hostess who is the third occupant of room 2046.  The name ‘Bai Ling’, incidentally but probably not accidentally, happens to match that of another famous and voluptuous Hong Kong movie actress who has had a tempestuous personal life.  Here in 2046 our Bai Ling is a lascivious coquette who attracts men with her kittenish and seductive ways. Like the Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, she wears body-hugging cheongsam outfits that show of her slender and curvaceous figure. Chow Mo-wan cannot help noticing this, and soon he is making all his moves on the woman.  They start off as “drinking buddies”, but their mutual sexual attraction has only one destination: the bed.  Because Bai Ling works as a taxi dancer and has a number of male customers, her relationship with Chow has the appearance of a game, and he carelessly insults her by paying her for her “services”.  But despite appearances, Bai Ling is not truly toying with Chow in this relationship and is not so self-seeking.  Soon she falls deeply in love with Chow and struggles to elevate their relationship above its artificial role-playing. Their relationship occupies a major portion of the film, and it is highlighted by their several extremely erotic sexual encounters.  Eventually the frustrated Bai Ling demands to be Chow’s exclusive woman, and when he flippantly refuses, she terminates their relationship out of frustration.

The nonlinear storytelling of 2046 covers all of these relationships, as well as dramatizations of Chow’s sci-fi tale, which feature a futuristic version of Wang Jing-wen’s Japanese boyfriend, Tak (but actually representing Chow’s persona), traveling on a train to and from the mysterious destination of 2046, where lost memories can be regained and dwelled upon.  While traveling on the train, Tak encounters a beautiful android (Faye Wong again) with whom he falls in love, just like the earlier-mentioned Twilight Zone episode.  Tak invites the android to leave with him, but for various hypothesized reasons (mechanical wear and tear, emotional indifference, . . .), she only passively receives but never responds affirmatively to his caresses and proposal.  Tak sadly retells to her Chow’s story from In the Mood for Love about how one buries a secret forever:

“Before, when people had secrets they didn’t want to share, they’d climb a mountain.  They’d find a tree and carve a hole in it and whisper the secret into the hole.  Then cover it with mud.  That way, noone else would ever discover it.”

But his android only makes a game of the sad story’s carved hole by imitating it with her fingers.  Tak also invites another android (Carina Lau) to leave with him, but again he gets only acquiescence and no positive uptake.  Again the problem is memories.  In Tak's case the problem is that the androids he encounters don't seem to have much in the way of memories.

If we think about things on a more general level, we can say that all human relationships entail memories, which provide the very basis for future hopes and dreams. Indeed our primordial understanding of time, itself, is based on the way we construct narratives out of remembered incidents and expectations [7,8].  However, the problem with revisiting a treasured memory is that the past wonderful experience necessarily included expectations and dreams which later either materialized in some definite way or did not. Either way, they no longer retain the magical nature of the accompanying dreams.  Even so, we tend to dwell on our fond memories because of the beautiful dreams that they still invoke.  As film critic Stephen Teo has remarked [3],

“Desire is better felt than satisfied.  It lasts longer. . .”

So our pasts, i.e. all of our memories, are actually narratives that we have constructed.  When we want to physically return to a memory, we cannot really go back there, because its at-the-time accompanying future component has now vanished.  In this way a remembered time is like the year 2046 for Hong Kongers: it has no real future, no dreams that may come true. In 2046 Chow Mo-wan is struggling to come to grips with this realization.

