Having completed my Miike Takashi retrospective, I decided to look back at the work of some of my other favourite directors. Recently back from Hong Kong, having purchased ‘Fallen Angels’ while there – a film that was one of the first to start off my interest in Asian cinema – Wong Kar-Wai seemed the most logical place to continue my pathetic obsession.
My first experience with perhaps Hong Kong’s best director was an unwitting one, having watched the aforementioned ‘Fallen Angels’ as a teenager on BBC Two one Saturday evening after Match of the Day. Along with Kurosawa Akira’s ‘Rashomon’ and Zhang Yimou’s ‘Raise the Red Lantern’, this film took my interest of Asian cinema away from just kung-fu films and to the broader aspects of the cinema of China, Japan and Korea.
Entering my 20s, with a disposable income and a DVD player, I picked up some of his works, quickly falling in love with his artistic style and tales of heartbreak. On researching further, I discovered that he was the same man that wrote and directed the 1995 film I’d so enjoyed.
Having already seen all his feature films, I decided that I would take a look at his work in chronological order for simplicity, unlike my random and sprawling look at Miike’s…
Going back to good ol’ 1988, when Luton Town won something, ‘As Tears Go By’ doesn’t only sound like an 80s pop song, the film feels at times very much like watching a pop video from the coolest of decades. His first film, it is quite different to his others, showing maybe he’d taken some time to find his feet as a director and create his own brand of cinema. There aren’t really any lavish shots here and the score feels less considered, with many an 80s power pop tune thrown in for extra karaoke appeal. Violence is regularly on screen, and quite intense violence at that; a far cry from his whimsical tales of loves lost and tragedy.
The style isn’t obviously Wong, made at a time when all Hong Kong films were dubbed. Combined with the violence and choice of music, this feels like many Hong Kong films of the 80s, and could sit easily alongside John Woo’s works at the time, such as ‘A Better Tomorrow’. The dialogue is not as poetic as his following works and while it still looks good, it lacked the cinematography of long-term collaborator Christopher Doyle.
Featuring Andy Lau as a small time gangster, looking after his gung-ho younger brother, played by Jacky Cheung, it’s a fairly touching piece about their relationship and how the younger gangster’s petulance bring his older brother into unneeded trouble. Some emotionally-charged scenes follow, with the film ending in inevitable tragedy.
Technically, ‘As Tears Go By’ is a very accomplished debut, featuring traits that would be used again in later films, such as slow frame speed and a rushed focus. Wong would go on to work with many of the strong cast again, with this the starting point for various themes and styles that would run throughout the rest of his works.
His next film, made two years later, was an advancement in style and would prove much more consistent with his later works. Made in 1990, ‘Days of Being Wild’ was an early Hong Kong film to be shot with an actual soundtrack rather than being dubbed-on later. This gives the film a greater sense of style, class and credibility than ‘As Tears Go By’. Despite the same director and near identical lead cast, this is certainly not a film that can be equated to the likes of John Woo as his debut could.
His first time working with long-term collaborator Christopher Doyle as Director of Photography, the look of the film is sumptuous, with good use of colours and every scene feels well thought-out, much like their later collaborations. Style over content is very much the order of the day here, with a beautifully-shot film that is essentially about nothing; a theme that would run through many Wong films.
A lay-about, womanising playboy, played by my favourite England-educated, homosexual, Hong Kong singer/actor to commit suicide, Leslie Cheung, breaks hearts as he searches for the woman that broke his: his birth mother. Arguing with his adopted mother about her whereabouts, he leaves a trail of women behind, one of which (Maggie Cheung) spills her heart to wandering policeman, Andy Lau. The two male leads unwittingly meet in the Philippines, where the film culminates with an unnecessarily violent finale, before ending with a strange scene of Hong Kong housewife’s choice, Tong Leung Chiu-Wai, preparing for a night on the town – a scene that has little direct connection to anything else.
While not his best work, this was definitely the start of Wong’s niche in cinema, with beautifully shot scenes, expertly selected scores and tales of love and wonder. Very much modern film noir, that is low on plot and excessive in style.
If ever there were an archetypal Wong film, ‘Chungking Express’ would be it. ‘Days of Being Wild’ was a mere hors d’oeuvre to his next complete feature. Quickly written and filmed in a lapse in filming for his more grand and epic kung-fu piece, ‘Ashes of Time’, the film is about two unconnected, lovelorn policeman that pass through the Midnight Express takeaway stand near Chungking Mansions in Kowloon.
Split in two halves, the first follows Takeshi Kaneshiro, who continually waits by the phone to speak with his ex-girlfriend. While using the novel techniques to get over this fact of running and buying cans of pineapples that expire on 1st May, he meets an enigmatic, blonde-wig wearing drug and human trafficker and soon falls for her. On discovering their love will never blossom, he fleeting brushes with a Midnight Express employee that soon becomes the love interest of policeman number two, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai.
