Wong Kar-wai: A Retrospective

Editor’s Notes: The Grandmaster is now open in limited theatrical release. Read Soheil’s review here.

A single glance can destroy your world. One brief caress can send you into a spiral from which you may never recover. A love affair can leave your mind, heart, and soul a wreck, can remake you from the ground up and change your outlook on the world. Suffering is intense, prolonged, and devastating. But never for a second should that deter you from trying, from loving, from living. Throughout his illustrious career, Wong Kar-wai has become renowned for his stylized, pop-music laden, emotionally resonant works about missed connections, broken hearts, and an enduring optimism no trauma can destroy.

Throughout his illustrious career, Wong Kar-wai has become renowned for his stylized, pop-music laden, emotionally resonant works about missed connections, broken hearts, and an enduring optimism no trauma can destroy.

His directorial debut, As Tears Go By, introduces many of these themes, though they have yet to fully coalesce. The film is an extended Mean Streets riff, following Wah (Andy Lau), a small time gangster trying to keep his friend Fly (Jacky Cheung) out of trouble while falling in love with Ngor (Maggie Cheung). Much of the film’s run time is taken up with the gangster side of the story, and while Kar-wai has a surprising facility with close-quarters action from the start, its clear this isn’t where his interest lies. The film boasts an expressionistic color palette that steals a bit from Scorcese’s debut but also feels right at home in the neon-soaked 1980’s. The film’s standout sequence, however, sees Wah and Ngor falling for each other to a cover of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.” The scene is stellar in its evocation of a mood and a moment, and an early indicator of Kar-wai’s phenomenal ability to rework pop music for his own purposes.

Kar-wai followed that film up with Days of Being Wild, a film that crystalizes his style and his chief thematic predispositions, and the first in an informal trilogy with In the Mood for Love and 2046. Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) is a thoughtless playboy living, loving, and leaving in Hong Kong. He seduces Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung) and then abandons her, leaving her devastated. She eventually finds some comfort in night patrolman Tide (Andy Lau), and the two dance around a romance that never comes to fruition. Wong Kar-Wai champions the selfless, or at least those willing to deny themselves for the greater good, even as he documents the selfish. In his work, the selfish get what they want, but they find no lasting satisfaction in it. The selfless never get what they truly desire, but they retain their integrity, even while losing everything else. The director’s sympathies clearly lie with the selfless, but he’s enough of a realist to know the selfish more often triumph.

In 1994, Kar-wai released two features, the masterful Chungking Express and the kung-fu epic Ashes of Time. While the latter has greater relevance to the director’s latest feature, The Grandmaster (another kung fu film, out today), the former is more of a piece with the director’s larger body of work. Chungking is a bisected look at two lovesick policemen. Though set in the bustling metropolis of Hong Kong, the film depicts each of its characters as isolated, an island in a crowded archipelago still separated from all around them. The first story follows Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who has lost his love and goes through superstitious motions he hopes will bring her back before falling into a flirtation with a lethal drug smuggler (Brigitte Lin). In the second (and in my opinion, superior), an unnamed cop (Tony Leung) recovers from his break up with a flight attendant (Valerie Chow) as he falls for an eccentric snack bar attendant named Faye (Faye Wong). This segment makes extensive use of pop music (most notably the recurrent, and phenomenal, use of “California Dreamin’”) to underline Faye’s growing infatuation with the cop, and while the film leaves their future ambiguous, there’s a sweeping romance to the final moments that at least leaves us with a hope there may be light at the end of the tunnel for these two.

In the Mood for Love, the director’s undisputed masterpiece, focuses on the unconsummated infatuation between Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Chung), two married neighbors who develop as infatuation even as they suspect their spouses are involved in an affair.

In the Mood for Love, the director’s undisputed masterpiece, focuses on the unconsummated infatuation between Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Chung), two married neighbors who develop as infatuation even as they suspect their spouses are involved in an affair. The two refuse to stoop to the level of their cheating partners, but the bond they develop is beautiful and heartrending. The film plucks moments and interactions out of time as if they are being recalled from a great distance, and small gestures become mountains of significance. While the film captures the alienation of big city life like much of Kar-wai’s work, that serves only to amplify the longing between the pair, creatures of open need, longing for a connection they know they can never share. There is a dreamy, ethereal melancholy to the proceedings, and In the Mood for Love casts a spell over viewers that remains unbroken even years after the credits roll.

The semi-sequel conclusion to the trilogy, 2046 is a gloriously improvisatory piece of work, haunted by aspects of the director’s former work yet finding its own utterly unique wavelength to operate on. Like a great piece of jazz, the film finds a chord and experiments with various permutations. Tony Leung seems to be reprising his role from In the Mood for Love, returning to a futuristic Hong Kong from a place where nothing ever changes. He settles down in a hotel and begins relationships with two women, a call-girl he wants to keep as a platonic drinking buddy (Zhang Ziyi), and the hotel owner’s daughter (Faye Wong). Leung returns to writing stories, as he did in the previous film, but this time they are science-fiction, and the film follows him on his flights of fancy, examining the ways they mirror his own private heartbreaks. The shifts could be jarring, but under the expert hand of Wong Kar-wai, they become riffs on a central mood that anchors the proceedings in a bittersweet reflection on love and loss.

Though he’s named several of his films after pop songs (both In the Mood for Love and his 1997 film Happy Together draw their titles from songs), it is perhaps Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” that fits his career most poignantly. Wong Kar-wai never seems to care much for stories or conventional plot mechanics. He focuses on a feeling, a mood that is nearly impossible to describe but universally understood. His films proceed from scene to scene, but these are collections of moments more than elements within a plot. If his scenes are pieces in a puzzle, the completed picture is a fuzzy examination of his characters’ internal worlds. No one ever says exactly how they feel within the films of Wong Kar-wai; they never need to. We know it because we see it in their eyes. We know it because we’ve felt it in our souls.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Jordan Ferguson

Staff Film Critic

Jordan Ferguson is a lifelong pop culture fan, and would probably never leave his couch if he could get away with it. When he isn’t wasting time “studying the law” at the University of Michigan, he writes about film, television, and music. In addition to writing for Next Projection, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Review To Be Named, a homemade haven for pop-culture obsessives. Check out more of his work at Reviewtobenamed.com , follow him on twitter @bobchanning, or just yell really loudly on the street. Don’t worry, he’ll hear.

Latest posts by Jordan Ferguson (see all)

• Wong Kar-wai: A Retrospective - August 24, 2013
• Edgar Wright: A Retrospective - August 23, 2013
• Review: The World’s End (2013) - August 23, 2013