Wong Kar Wai and his production team go over these feelings with sublime elegance in 2046. Because we are dealing with evaporating memories – rather than sitting on the knife-edge of anticipation as in In the Mood for Love – this film is much faster paced. Note also that 2046 was Wong’s first to be shot in cinemascope, and he employed many interesting framings and figure compositions with that format.  For example there are numerous wide-screen closeups with the figure off to one side and facing the short side of the frame.  This runs counter to the convention of balancing the frame “weight” by having an off-centered figure facing into the frame’s open space.  But these closeup frames in 2046 were artfully composed so that the imagery behind the closeup figure’s head was  shadowy and in soft-focus and so did not distract the viewer’s attention.  The overall effect was to enhance, without distraction, the feeling of cramped confinement, which is always a feature of Wong’s crowded but lonely urban environments.  Further contributing to these effects and feelings were

• the artful short depth-of-focus shots taken in comparatively deep visual fields such that only a part of the subject matter of interest is in focus;
   
• the occasional closeups focusing on moving feet or hands of a principal woman, which mysteriously blends well with the moody dance-theme music that pervades the background throughout the film;
   
• the numerous well-composed shots with mirrors such that the subject figures are seen from multiple perspectives.

All of these effects and more pull the viewer into Chow Mo-wan’s dreamlike reveries of past memories, most of which recall and evoke past feelings of loneliness and some of which resonate in the mind long after the film finishes.  There are moments of passion, too.  For example just before Chow and Black Spider part for the final time (at her behest, not his), they engage in a passionate 35-second kiss that embodies all his fervor for wanting to be with her.  And there are the intensely erotic scenes with Bai Ling that convey her romantic zeal for Chow.

Like many people with no family, Chow was particularly lonely on Christmas Eve, and the film focuses on his memories of successive Christmas Eves throughout the late 1960s, when he was particularly in need of feminine company.  His 1967 Christmas Eve was spent with Bai Ling.  His 1968 Christmas Eve was with Wang Jing-win.  And he spent his 1969 Christmas Eve in Singapore looking for Black Spider, who, he was only told, had either died or had returned to her original home in Phnom Penh.

For Chow, these women of interest are occasionally conflated in his memories, and he sometimes mixes them up.  Indeed all five of the key women wear their hair in roughly similar ways, as stylish “updos”.  On this topic I can recall being instructed in film school that if your film project scenario is to have a man involved with two women, you should make sure that one of the women is a blonde and the other a brunette.  This would ensure visual distinctiveness.  Here Wong Kar Wai does just the opposite, but it is more realistic.  Men are often attracted to women who unconsciously evoke past memories in their minds, and so there may be physical similarities to the women they seek.  So it apparently was with Chow.

But despite some fashion similarities, Chow’s women in 2046 are very different with respect to their own memories.  Some of those memories are closed off by past events and are only obstructive for future engagement. Lulu wants to forget her memories and wallow in present-moment sensuality.  Black Spider cannot escape her own sad memories.  Wang Jing-wen’s memories of her Japanese boyfriend were for a time thought to have been closed off, too.  But Chow selflessly helped her resurrect those dreams, even though they didn’t involve him.

However, It is Bai Ling’s memories that offer the truly fertile ground of an open future for Chow.  She remembers the joy the two of them had experienced together and wants to continue the engagement.  “Why can’t it be like it was before?”, she begs him.  

There it is, staring him in the face – a romantic future with someone who lovingly offers him her body and soul.  Indeed it is this unnecessarily shortened relationship that is the key to the film and elevates it to greatness.  Without Zhang Ziyi’s soulful depiction of Bai Ling’s passionate ardor, the film would not have ascended into this sublime sphere of Wong Kar Wai artistry.  This is the most moving and effective screen performance I have seen from her.
 
But Chow cannot extricate himself from both his own self-centered memories and his now customary Casanova-style role-playing. So he coldly lets her go.  At the end a hitherto unheard external voiceover comments:

“It was if he had boarded a very long train, heading for a drowsy future through the unfathomable night.”

★★★★

Notes:

1. Acquarello, “08-28-04: Editions Dis Voir: Wong Kar Wai by Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai”, Journal Notes, Strictly Film School, (28 August 2004).
2. Chale Nafus, “2046", Austin Film Society, (n.d.).
3. Stephen Teo, “2046: A Matter of Time, A Labour of Love”, Senses of Cinema, (April 2005). 
4. Nathan Lee, “Elusive Objects of Desire”, Film Comment, (July/August 2005). 
5. Ian Johnston, “Unhappy Together: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046", The Bright lights Film Journal, (31 January  2005).  
6. "The Lonely”, The Twilight Zone, (13 November 1959), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_(The_Twilight_Zone)    
7. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, (1984, 1985, 1988), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), Harper & Row.