Recently dumped by his airhostess girlfriend that went to ‘try something different’, he returns to the takeaway night after night, soon befriending the young niece of the owner, who mysteriously cleans his flat for him while he is out to the music of Mamas and Papas. He then returns to his flat, where he speaks to his household objects.
Clearly a film squeezed in-between the filming of another, this is quite a simple, little film, but a very effective one. Telling tales of coping with heartbreak, he uses various techniques here that would feature in many of his films, such as the long luscious shots of ‘Days of Being Wild’ and the slow frame speed of ‘As Tears Go By’. Probably his most written and talked about film, this is simple, effective film making…just make sure you like ‘California Dreaming’.
The first film by Wong Kar-Wai I ever saw, was probably a Saturday night when I was around 15 on BBC2, no doubt after Match of the Day. ‘Fallen Angels’ was a strange film on late at night that I had probably accidentally started watching, but kept on as my interest for it grew and grew. Along with Zhang Yimou’s ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ and Kurosawa Akira’s ‘Rashomon’ – both also late night viewings – ‘Fallen Angels’ was one of the three films to take my interest of Asian cinema beyond mere kung-fu films.
In many ways, it is like a sequel to ‘Chungking Express’, looking at the lives of Hong Kong night drifters, combining two separate stories and using narratives. The two leads are again applying unusual techniques to combat their loneliness and the musical accompaniment is dominant throughout. Aesthetics are taken a step further here, with extended plays of full songs over scenes without dialogue, looking very much like a series of music videos cobbled together through a loose plot-line.
This is not Wong at his best: the film has many bemusing moments and is not always easy to follow, but it probably doesn’t need to be. Slick, stylish and cool, but lacking in parts, with the characters (and cast) less interesting and impressive than in his previous works. Though the 15 year old me must have seen something good in this; and the 28 year old me still does.
As well as feature films, Wong takes his directing skills to the worlds of shorts, music videos and advertising. While these run along similar themes to his films, they are often overly styled and result in quite pretentious pieces that serve as little more than accompanying media for a Selfridges perfume stand. Quick cutting and constant movement make them difficult to follow, as Wong tries to create an entire movie in a three minute piece.
Often, these feature big name actors from Hollywood and Asia, such as Clive Owen, Mickey Rouke, Forrest Whittaker, Tadanobu Asano and Faye Wong, to name a few. They look incredible, with brilliant colours, settings and camerawork, but try to do too much within their short capacity. Shorts funded by big name brands are billed as films (such as ‘The Follow’ funded by BMW or ‘There’s Only One Sun’ by Philips’), but essentially, you know you are watching a glorified advert.
These are designed to look cool and they succeed in this aim, but with overly complex stories squeezed into short time periods, there is no point bothering to follow them, making them nice to look at background shots. The video for DJ Shadow’s ‘Six Days’ and the short ‘I Travelled 9,000km to Give it to You’ are simply confusing, unable to create any empathy with the characters in a mere three minutes.
While a feature of his work for many years, these are much more reflective of more recent times, where bright colours and over-styling create a sense of cool in the often misplaced cry-babies acting them out, rather than the genuine romance and style of his earlier films.
With the handover of Hong Kong from British to autonomous rule before handover to China in 2047, Wong forced the completion and release of ‘Happy Together’ before 1st July 1997. I would never have imagined that a film about two gay men from Hong Kong travelling across Argentina would be one of my favourite films, but with ‘Happy Together’ the context in which the film is made is key here.
With the imminent handover, Wong wrote and directed a film about the apprehensions of the people of Hong Kong about returning to Chinese rule. The liberal freedoms potentially to be taken from them, the gay couple in Argentina represent the liberty that they enjoy, while the troubled relations with their parents the disapproving hand of mainland China.
Context aside, the film is brilliantly made, earning him the Best Director Award at Cannes. The use (and lack of use) of colour, slow motion shots and soundtrack are expertly crafted and put together, as well as strong performances from the two leads: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Jackie Cheung. Criticisms have been made for the lack of a truly ‘gay’ relationship between them, feeling it more two straight men put together, which is true to some extent, despite Cheung’s real life homosexuality. Though the nature of the relationship serves more as a metaphor than a tale of gay love.
This is film-making as an art form, expressing an emotional state of a people, capturing a feeling of the time. On the surface, this is a very well-made love story, but scratch beneath the surface, and there is a-whole-other world of expression, with cinema and politics blending happily together.
For his next feature, Wong chose to extent one of his shorts into a full length piece. Loosely part of a trilogy, including ‘Days of Being Wild’ and the following ‘2046’, it’s the story of two neighbours, one male, one female, that soon learn that their significant others are having an affair together. The respective wife and husband are never seen, and with their suspicions looming, the pair try to discover what led to the affair coming about, soon finding themselves in the exact same situation.
‘In the Mood for Love’ is very much a film to be watched. The style, look, use of colour are all expertly crafted, with the soundtrack again an important part of the film. The slow motion shots used throughout serve as a Garth Marenghi-style way of extending the running length of what was originally a hot, though these lush, slow scenes are the signature of ‘In the Mood for Love’.
