GR612_catalog

WO N G K A R WA I FI LM FES T I VA L

FILM CATALOG

WONG K AR WAI FILM FESTIVAL

4

5

C

O

N

T

E

N

T

S

director 05

DIRECTOR BIO

10

FILMOGRAPHY

films

15

AS TEARS GO BY

20

D AY S O F B E I N G W I L D

25

CHUNGKING EXPRESS

30

FALLEN ANGELS

35

HAPPY TOGETHER

festival

35

T I M E & D AT E

40

VENUE

credit

40

INDEX

D I R E C T O R

15

THE CINEMA OF WONG KAR-WAI FILMOGRAPHY

20

Part 1

director

Of all the Hong Kong filmmakers to achieve worldwide recognition, the most anomalous is Wong Kar-Wai. Rather than reify movie genres and story conventions, as most of his colleagues do, Wong defies audience expectations. Like the directors of the 1960s New Wave cinema, he makes his viewers clearly conscious that they are watching a film, that the story being witnessed is primarily a mediated event and not something to be instantly accepted at face value. But he does this without obliterating the pleasures of the narrative: the centrality of the story, the psychology of the characters, the passionate performances by the actors. Swimming against the seemingly irresistible conservative currents of contemporary cinema, Wong Kar-Wai’s films seek to reclaim the perceptual possibilities of the moving image on the popular screen.

Following As Tears Go By (1988), his first feature as a director (after years as a script writer), Wong’s mature work is marked by oddball images and disjunctive story lines largely held together by the characters’ voice-overs. On first viewing, Days of Being Wild (1991), Ashes of Time (1992-94), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), and Happy Together (1997) all verge on the incomprehensible. Story lines seem to meander. Narrative trajectories are aborted in mid-flight. Characters–even the main

10

characters–sometimes appear out of nowhere

frivolous quality of Hong Kong’s popular

and vanish just as suddenly. Cinematography

cinema is internally contradicted by another,

stretches the perceptibility of the screen

more serious impulse: a desire to put forward

image more often than it conveys a clear view

and explore –however indirectly–a Chinese

of the characters. As Larry Gross describes

identity. The problems of such an identity, of

them: The first time you see Wong Kar-Wai’s

course, became most acute in 1984, when the

movies, you feel you are watching the work of

British government –which had wrested Hong

a delicious visual mannerist indifferent to

Kong from the Chinese in 1841–agreed to

narrative structure....The sheer hedonistic

return the colony to the People’s Republic of

absorption in architectural surfaces, in light

China in 1997. Poised between two “empires,”

sources, in decor of every possible fabric and

the British and the mainland Chinese, Hong

material, and the absence of overtly literary

Kong cinema has unavoidably become a

seriousness in the plots, make you feel

textual field where crises of identity are

trapped in the world of a super-talented hack.

implicitly set up and played out.

Then you go back and take another look, and the movies change, more drastically than any I know of. They seem richer, more intricately organised, more serious...

What makes Wong’s movies even more remarkable is that they come out of the Hong Kong film industry, which discourages such a sensorially seditious cinema. Although Hong Kong movies (like any other form of dominant cinema) carry their own potentially subversive subtexts, their primary function is to make a return on their investment by pleasing as large an audience as possible, as quickly as possible. Given the island’s economic evolution as a ruthlessly dog-eat-dog laissez-faire trade and manufacturing center, this movie-making environment (much like Hollywood’s) was never conducive to the development of “art” films. However, the

11

As Stephen Teo explains: towards the late 80s, Hong Kong critics were already referring to a

early 1980s. The issue infuses even those movies that never explicitly acknowledge any

‘post-1997’ sentiment. The best films at the

uneasiness toward national identity, just as

time exerted a double impact: film-makers

the Great Depression implicitly infused all

asserted their identity in terms of its

Hollywood (and international) cinema of the

difference from what they presented as

1930s. So, issues of nationalism in Hong Kong

China’s, but they at the same time attempted

film are (to use an overworked phrase)

to come to terms with China. There was an

always/already present.

inherent contradiction in wanting to be different and yet feeling a nationalist empathy with China, a tension which increasingly became the point of reference for identity questions. Although Hong Kong is not a country, its residents possessed a form of national identity increasingly identified as Chinese even though artists expressed their Chineseness in ways that were certainly different from the way artists in China negotiated theirs.