“In the Mood for Love” - Wong Kar Wai (2000)

In the 1990s the uniquely romantic films of Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) burst upon the scene as almost a new form of cinematic expression, something like a Hong Kong nouvelle vague.  Each of his films during this period – As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), and Happy Together (1997) – featured Wong’s moody depictions of amorous yearning that seem to wander about in search of any form of structured plot [1].  His In the Mood for Love (Faa Yeung Nin Wa, 2000) was a continuation of this style and is perhaps the Wong film we remember the most.

For all of his films, Wong would begin shooting without having a script in hand and would more or less make things up a he went along.  What he did have in mind was not really a story (in its usual sense) but a mood.  So he would reshoot scenes many times looking for a particular angle that he had only vaguely in mind and had not pre-articulated.  Naturally this usually led to enormous shooting ratios and schedule overruns.  For example the shooting of In the Mood for Love took 15 months.  The results are not to all tastes.  Some people find his films aimless and boring; others find his films richly rewarding [2].  I am one of the latter type, and I think Wong’s films push the boundaries of creative cinematic expression.

Films often have two main narrative threads: one involving some quest in the external world and another focused on the (usually romantic) relationship between two principal characters. Both threads have a goal, a target to be reached, with possible adversaries potentially blocking attainment of the goals.  With Wong films, however, any external goals are obscure, and the focus is almost entirely on the relationship thread.  But the relationship thread lacks clearly defined goals, too, and often doesn’t seem to go anywhere.  Nevertheless, there is something unusually enchanting about Wong’s stories all the same.  He is always the Master of the Broken Heart.

In the Mood for Love represented to some extent the epitome of Wong’s moody style, taking his aesthetic expression of unfulfilled longing to its furthest point. As usual with Wong, the film featured big-name Hong Kong (and often Cantopop) stars, in this case Maggie Cheung (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) and Tony Leung (Tony Chiu Wai Leung).  And once again Wong worked with his usual creative assistants:

• Christopher Doyle, the wondrously expressive cinematographer whose camera stylistics were always an integral part of Wong’s mise-en-scene.  On this occasion, though, because Wong’s off-the-cuff directorial style led to 15 months of shooting, which interfered with prearranged Doyle commitments, Doyle had to leave the project before shooting was finished.  His replacement was the equally gifted Mark Lee Ping Bin, who was Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s regular cinematographer. So Doyle and Lee Ping Bin shared the cinematography credits for this film.
   
• William Chang, who is credited with both production design and film editing.

What they create is a melancholy embodiment of urban alienation.  A key feature of this is Wong’s depiction of the always-crowded nature of city life.  In Wong’s environments, space is so cramped, one can barely move around or even find a place to sit; and privacy, as well as private spaces, are out of the question.  This is particularly the case and almost a signature aspect of life in Hong Kong, and it was probably doubly intense there in the 1960s, when this film is set.  Wong’s family had immigrated to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1963, when he was five years old, and his experiences growing up in that environment probably left their mark on him [3]. His early Wong-style breakout film Days of Being Wild was also set in Hong Kong in 1960.

This alienation, and hence internalization, is enhanced by both the sentimental soundtrack music and the short depth-of-focus interior cinematography. The lack of privacy feeling and reflective alienation is accentuated by all the mirror reflections shown in the shots where the two principal characters are alone together.  These are trademark Wong effects. But there are some interesting narrative innovations, too:

• For example there is no voiceover narration expressing the internal thoughts and feelings of a principal character, as is common in Wong’s earlier films.  So the narrative witness doesn’t get a special perch inside the thoughtful mind (i.e. expressible in text) of any character.  All the narrative witness has available are the external images (which, admittedly given the above-mentioned mise-en-scene, are expressionistic) and the music.
   