Unlike ‘Happy Together’, there is little in the way of hidden meaning or political expression here: it is pure aesthetic film-making. Capped by typically award-winning performances by the two leads, Tony Leung Chui-Wai and Maggie Cheung, the film oozes the style hinted at in the final scene of ‘Days of Being Wild’.
The third and final part of Wong’s trilogy, ‘2046’, perhaps marked a turning point in his career. With the success, and the awards it brings, of his previous two films, the next decade brought a lean spell in his work, in both quality and quantity.
Bigger budgets brought with them ‘all-star’ casts, rather than strong acting performances; the use of colour became more garish than attractive; and CGI effects came into play.
‘2046’ is not a bad film, though it clearly lacks what came before it. Christopher Doyle was no longer present as Director of Photography, and so it lacks some of the originality of its predecessors. The longer running time does make the film drag a little, particularly as featuring many slow motion sequences as in ‘In the Mood for Love’. The soundtrack is lacking also - a normally strong fixture in Wong’s films.
While style was always key, it has now taken over. The way the film looks seems more important than the actual content here, feeling more like the videos and commercials he has filmed throughout his career, something that wouldn’t bode well for the future.
‘The Hand’ was the opening of a three part trilogy of shorts labelled ‘Eros’, featuring Wong alongside Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni. An improvement on ‘2046’, ‘The Hand’ was much simpler than its at times complex predecessor.
In a trilogy of strange love stories, here we see a young apprentice shown the ways of woman by a client he is tailoring for. Lending him ‘a hand’ on their first meeting, they soon build a long-standing affair.
Being a short, however, this is hardly an emotional rollercoaster and the tension never really builds. The look and feel are less overbearing than in ‘2046’, though this is one that can easily be missed. Again, alternate versions of soundtracks from previous films screams at desire to return to a better time in his career.
Like many before him – John Woo, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Young-Fat – Wong made the move to Hollywood, making his first English-language film in 2007. Like the others that made the move across, this was a bad decision, resulting in a film of poor quality.
Norah Jones, whose acting is only just a bit more annoying than her bland, soulless brand of music that plagues the film’s soundtrack, is a whiny, heartbroken girl seeking solace in Jude ‘I’m from Manchester’ Law in the café in which he works. To get over her recent split with her boyfriend and ‘grow up’, she takes an ever-so-predictable voyage of discovery across America to look and learn. The people she meets are horrible stereotypes, spelling out their soap opera problems to the young and naïve Norah so she can have an epiphany: She wants to shag Jude Law.
Maybe it’s the cross-cultural differences, but Wong’s whimsy just doesn’t come across in ‘My Blueberry Nights’. It feels far too simplistic and easy, with life coming up with nicely packaged conclusions. This is probably just me being pretentious in my passion for Asian cinema, but the script being played out by English speakers seems to take away the mystery that is usually present in his films. The only real strength of the film is surprisingly Jude Law, who is charming enough as the New York-based limey that serves Miss Jones her blueberry pie.
This was the third straight film to feature alternate versions to soundtracks from his work in the 90s, showing a clear nostalgia for his previous, better works as he searches to find the form that made him. ‘My Blueberry Nights’ is the last new production from Wong, and a few years have passed since. Talk was of him making further English language films, though thankfully these ideas have not come to pass, with his next works back in Cantonese.
To further that Wong was trying to recreate films of his past, his next release was ‘Ashes of Time Redux’, essentially a remix version of his 1994 work ‘Ashes of Time’. A film that took a long time to complete – indeed, Wong wrote, filmed and released ‘Chungking Express’ during production of the original – it was something of a lost work in his career, often overlooked or forgotten when put in the context of his work.
It’s re-mastering and release 14 years later was something of a necessity to ensure the film wasn’t forgotten, but also to drag Wong’s career back on track from the recent decline. Shot in the Chinese dessert, it looks very much like it inspired many of the scenes from ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, being very much a kung-fu film focusing more of love stories than action sequences.
Wong is no kung-fu director, and the fight scenes are either slow motion with up-close shots making it difficult to see what is actually happening; or sped-up, giving life to a response that is more comical than intended. But genre aside, this is a strong, picturesque piece, using colour to good effect. With an exception team both on screen and behind the camera, this would have been a sorely missed work if left to rot in the ashes of time.
Pretty much all of Wong’s works feature some kind of nostalgic element: characters are often searching for a past love, though often find the need to make a fresh start and move on by the film’s conclusion. As if a character in one of his own films, as Wong’s career has progressed, it would appear that he is searching for elements of his past films in his new works. This has resulted in over a decade of declining quality in his films, as well as the quantity of feature-length new releases from him.
It may be that now it is time for Wong to move on and try and update the content and storylines within his films. With his next feature release to be the story of Ip Man, the man whom trained Bruce Lee at a young age, it appears that this could be the case.