This is true even for Hong Kong’s best-known type of film: its dynamic, disorienting action cinema, which some have referred to as the Hong Kong “New Wave,” exemplified by such adrenaline-pumping directors as Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues, 1986), Ching Siu-Tung (A Chinese Ghost Story, 1987), Ringo Lam (City on Fire, 1987), and John Woo (Bullet in the Head, 1990). Due to its historical situation, the explosive energy of Hong Kong action movies serves to displace the emotionally

Cinematic expression of “national” identity

combustible anxieties surrounding the

was complicated by the colonial govern-

countdown to Chinese control, and this lends

ment’s passage of the 1987 Film Censorship

the films a subtext of subversiveness. But as

Bill, a law that restricted “[motion] pictures

fascinating as they are, the subversive

which damage relationships with other

undercurrents in the films of Tsui, Ching, Lam,

countries”; filmmakers took this as a tacit

and Woo remain just that: undercurrents,

reference to China in particular. Although it

something beneath the surface, something to

was later repealed, the censorship law

be searched for, and maybe not found at all.

heightened hand-over anxieties–as it

Oblivious audiences can easily enjoy these

simultaneously veiled their expression on the

movies for their spectacle alone. Rather than

screen. Consequently, as numerous other

employing new filmic techniques to explode

critics have noted, the “1997 issue” became a

and problematize the generic conventions of

vague, unspoken omnipresence that has

cinema (as the 1960s New Wave directors

permeated all of Hong Kong cinema since the

had), the Hong Kong New Wave shakes up the cinematic image merely to reinvigorate–and thereby perpetuate–the industry’s popular genres. This is a “New Wave” that rolls in a

12

very old direction.

Regrettably, any controversy over the appropriateness of the “New Wave” label is now moot. Since the mid-1990s, Hong Kong cinema has experienced a precipitous decline.

Where domestic productions once regularly outgrossed imported offerings–even Hollywood’s–Hong Kong movies have become a victim of their own success. Once filmmaking became such a lucrative investment, many neophyte producers soon flooded the screens with substandard productions, which quickly alienated the Hong Kong audience’s carefully cultivated loyalty to domestic movies. Worse, rampant video piracy has cut catastrophically into the profitability of the remaining high-quality films. As if that weren’t bad enough, the industry now faces a potentially fatal drain on its talent. Apparently jittery over the depressed Asian economy, interference by local gangsters, and possible Communist Party control of the industry, many of Hong Kong’s best-known actors and directors have sought work overseas, especially in Hollywood. Although some newer Hong Kong filmmakers are struggling to revive the industry, they have a lot of lost ground to reclaim. Despite this, Wong Kar-Wai has reportedly announced that he intends to remain in Hong Kong.

13

Part 2 Unlike the action movies of the “New Wave,”

scenes a haunting sense of simultaneous

their willingness to stress the materiality of

animation and suspension. Stephen Rowley

the image. They often work against the

describes the visual result as “a lurching style

principle of visual “seamlessness” by utilizing

that proceeds at (or close to) normal speed

self-reflexive elements on the screen:

but smears between moments of clarity: the

hand-held cameras; intrusive, out-of-focus

effect is somewhat like viewing freeze frames

objects in the foreground; intensely grainy

and fast motion in rapid alteration.” Together,

frame enlargements; achronological editing;

the director and the cinematographer have

cutting between color and black & white.

fostered a visual style that is self-reflexive

Although the frenetic pacing of Hong Kong

without being completely alienating: today’s

action movies offers its own form of

polychromatic equivalent of black & white.

disruption, visual cohesiveness is still

Without Doyle, Wong’s films would be as

mandatory. Wong’s willingness to work

unimaginable as, say, Bernardo Bertolucci’s

against visual and narrative seamlessness

best-known works without Vittorio Storaro.

suggests that he wants to demystify the

Indeed, Wong has sometimes used substitute

filmmaking process and thereby make his

cinematographers when Doyle was away on

audience active participants in the narrative.

other projects, only to reshoot many of those

Because the films’ visual elements are so important, Wong’s most crucial collaborator

14

undercrank/step-printing method gives these

the most striking feature of Wong’s films is

scenes once Doyle became available again.

Wong himself downplays the significance of

is the Australian-born cinematographer

his disruptive visuals: People are always very

Christopher Doyle, who has shot all of Wong’s

curious about the visual effects in my works.

films to date since Days of Being Wild and is

The not so romantic truth is that lots of those

now regarded as a world-class master of the

effects are in reality the results of circumstan-

movie camera. Over the years, Doyle has

tial consideration: if there is not enough space

pushed his camerawork beyond the painterly

for camera maneuvering, replace the regular

to achieve striking results.8 Between them,

lens with a wide-angle lens; when candid

Wong and Doyle have developed a visual

camera shooting in the streets does not allow

motif that appears in all of their films

lighting, adjust the speed of the camera

together: some strategic scenes are shot at a

according to the amount of light available; if

slower film speed (“undercrank” in Hollywood

the continuity of different shots does not link

jargon), so the action is speeded up; then, the

up right for a sequence, try jump cuts; to

frames are step-printed at a slower speed

solve the problem of color incontinuity, cover

onto the finished film, so the action is

it up by developing the film in B/W… Tricks

restored to its real-time duration. The

like that go on forever.

In cinematic narrative, romantic love raises contradictory issues. On one hand, it affirms the psychology of individuality by asserting personal desire as a central concern. On the other hand, the ability to be in a reciprocal romantic relationship and live with another person necessitates an identity beyond the self. Traditional concepts of romance frequently reinforce the idea that one can’t live completely alone, and this problematizes the very concept of individuality. In short, the issue of romance asks questions of the individual’s relationship to the “other”– not only the other individual in the partnership, but to society at large. And an individualistic identity, paradoxically, can only exist within a mass social order that encourages such a conception of the self. So, romantic love in narrative may highlight the interdependence of individualism, otherness, and the larger social order, including the nation. Romance narratives may also put into play the contradictions that arise when the individual is upheld as an “autonomous” entity supposedly divorced from larger social forces.