• But even with respect to the external images, the narrative witness (i.e. the viewer) doesn’t get any visual exposure to something crucial that we know must affect the feelings of the two principal characters, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan.  Both of them are hurt by their respective spouses’ marital infidelities, and they must often be thinking of their spouses and what led them to be unfaithful. Yet the viewer is never shown the faces of the two adulterous partners; we are only left to imagine what they might look like.

These two narrative effects are curious, because they somewhat distance the viewer from the focalization of interest – what is going on inside the minds of the two protagonists.  All the viewer has available to digest are the polite social gestures, which are made in the context of a not-so-private social environment.  So the viewer, like the two protagonists, must try to make out the extent of any amorous feelings on the part of the other in a somewhat constricted environment. Note that from I have been told, the lack of privacy, as characterized in the West, is a generic characteristic of Chinese society. One must operate there largely in a public space, and maintaining appearances and decorum is an important concern for social survival.

All of these circumstances and expressionistic effects combine to give one the feeling of being on the verge of falling in love.  This, of course, is a magical, thrilling feeling, but it is often only momentary. It is a tipping point that cannot last – either it happens or it doesn’t happen.  It then moves on to some other, more stable state.  Even films that capture this moment, such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), only hold on to it for a moment. In contrast, the beauty of Wong’s In the Mood for Love is that this knife-edge tipping point of falling in love is maintained for much of the entire film.  That makes the film a rare viewing experience.

Although the film, like most of Wong’s films, doesn’t have a clearly structured plot (that is why Wong can add or delete scenes in the editing stage without much change to overall presentation), we can identify five general phases through which the narrative passes.

1.  Meeting in Hong Kong, 1962
In the beginning it is 1962, and a young woman, Su Li-zhen (played by Maggie Cheung), who is also referred to as Mrs. Chan, arranges to rent an available room for herself and her husband from an apartment owner, Mrs. Suen, in crowded Hong Kong.  Almost at the same time a young man, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), also seeks a room for himself and his wife and finds that the next-door apartment, owned by the Koos, has a single room available. So Su and Chow move in and become neighbors and, given the crowded apartment conditions, occasionally bump into each other.

We soon learn that both Su Li-zhen’s husband and Chow’s wife have jobs that involve business trips and night shifts that often keep them away from home.   So Su and Chow frequently find themselves separately going to a local noodle shop for dinner and sometimes run into each other there.

Note that Maggie Cheung also appeared in Wong’s Days of Being Wild, which was made a decade earlier but which was also set in Hong Kong in 1960.  In addition, Cheung’s character in that film had the same name, Su Li-zhen.  This has led a number of reviewers to presume that the two roles are the same character [4].  I don’t think so, however. The two characters played by Cheung are quite different – they dress and act very differently, and, of course, Cheung is now ten years older.  I think it is more a matter of Wong making a sly reference (or homage) to another of his works, something that he has done many times (see, for example my review of Fallen Angels).

2.  Discovering Infidelity
In the second phase of the film, Chow and Su gradually suspect that their two spouses (whose faces are never shown in the film – they are only sometimes fleetingly seen from behind) are having an extra-marital affair with each other.  Finally Chow invites Su out to dinner, and they share and confirm their  suspicions.  But now they are getting to know each other more and seem to tentatively be attracted to each other.

3.  A Growing Relationship
Su and Chow are still only politely acquainted, but they start doing little favors for each other.  Chow gets Su to agree to help him with his project of writing a wuxia (Asian martial arts) serial.  But their meetings have to be clandestine given their nosey landlords and neighbors.  Eventually Chow rents a hotel room where they can meet and work on his wuxia writing.  Su cautiously agrees, but assures him, “we won’t be like them”, meaning they will not stoop to the sordid level of their marriage partners. 

The hotel room where they meet has a room number of 2046, which has special meaning for Hong Kongers, since that is the date when Hong Kong’s right to maintain a separate administrative and economic system expires. The scenes shot in this room are particularly atmospheric because of the short-focus and moving-camera cinematography in the context of numerous mirrors.  The multiple mirror images intensify the growing sense of attraction between Chow and Su, and this is a film highlight.

These trysts are finally interfered with when the busybody Mrs. Suen lectures Su about her unseemly practice of going out alone at night.  Chow and Su do have further meetings, though, but they are only by happenstance and still clandestine.  Finally Chow tells Su that he is going to take an indefinite posting in Singapore, because he knows that the cautious Su will never have the guts to leave her husband.  He also finally admits to her that he loves her.

4.  Singapore, 1963
As he is about to leave, Chow invites Su to go with him to Singapore.  She hesitates, and when she finally goes to see Chow, he has already left.  This whole phase of the film is a series of missed opportunities for the two of them finally getting together.  It is clear that they love each other, but social propriety holds them back from making the definitive gesture.  Su had earlier been given a free boat ticket to Singapore, and she does go, but again they don’t make the true connection.

On one occasion in Singapore while conversing with his colleague Ping, Chow tells him despondently how in “the old days” people would bury a secret.  They would carve a hole in the trunk of a remote mountain tree, whisper their secret into the hole, and then fill the hole up with dirt and depart forever.  Such is Chow’s sad mood of melancholic resignation.

5. 1966
The story then jumps forward to 1966.  Su, after a long absence and now with a small son, returns to visit Mrs. Suen and learns that the woman is moving away.  So Su inquires about buying Mrs. Suen’s apartment.  Shortly thereafter Chow returns and visits the next-door Koo apartment, where he learns that the Koos have moved away and that the next-door apartment formerly occupied by the Suens is now occupied by a young woman and her son (suggesting that Su is no longer with her husband).  Chow looks at the apartment door where Su presumably lives, but he doesn’t make the connection, and he passes by without knocking.

The closing scenes show Chow visiting the Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia.  Angkor Wat, a colossal, now-empty 900-year-old Hindu and Buddhist temple complex, is itself a haunting site that you must visit someday.  It evokes in the mind a vast lost world of innumerable stories and secrets.  Chow finds a hole in one of the temple columns and whispers his secret into it. Then he fills the hole with dirt.  And so the mystery of Angkor Wat reminds us of the boundless world of irrecoverable memories.


In the Mood for Love is very much an extended voyage into melancholia.  Throughout the film it sustains a feeling of hopeful yearning for the unearthly experience of love.  It never arrives at the hoped-for destination, though, and leaves one suspended on the knife-edge of falling in love but never arriving at a blissful state. Rather than a conventional narrative account, it has the feel like a series of impressionistic recollections.  Thus to some extent we might say that the film is the ultimate expression of Wong’s romantic expressiveness, and accordingly the film has never lost its appeal.  It is ranked 24th on British Film Institute’s 2012 critics’ list of all-time greatest films, which is the highest rated film from the 21st century [5].
                           
As for me, I liked the film even more on the second viewing.  It is an enduring mood piece that artfully links sound and image to create a feeling of an imminent losing of oneself into love’s ecstatic embrace.  Two memorable aspects of the film come particularly to mind.  One is the soulful music, especially the recurring mournful cello music of “Yumeji’s Theme”, which comes to stand for the lovers’ doomed romantic inclinations.  There is also the velvety music of Nat King Cole that suggests an otherworldly romantic innocence far removed from our world of mundane activities [6].

Another key element of the film is the subtle and touching performance of Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen. Perpetually clad in long, body-hugging cheongsam gowns, which gracefully display her svelte and sensuous figure, Cheung seems to be an ideal personification here of civilized sensibility.  The cheongsam gown, by the way, was something of a symbol of the modern Chinese woman and became popular in Hong Kong after 1949 when Shainghainese emigrants brought with them the fashion that was then discouraged back in China by the new Communist government.