Although contradictions between individuality and society are sometimes foregrounded in romantic dramas of “forbidden love” (stories of racial or cultural taboos, etc.), such contradictions tend to be elided by the romantic “happy ending,” especially in comedy.

15

filmography

2016 // The First Monday in May

2008 // Ashes of Time Redux

2013 // The Grandmaster

"Throughout his entire career, which spans four decades of

2007 // My Blueberry Nights

filmmaking, the director has manifested his obsessive preoccupation with details and minutiae time and again; the little fleeting moments and impressions that that add up to a mood. ...Indeed, the criticism most frequently leveled is that wkw is a director concerned with style over content, but that seems to us a fallacy—for wong, emotion, and not necessarily story, is the content; style exists to evoke it.

And the emotional currency he deals in is romantic love, in all its forms but especially those tending to be on the melancholy end of the spectrum: love stolen, lost, unrequited, doomed, remembered but inaccessible." – Indie Wire Interview

16

2004 // 2046

2004 // Eros

2002 // Chinese Odyssey 2002

2000 // In the Mood for Love

1997 // Happy Together

1995 // Fallen Angels

1994 // Chungking Express

1994 // Ashes of Time

1991 // Days of Being Wild

1988 // As Tears Go By

1987 // The Haunted Copshop

17

S E L E C T E D

AS TEARS GO BY 20

15

DAYS OF BEING WILD

CHUNGKING 20

F I L M S

15

FALLEN ANGELS

HAPPY TOGETHER

15

20

Plot

AS TEARS GO INFO

1988 102 min Andrew Lau

BY

Wong Kar-wai makes his feature film debut with this gritty romantic crime-drama inspired by Scorsese’s Mean Streets. The film opens with young gangster Wah (Andy Lau) getting a visit for the day from his beautiful cousin Ah-Ngor (Maggie Cheung), who is coming into Kowloon from the remote outlying Lantau island to receive medical treatment for a lung condition. At first, the

FEATURING

short-fused gangster and the quiet country girl have little in common, but gradually the

Andy Lau Maggie Cheung Jacky Cheung Kau Lam Alex Man Ronald Wong

two start to form a bond of sorts. Meanwhile, Wah’s buddy Fly (Jacky Cheung), who has an absolutely volcanic temper, is always getting Wah into hot water. Even though Wah knows that Fly is bound to end up dead soon, he stands by his foolhardy friend. After some hesitation, Wah – who has fallen for Ah-Ngor – visits his cousin on Lantau, hoping to make their relationship more than family. Fly later infuriates a psychopathic mob boss, Tony (Alex Man Chi-leung) who, along with his henchmen, beats and degrades Fly and Wah. This induces Fly make amends with Tony by undertaking the outrageously difficult task of rubbing out an informant who is in the custody of the cops, before the man has the opportunity to testify in a court hearing.

21

Review Wong Kar Wai’s debut feature As Tears Go By

benefactor, but Fly’s unpredictable behavior

raw and stylish film that balances gritty

and tough guy attitude continually get Wah in

realism with bold stylization, colorful imagery

big trouble. The film alternates between

and rapid leaps into frenzied action

Wah’s attempts to cope with the problems

sequences or hazy, drifting slow motion.

stirred up by Fly, and an undercooked love

Violence in this film erupts suddenly, its

story between Wah and his young cousin

impact heightened by Wong’s accelerated

Ngor (Maggie Cheung), who he falls in love

cutting, which signals the abrupt transition

with when she comes to stay with him. The

from ordinary reality to the bloody, brutal

story is familiar, of course. Wong, inspired by

hyper-reality of the fight scenes. A fight

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (especially in

scene at a pool hall is preceded by a slow,

the bold use of pop music) and working within

tense buildup as the inept Triad thug Fly

the genre mold of the Hong Kong gangster

(Jacky Cheung) taunts a rival, mocking him by

flick, sticks to the basics of the genre but

moving balls around on the pool table,

amps up the aesthetics and the emotions into

brazenly cheating and essentially daring the

a near operatic orgy of excess.

other man to start a fight. The tension slowly mounts, mingled with uneasy humor, but when the fight itself erupts, Wong introduces the violence with a sudden shot of a pool table, a racked triangle of balls broken by the cue ball, and then a quick cut into the rapid-fire violence as Fly and the other gangsters initiate a brawl that eventually spills out into a chase through the streets.