One can view a few deleted scenes from In the Mood for Love, which are available on distributed DVDs.  Some of them show Chow and Su consummating their love, others show them meeting again in the 1970s and dispassionately revealing how much they have changed since those old days.  However much those scenes may fill in the gaps of a narrative that the viewer may want to learn more about, Wong was wise to leave them out.  The package that he released instead was the ultimate, resonant cinematic embodiment of the haunting “Yumeji’s Theme”.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Kent Jones, “Of Love and the City”, Film Comment, (January/February 2001). 
2. Steve Erickson, “In the Mood for Love: Haunted Heart”, The Criterion Collection, (2 October 2012). 
3. Stephen Teo, “Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love: Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time”, Senses of Cinema, (April 2001).   
4. Li Cheuk-to, “In the Mood for Love”, The Criterion Collection, (4 March 2002). 
5. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).
6. Joanna C. Lee, “Music from In the Mood for Love”, Notes on the Music,  In the Mood for Love, The Web Site, Wong Kar-Wai, (n.d.).  

“Happy Together” - Wong Kar Wai (1997)

The seemingly aimless melancholic meanderings of Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) were extended into the world of gay romance with his Happy Together (Chun Guang Zha Xie, 1997). Whether this was a step forward of backward for Wong remains to be seen. Like his earlier efforts along these general lines, this film didn’t have much of a goal or clear-cut narrative movement other than to follow for awhile the sufferings of people in the throes of romantic heartbreak. Except, of course, this time we are dealing with a gay couple, which to me changes the tune somewhat.

As I have commented on Wong’s earlier films in this vein, As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1993), and Fallen Angels (1995), his films generally take the viewer into a mental space that is entirely different from mainstream cinematic narratives.  Rather than telling a story about people on a narrative journey that seeks out some goal(s) and usually comes to some conclusion, Wong’s films are dreamy mood pieces that seem to wander about in a lonely place.  Watching one of his films is like listening to an extended flamenco guitar piece – there is movement, to be sure, but one doesn’t know where one is headed and one never seems to arrive anywhere.  We do get inside some of Wong’s characters and share their romantic longing and their sense of resignation to loss.  But at the same time the viewer is also aware of things from a perspective outside the scope of the protagonists – the missed opportunities, lost connections, and the utter hopelessness of the depicted romantic longings.  When the film is finished, we remember not so much the events, but the mood.  And it this quality of Wong’s films that make them comparable to music. 

The uniqueness of Wong’s cinematic style is a reflection of his production methods.  Although Wong started his film career as a screenwriter, he is notorious for working without a script on his own films and making things up as he goes along.  In other words the aimlessness of his films reflect the apparent aimlessness of Wong’s filmmaking style. 

Nevertheless, Wong Kar Wai has a devoted following, including that of serious film theorists and critics. There are roughly two lines that people take with respect to Wong’s narrative style. 

• On the one hand, one could say that Wong is exploring new pathways in the area of cinematic expression.  The idea is that rather than simply translate some narrative text into the film medium, Wong is actually showing us that cinema has a vastly greater space and opportunities for dynamic visual expressiveness and tone.  According to this line of thinking, the narrative is always exclusively embodied in the medium (film/text).  Wong Kar Wai is then seen as pushing the boundaries of narrative and is exposing conventional filmmaking as restricted and old-fashioned. 
• Another point of view concerning Wong would not attribute an entirely new form of visual narrative to his work.  Instead, one would say, following along the lines I believe of David Bordwell, that Wong is simply taking advantage of the audience’s by-now rather sophisticated capabilities of mentally constructing a narrative.  According to this line of thinking, the viewer is always the co-constructor of any narrative.  He or she inevitably must fill in the missing information and gaps of what is told and imagine the activities and events based on his or her own past experiences that flesh out the story.  Thus narrative is not just embodied by the “text”, but in fact encompasses three items: the teller (creator/sender/narrator), the narrative message (film/text), and the listener (viewer/receiver).  So Wong Kar Wai, from this perspective, is not doing anything really radically new, but is instead just providing only (narrative-message) bits and pieces and is thereby leaving more narrative gaps to be filed in by the spectator from his or her own romantic recollections.  This forces the viewer to take a more active narrative construction role.