Fly is a familiar character in gangster lore, the volatile but pathetic loser who drags down the more balanced, intelligent friend who looks after him. Wah (Andy Lau) is Fly’s “big

22

brother” in the Triad gangs, his boss and

is a visceral, idiosyncratic gangster picture, a

The film’s action sequences are probably its

he has to sacrifice himself to do it. The scene

most compelling moments, bloody and

plays out mostly in alternating closeups on

ecstatic scenes of carnage, mingling fast

the two brothers, but Wong punctuates the

cutting with slow motion to convey the

scene with a kind of emphatic exclamation

brutality of these gangsters – and of course,

point, abruptly switching to an unbalanced

to convey their sense of “cool.” The film is

long shot of the parking lot where this

very self-conscious about “cool,” because the

discussion takes place. The two brothers are

characters are so self-conscious about it. Wah

at the bottom of the frame, with Fly facing

often poses in his leather jacket, his head

away from his brother, the lower halves of

cocked back in a Rebel Without a Cause

their bodies cut off by the bottom of the

sneer, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

frame, and Fly simply hurls the beer bottle

When he walks into a room, it’s often in slow

he’d been drinking off into the distance. It’s

motion, his determined expression slowly

such an effective moment, a rough and

drifting through the hazy, abstract back-

evocative shot that perfectly captures the

grounds, his surroundings erased by the

tension of this scene.

prolonged contemplation of his languid cool as he prepares to kill someone or beat up some rivals or shake down a resistant debtor.

That coolness is why Fly looks up to Wah, why he’s so determined to impress his “big brother,” even as he’s very aware that his own (real) little brother, Site (Ronald Wong), doesn’t think that Fly is cool. Fly is obsessed with making good, with returning to his family as a big man, but he knows that he’s a failure.

Towards the end of the film, he visits his brother – who’s now a family man, with a regular working class job – and tells him that he just wants to be a cool big brother, even if

23

24

Plot

DAYS OF BEING WILD INFO

Set in 1960, the film center of the young,

15 December 1990

who learns from the drunken ex-prostitute

boyishly handsome Yuddy (Leslie Cheung),

94 minutes Crime | Drama | Romance

who raised him that she is not his real mother.

Hoping to hold onto him, she refuses to divulge the name of his real birth mother. The revelation shakes Yuddy to his very core, unleashing a cascade of conflicting emotions.

Two women have the bad luck to fall for

FEATURING

Yuddy. One is a quiet lass who works at a sport arena named Su Lizhen (Maggie

Andy Lau Jacky Cheung Leslie Cheung Maggie Cheung Carina Lau Rebecca Pan

Cheung), while the other is a glitzy showgirl named Mimi (Carina Lau). Perhaps due to his unresolved Oedipal issues, he passively lets the two compete for him, unable or unwilling to make a choice. As Lizhen slowly confides her frustration to a cop named Tide (Andy Lau), he falls for her. The same is true for Yuddy’s friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung), who falls for Mimi. Later, Yuddy learns of his birth mother’s whereabouts and heads out to the Philippines.

25

Review Days of Being Wild’s title comes from Rebel Without a Cause’s translated name when that film was shipped to Hong Kong theatres. The woe and stresses of youth that Nicholas Ray’s film touched upon are even more frantically suggested in Wong Kar-Wai’s early feature.

However, even as the characters’ heartaches swell throughout, this may be Wong’s most restrained film visually – there is a drab, green colour scheme throughout that rarely shifts, but situates the characters within the misty rainforest setting that appears at the start. In addition, rain pours in nearly every scene. So, what is it that these young and eligible adults are so sad and worried about?

Time’s piercing arrow.

Wong focuses on clocks and watches and the characters wonder continually what time it is. If the deadlines set from Chungking Express, which I explored on The Essentials last week, did not enforce this enough, the characters in his films seem to be walking through a limbo of time. The clocks and watches also refer to one’s lack of control over time as it ticks by. One can become desolate and lonely without a firm grip of how their days are running; appropriately, very few scenes in this early film contain more than two or three characters.

As with Chungking, Days of Being Wild features two male and two female protagonists and their shifting romantic alliances.

Yuddy (the late Leslie Cheung) is a playboy

26

with a sharp tongue. In the first scene, he sets his eye on a shy but pretty vendor, Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung). This relationship is shortlived as the film soon flashes forward to Mimi (Carina Lau), a cabaret dancer desperate for a fling. Yuddy and Mimi hit it off, but there is only surface value to the relationship. Upon hearing of this affair, Su runs off and sobs, only to be

I’ve heard that there’s a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is

comforted by a police officer working the night shift. His name is Tide (Andy Lau) and she starts confiding in him. Another supporting character, Zeb (Jacky Cheunge) harbors feeling for Mimi but cannot express himself (he would be an allusion to Rebel‘s Sal Mineo). Days of Being Wild is a film full of people living moment to moment. Wong brings us a glimpse of one couple – a very erotic two-shot of Yuddy and Su’s heads touching as they frolic in bed, faces aglow, for instance – before moving along with the next tale of spritely love. The moment Su asks Yuddy if he would marry her, he replies

tired. The bird only

ellipsis fits the themes involving the essence of

lands once in its life...

The film’s pacing also reflects the protagonist’s

that’s when it dies.