I subscribe to the second, call it “Bordwellian”, view of narrative and Wong Kar Wai, but that perspective doesn’t diminish my appreciation of Wong’s films.  Despite the apparent aimlessness of his filmmaking style, there is certainly some method to his madness that enables him to keep producing interesting cinematic experiences.  Nevertheless, Happy Together, despite earning for Wong Kar Wai the Best Director award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and receiving high praise from some respected quarters [1], wasn’t for me one of those satisfying experiences.  Perhaps contemplating some of its shortcoming can reveal a bit about what makes Wong’s other films work so well and why this one didn't.

The story concerns two gay men from Hong Kong who have traveled to the “other end of the earth”, in this case to Buenos Aires [2], in hopes of rekindling their on-again/off-again relationship. As usual, Wong has cast top Cantopop music and cinema performers in the leading roles, in this case Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, as the two gay lovers. And as usual with Wong Kar Wai’s films, nothing much seems to happen. 

The first twenty or so minutes of the film are in black-and-white and outline the dysfunctional romantic relationship between the two main characters.  Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) is the extrovert – a spoiled, self-absorbed narcissist who continually avoids responsibility and seeks to charm his way through all circumstances.  His lover, Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), is the introvert and is more responsible, sensitive, and caring.  For most of the film, the focalization is on Lai, and the viewer is privy to Lai’s inner monologue describing his emotional responses and reflections.  The film’s story, reflected by voiceover narration, seems to be that of a memoire – a recollection of the meaningful moments that have taken place sometime in the past.  And like all recollections, seemingly random moments and images are  magnified and elongated in time. 

The two men have a stated goal of eventually making a trip to the famous Iguazu Falls about a thousand kilometers north of the city. And this goal has metaphorical overtones for the story.  For the two men, this goal is almost an unrealizable fantasy, and the closest they seem to be able to get to is to stare at a rotating frosted souvenir lamp depicting the falls in Lai’s apartment.

But neither of them has much money.  We later learn that for them even to get to Argentina, Lai stole money from his father. Now he lands a job as a greeter at a Buenos Aires tango bar to provide some support. Ho just lives off Lai whenever he needs money, but he also continually drifts away into other male liaisons and appears to be more or less a male prostitute.  The relationship of the two men is persistently rocky.  Ho is habitually petulant and demanding, so naturally Lai constantly gets fed up with Ho’s selfish behaviour.  But at the same time Lai can’t resist Ho’s coquettish charm, and he continually melts and gives in to whatever demands Ho makes.

After one of their separations, Ho shows up at Lai’s apartment beaten up after some unexplained nocturnal escapade and has to be taken to the hospital.  Ho’s hands are left all bandaged up, and he must be waited on and spoon-fed (chopsticks-fed) by Lai.  Although Ho is now more petulant and demanding than ever, Lai reflects in voiceover that Ho’s helpless dependency on Lai make this his happiest period with Ho.   It was then that they were truly happy together, and accordingly the film presentation suddenly shifts from black-and-white to color.

After some time (about forty minutes into the film) Lai takes a job working in a restaurant kitchen. One of his  coworkers is a Taiwanese expatriate, Chang (Chang Chen), who casually befriends Lai. Meanwhile the Lai-Ho relationship is going through ever-worsening ups and downs, finally leading Lai to despair.  After coming to the conclusion that he can’t go on with it anymore, Lai is heartbroken, and he spends time with Chang to get his mind off Ho. The focalization and narrative voiceover, which up to this point had been exclusively associated with Lai, now occasionally shifts to Chang, with Chang’s voiceover reflections about Lai.  Chang, incidentally, is almost the opposite of Ho.  Rather than focusing on his own self and image, Chang is a serious listener of other people – so serious, he tells Lai, that he can discern other people’s inner emotional states just by listening to them. And so he likes to eavesdrop all the time on Lai’s conversations whenever he is in the vicinity.  We never really learn if Chang is gay or not, but there is clearly an affinity between Lai and Chang that slowly develops over the rest of the story. 