– Yuddy

instantly, “No.” Cue the next love affair. This time that are a staple of Wong’s films. frivolity. Days of Being Wild does not delve deeply into any of the characters’ relationships, letting small pieces of music, the colours or designs on one’s clothing and expressive facial acting communicate the abandonment and misery. Without showing many scenes of the characters reconciling their feelings with each other, the individuals seem like islands, gorgeous and adrift, longing to cling onto a piece of something. Or someone.

27

As with Chungking, Days of Being Wild

Days of Being Wild marked Wong’s first

features two male and two female protago-

collaboration with Australian cinematogra-

nists and their shifting romantic alliances.

pher Christopher Doyle and the duo begin to

Yuddy (the late Leslie Cheung) is a playboy

explore the controlled colour scheme (often

with a sharp tongue. In the first scene, he sets

vibrant, but more restrained here) and the

his eye on a shy but pretty vendor, Su Lizhen

claustrophobic locales that, through tight

(Maggie Cheung). This relationship is

framing, push the characters closer together.

short-lived as the film soon flashes forward to

Wong initially constructed Days of Being Wild

Mimi (Carina Lau), a cabaret dancer desperate for a fling. Yuddy and Mimi hit it off, but there is only surface value to the relationship. Upon hearing of this affair, Su runs off and sobs, only to be comforted by a police officer working the night shift. His name is Tide (Andy Lau) and she starts confiding in him. Another supporting character, Zeb (Jacky Cheunge) harbors feeling for Mimi but cannot express himself (he would be an allusion to Rebel‘s Sal Mineo).

Days of Being Wild is a film full of people living moment to moment. Wong brings us a glimpse of one couple – a very erotic two-shot of Yuddy and Su’s heads touching as they frolic in bed, faces aglow, for instance – before moving along with the next tale of spritely love. The moment Su asks Yuddy if he would marry her, he replies instantly, “No.” Cue the next love affair. This ellipsis fits the themes involving the essence of time that are a staple of Wong’s films.

The film’s pacing also reflects the protagonist’s frivolity. Days of Being Wild does not delve deeply into any of the characters’ relationships, letting small pieces of music, the colours or designs on one’s clothing and expressive facial acting communicate the

28

as the first in a trilogy of films. However, upon its disappointing box office returns, he shelved this project. In retrospect, film scholars would place Wong’s later romances In the Mood For Love and 2046 as part of an informal trilogy, with Days as the premiere entry. (I will explore those masterworks in the next two installments.) As Wong explores the fits and moods that align with the restless dreams of youth, he brings forward an atmosphere that is fittingly tender and tumultuous.

29

30

Plot

CHUNGKING EXPRESS INFO

8 March 1996 102 min Hong Kong Comedy | Crime | Drama | Mystery | Romance

Two love-struck cops is filmed in impressionistic splashes of motion and color. The first half deals with Cop 223, who has broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He purchases a tin of pineapples with an expiration date of May 1 each day for a month. By the end of that time, he feels that he will either be rejoined with his love or that it too will have expired forever. The second half shows Cop 663

FEATURING

dealing with his breakup with his flight attendant girlfriend. He talks to his apartment

Takeshi Kaneshiro

furnishings until he meets a new girl at a local

Brigitte Lin Tony Leung Chiu Wai Faye Wong Valerie Chow

31

Review

Part 1: things in life

“It’s not every day we’re gonna be the same way,” Dennis Brown sings on his 1972 reggae hit, “Things In Life.” “There must be a change somehow.” Brown’s song plays at several moments during the first half of Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express, and in many respects, the film is about characters learning how to hear it. The film is filled with moments reinforcing the inevitability of change and the irreversibility of time–and how those who refuse to accept this do so at their own peril. But it’s also filled with repetition and reflections, finding unexpected patterns and parallels in the midst of a chaotic urban setting–and with them, the possibility, however faint, that change might be for the better. These, too, are things in life.

Stripped to its barest plot synopsis, Chungking Express tells the story of two Hong Kong policemen who, after unexpectedly getting dumped by their girlfriends, struggle to move on. The film first introduces Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who, on the cusp of turning 25 on May 1, pines for contact with the girlfriend who’s left him. Wong tells his story in parallel with that of a mysterious woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin), for whom May 1 also has significance: It’s the day she needs to complete a major drug-smuggling operation, or face dire consequences.

Later, Chungking Express shifts focus to Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), whose heartbreak

32

comes from the departure of his stewardess

The two halves don’t look or feel the same,

girlfriend (Valerie Chow). Observing his

either. The cinematography is credited to

situation is Faye (Faye Wong), an employee at

Andrew Lau and Christopher Doyle, with, as

the Midnight Express food stand that both

Tony Rayns explains on the commentary track,

cops frequent. Before long, her observation

Lau mostly shooting the first story, and

develops from passive curiosity to active,

Doyle¬who’d collaborated tumultuously with

almost mad, interest.

Wong before, and would collaborate

Despite the similarities between the film’s two narratives, Chungking Express is divided unmistakably down the middle. About 40 minutes in, Cop 223 brushes by Faye, and over a freeze-frame of the moment, says, “Six hours later, she fell in love with another man” as The Mamas & The Papas’ “California Dreamin’” takes over the soundtrack. It’s the last we hear from him–though hardly the last we hear of “California Dreamin’”–and from this point forward, Chungking Express becomes a different sort of film, albeit one whose two parts complement each other. In her liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray release of the film, Amy Taubin calls Chungking Express a turning point in Wong’s career, pointing to this moment as “a shift in direction that’s actually signaled within the film, when the desultory underworld-revenge narrative fades away and is replaced by a love story.”

tumultuously with him again¬mostly shooting the second. By this point, Lau had already started what would be a long, successful career as a director, mostly of action films, and he brings a frenetic energy that suits the film’s first story as well as Doyle’s dreamy, lingering approach suits its second. Both are guided by Wong’s sensibility, however, which mixes handheld, seemingly seat-of-the pants shots and start-stop editing with breathtaking compositions. (Think of Wong crouching beside her own gauzy reflection on Hong Kong’s Central Escalator, which runs outside 663’s house, or any of the shots that frame characters between obscured foreground objects.) The difference is subtle, but it’s there. Watching Chungking Express doubles as an example of how two different cinematographers solved the same problem of shooting a feature film quickly but beautifully, for a director who was making it up as he went along.

33

34

Or almost as he went along. Wong shot Chungking Express in the middle of a production break during the protracted shooting and editing of the martial-arts epic Ashes Of Time (a striking, meditative, extremely Wong-esque film that has little in common with a traditional wuxia entry). It wasn’t on a whim. Wong had a contract that required a second feature, and a production company to keep afloat. So, as David Bordwell recounts in his book Planet Hong Kong, Wong “stitched together script ideas he had been considering for years,” then shot the film in sequence and wrote “each scene the night before or even the morning of the day it was to be shot.”

Though necessitated by circumstance, shooting faster and looser seems to have opened Wong up to new ideas. Yet, just as in the world of the film, there’s order within the chaos. Though made in an urgent heat, it’s a deeply considered, beautifully constructed film that captures the feel of a particular place at a particular time–and of characters of a particular age, specifically the age when it first becomes apparent that time only runs one way, even if the world seems to be eternally repeating itself.

35

“Do you like pineapple?”

36

37

Review

Part 2: dream

Wong doesn’t offer enough for viewers evidence to determine whether Cop 223 is any good at his job. In the film’s most energetic sequence, he makes a bust, but once he fixates on Lin’s mystery woman at the bar, he ignores the drug smuggler under his nose. (Literally, at times.) He’s too blinded by heartbreak to notice. Heartbreak has a way of doing that, especially in this film. 223 will soon celebrate his 25th birthday, and like all the dates in the film, that’s significant. It’s the age when, for many people, life stops being theoretical, when those who’ve previously consigned careers, marriage, parenthood, and other responsibilities to the world of grown-ups start to realize they now live in that world. 223’s girlfriend is gone, and for much of his sequence, he lives in denial about what “gone” means, engaging in magical thinking as he saves, then gorges on cans of pineapple with a May 1 expiration date. And yet, as Wong illustrates in shots of a clock rolling over, the date draws nearer, and his girlfriend remains just as far away.

The turning of the clock was much on the mind of Hong Kong residents, with the territory’s looming transfer of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China on July 1, 1997. Citizens of Hong Kong didn’t know what to expect, and many chose to leave, the ranks of emigrants swelling in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Those who stayed leapt into the unknown, and that instability informs many films made in Hong Kong at the time that represented,

38

Countering that is 223’s narration, which

Only it isn’t quite that simple. Faye seems like

remains romantic and idealistic even in the

an obliging lifesaver–the sort of manic pixie

midst of his personal disappointments and the

dream girl who became so prominent in film

chaos of the area he patrols, home to

shortly after Chungking Express–if she didn’t

residents from around the world, and

seem half-cracked, and if her impish energy

anchored by the mix of shops, makeshift

didn’t have such a desperate undercurrent. In

restaurants, and living quarters known as

the end, she opts to make her own escape,

Chungking Mansions, a 17-story complex that

flying off to the real California she’s only

covers five blocks. The film suggests that any

heard about in song, rather than joining 663

attempt to impose order on such a place

at the bar that bears the state’s name. The

would be futile, and that the future of Hong

film ends on an ambiguous note, a year after

Kong will be decided as much on the street as

she fails to show. Both Faye and 663 seem to

from above. Time may be running out for

be in better places in their lives, but those

Hong Kong as they know it, but some things

places aren’t with each other, and might

never change: It’s hard to imagine any

never be. Sometimes escape means leaving

situation that will make Chungking Mansions

what you love behind.

any less crime-ridden, just as it’s hard to imagine 223’s girlfriend coming back to him.

Nevertheless, 223 deludes himself with his hopefulness about his job and his love life, but the film doesn’t mock him for it. Even if evidence suggests that the blonde mystery woman’s defeated terror makes more sense as a response to the world they share, the film remains on the dreamers’ side.