Eventually Chang departs for a trip to the southern tip of Argentina, perhaps, it is hinted, to try and rid himself of his own sad memories.  Lai manages to save up enough money to afford a trip back to Hong Kong; but before he leaves, he makes that promised visit to the Iguazu Falls. While Lai seeks to re-engage with the real world by visiting the real falls, Ho is shown moving back into Lai’s old apartment and staring dejectedly at the souvenir lamp depicting a crude artificial image of the falls.

 
On his return trip to China, Lai has a stopover in Taiwan, and though Chang is absent, Lai visits Chang’s family street market café in Taipei. While there, he spies a picture of Chang at the back counter and steals it for future reference. .

There are several reasons, to me, why this story never really gets into gear. One problem with Happy Together is the excessive and mundane repetitiveness of the Ho-Lai interactions.  They don’t even convey a hint of progression.  Perhaps this was Wong Kar Wai’s intent – to convey the idea that the relationship wasn’t going anywhere – but depicting tedium in a film is always a losing proposition.  Wong got around this kind of problem in his earlier films by effectively telling two shorter stories, either sequentially or in parallel, so that we did not wear out one story over the routine running time of a feature film.  It is true that there is also the Chang-Lai story in this film, but it’s too inconsequential to give the viewer relief from the tedium of the Ho-Lai story.         

 
Another difficulty with the film is the cinematography from Christopher Doyle, whose previous work for Wong Kar Wai and elsewhere has been superb. As usual with Doyle, there are the overt temporal-flow variations, as well as the deliriously moving camera shots, but they all seem more mechanical on this occasion.  Moreover, the switching back and forth from black-and-white to color seems artificial and pointless.  And the excessive contrast in many of the shots often leaves darker portions of the images clouded in blackness.  This excessive contrast seems to be intentional, but why?  For example, there are several sequences showing Lai and Chang playing soccer in a back street with some  mates.  For these sequences, the camera is aimed directly into the sun, whose brightness leaves all the players indistinctly dark.  Although this visual effect does perhaps evoke a memory of looking into the sun on some occasion, there doesn’t seem to be any point to these shots, and so they stand out as oddities while the viewer struggles to make out what is going on in the frame.

Maybe the most fundamental issue with the film is the almost total absence of women.  Although Wong Kar Wai insisted that Happy Together was simply a story about two people relating to each other and was not a gay film, in fact the missing feminine component in the film compromises his aesthetic virtues. The opening images orient the viewer quickly about this matter, showing an extended scene of two naked men in bed aggressively making love. Of course I recognize that your mileage may vary on this, but I would say some of Wong Kar Wai’s best moments in his previous films involve images of beautiful, passionately heartbroken women who yearn after unresponsive men.  These images are not from a woman’s perspective: they strike me as images of male fantasy and are seen from an external male point of view.  It’s the mysterious feminine allure of romantic longing as seen by men.  But despite admirable performances by Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in Happy Together, this romantic-emotional effect isn’t achieved (at least for me) in this film.  That is, the corresponding sensibility – Wong’s previously presented sensibility but shifted over to this film’s relational context – is not achieved here.  Leslie Cheung, just as he was in Days of Being Wild, is the self-absorbed narcissist; but on this occasion the sense of longing for him is seen from an internal perspective (that of Lai Yiu-Fai) – and this is not the male-fantasy-fueled external experience of those earlier Wong films.  Even if the Ho Po-Wing character had been fashioned as a woman in the film, this internal/external difference in perspective (i.e. difference from Wong’s earlier films) would have remained.  By abandoning that earlier romantic fantasy sensibility, Wong has lost something here.  Never mind, Wong Kar Wai would take a step back in the right direction with his next film, In the Mood for Love (2000).

★★½
       
Notes:

1. Kraicer, Shelly (1997), “Happy Together”, A Chinese Cinema Web Site, http://chinesecinemas.org/happy.html.
2. Buenos Aires is practically at an antipodean position with respect to Hong Kong.