Much of the melancholy beauty of Chungking Express–and later Wong films, for that matter–comes from missed connections, mad love, and soured romances, pairings with little chance of working out, however much heat they might generate in the moment. In many of his later films, the bitterness started to overwhelm the sweetness. (There are few movies more

Despite his apparent world-weariness, Cop

romantic than In The Mood For Love, but also

663 also falls into the same hopeful camp by

few as inescapably sad.) Shot quickly and

the film’s end. Once abandoned, he holds no

loosely in the middle of a place staring down

illusions that his departed girlfriend will ever

enormous change, Chungking Express

return, falling into such a shuffling funk that

ultimately feels more sweet than bitter,

he fails to notice that the lovestruck Faye has

defined by a tone of long-shot hopefulness

begun sneaking into his apartment, tidying it

and a sense that maybe it might all work out

up, replacing worn-out bars of soap and dish

for those heartbroken young people–the

towels (with which he’s held conversations,

ones whose beautiful faces and sad eyes

due to his loneliness), and otherwise inserting

Wong casts in the neon glow of a terrible,

herself into his life. He’s feared change, but a

wonderful, forever-changing city, as they

welcome change is ready to embrace him.

watch the first acts of their youth draw to a

39

40

Plot

FALLEN ANGELS INFO

Fallen Angels is set in the surreal milieu of urban, nighttime Hong Kong. As with the

30 January 1998 99 min

filmmaker’s other features, plot takes a back seat to mood. The wisp of a narrative intercuts two story lines. The first follows a

Hong Kong

hitman (Leon Lai) who finds that the

Comedy | Crime |

assassin’s life has slowly lost its allure.

Drama | Romance FEATURING

Complicating his life is his beautiful contact (Michele Reis, a former Miss Hong Kong winner) who pines after him with fetishistic ardor, although the two have never met in

Leon Lai Michelle Reis Takeshi Kaneshiro Charlie Yeung Karen Mok Chen Wan-lei

their nearly three-year partnership. In another part of the city, He (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a mute, boyish ex-convict, makes a living by sneaking into and running businesses after hours. Still living with his father who runs the Chungking Mansions hotel, the restless Ho falls for Cherry (Charlie Yeung), a woman getting over her breakup with the offscreen Johnny. The movie follows these episodic romances almost half-heartedly as with Wong’s other films, and digressionary moments attract much of the camera’s distracted gaze. This visually stylish and unabashedly effusive work is considered by some critics to be the quintessential Wong film.

41

Review

42

A kaleidoscope of alienation and longing,

neon-tinted lighting, the use of pop music to

Wong Kar-wai’s 1995 film Fallen

underscore moods, and pixillated slow-mo-

Angelsremains one of Wong’s least discussed

tion action scenes.

and least appreciated films. Of course, compared to the sheer beauty and maturity of his latest work–his intimate In the Mood for Love (2000); his majestic 2046 (2004); even “The Hand” (2004), his relatively brief yet masterful contribution to the omnibus film Eros–earlier films like this one and Chungking Express (1994) come off as energetic though show-offy stylistic exercises.

But Fallen Angels is no mere exercise. In some

Fallen Angels is the only other film of his that could be considered a “gangster film,” although certainly it’s quite different from As Tears Go By. What Fallen Angels adds to what he was already doing visually in his first film is his experimentation with voiceover narration, allowing the characters to express their thoughts and feelings to us in ways that they are unable to articulate to each other. Also, in contrast to the linear plot of As Tears Go By,

ways, it is almost as important a film in

Fallen Angels pretty much disregards rules of

Wong’s oeuvre as Happy Together (1997). If

classical storytelling. Instead of focusing on

Happy Together represented a stepping stone, one linear plotline, it tells two interlocking an emotional deepening of Wong’s usual

stories filled with digressions and jumps in

themes of love, loss and desire, Fallen Angels

time.

represents both a look back and a look forward for one of cinema’s most important current directors.

In Fallen Angels, Wong takes all of those stylistic signatures to extremes. He pours on the slo-mo, the pixillated action scenes, the

Wong’s first feature film was a gangster flick

neon lighting and the pop music (one Canto

titled As Tears Go By (1988), a Mean

pop song even becomes the source of a

Streetsripoff that seemed to take its

message from a killer to his assistant). In

emotional cues from the popular Hong Kong

addition, the voiceovers become a dominant

action films of the time (such as John Woo’s

creative force: there’s barely any dialogue,

1986 gangster melodrama A Better

and nearly all the characters’ thoughts and

Tomorrow). Tears may have been derivative

emotions are expressed through narration.

and at times even dated and cheesy (on hearing the film’s Cantopop rendition of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” a friend said, “And I thought the original was bad enough!”), but it had an operatic power, and more importantly, it laid out some of Wong’s stylistic signatures, including exaggerated

43

For all its youthful stylistic brashness and crisscrossing plots, though, one of the major themes of Fallen Angels is the idea of moving on, or at least trying to do so: moving on from an unfulfilling job, in the case of Leon Lai’s assassin-for-hire; moving on from a broken heart, in the case of Michelle Reis’s personal assistant; and especially, moving on from a slacker’s existence, in the case of Takeshi Kaneshiro’s mute He Zhiwu.

I’d like to think that this plot turn holds at least a whisper of personal confession for Wong: his way of taking stock of the kinds of films he made before while expressing a desire to move on to something different and arguably more mature. Consider some of his previous film characters: the heartless ladies’ man played by Leslie Cheung in Days of Being Wild (1991), for example, or Faye Wong’s free

Surprisingly enough, that last instance of

spirit in Chungking Express. Both characters

moving on–part of the film’s barely-related

express one of Wong’s major cinematic

subplot rather than its main plot–may be the

preoccupations: a yearning for some kind of

key to explaining Fallen Angels’ significance

freedom within societal boundaries. Fallen

in the context of Wong’s body of work.

Angels throws a wrench into his obsession by

Early in the movie, He, who has escaped from prison, is seen breaking into shops every night and running them after hours. In his voiceover, he reasons that because the rent has already been paid, someone should still maintain these stores after hours. In some of the film’s funniest moments, He essentially hassles people into giving him money; a young man who professes to have mob connections is one of his accidental frequent “customers.” Eventually, though, he finds himself falling in love with a nutcase named Charlie (Charlie Yeung). When he discovers that his love is unrequited, he responds by trying to settle down from his older, wilder ways and reestablish a familial emotional connection, inspired by a Japanese restaurant owner who used to be a filmmaker: he decides to make a video of his widowed father, owner of the Chungking Express Mansions (one random Chungking reference among many in this film), as he goes about his

44

everyday business.

presenting a group of characters who, in their own ways, yearn for the opposite: a semblance of stability, in the case of killer; or an emotional connection to one closest to him, in He Zhiwu’s case. As it turns out (spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen the film) the killer ends up getting killed as he tries to do one last job for the assistant, and He returns to his aimless ways after his father dies. The personal assistant, meanwhile, having decided never again become personally involved with her partners, becomes a disheveled mess after the killer’s death (an event she may have helped orchestrate, although the film only suggests it obliquely).

One could understandably see these developments as regressions for these characters-–real fallen angels. But I prefer to see them as Wong taking one last pained, wistful glance at his old preoccupations with free spirits and forbidden love before finally deciding to go in a different direction.

45

Thus, it is fitting that the film’s final image is a

These days, though, as a young film enthusi-

pixillated slo-mo of the assistant riding He’s

ast still working out my views on cinema in

motorcycle: He has possibly made the human

general, I’ve become less interested in

connection he’d sought, while the assistant has at last found some genuine “warmth.” As is typical of Wong, he leaves the ending

placing emphases on “well-told stories” or “three-dimensional characterizations” all the time, as many filmgoers are wont to do.

unresolved–-the two characters’ futures hang

Perhaps that’s why, a few months after

in the balance–-but emotionally and

getting my first full glimpse of this film, I

thematically it is complete and satisfying.

couldn’t get its powerfully alienated feel out

Of all of his early films, Fallen Angels, for all

of my head.

of its high style, is arguably his most

And so, while I would concede that the

outwardly deceptive. I saw it soon after Days

characters in Fallen Angels are rather thinly

of Being Wild, probably the earliest Wong

defined, and the style at times a little too

Kar-wai film that could be said to be a

flashy–-although more subtly expressive of

spiritual precursor to In the Mood for Love

characters’ emotions than I realized on first

and 2046. Compared to that relatively relaxed

viewing–-the film is more important to

feature, Fallen Angels at first seemed a

Wong’s body of work than it first seems. In

mere exercise: effectively moody, yes, but

pushing his visual approach and his feel for

seemingly less interested in defining the

hopeless romantics to extremes, he carries

characters and deeply involving us in their

his modern style to its zenith. In emphasizing

thoughts and emotions than in looking

the changes his characters experience, I think

“cool,” playing with certain romantic notions,

Wong is implicitly looking ahead in his own

and revelling in changing film stocks,

career: wanting to enjoy the same free-spirit-

pixillated action sequences, and glamorous

edness as his characters–-a freedom

neon lighting (by Wong’s regular collabora-

reflected not only in those characters, but

tor Chris Doyle, his cinematographer on

also in Wong’s rampant technique throughout

every feature after As Tears Go By,). The

the film–-but realizing, with a wince, that

result at first struck me as superficially

even in a big city like Hong Kong, there’s a

impressive but rather detached and empty;

price to be paid for living such a lifestyle.

one could be easily dazzled by its MTV

That Wong continued to explore similar

veneer, but was there really anything

themes of love and alienation in an equally

beneath the pretty surface?

gorgeous yet more mature and intelligent style is further proof that he is one of the most exciting and fascinating filmmakers working today.

46

47

48

Plot

HAPPY TOGETHER INFO

30 January 1998 99 min Hong Kong Comedy | Crime | Drama | Romance

Fallen Angels is set in the surreal milieu of urban, nighttime Hong Kong. As with the filmmaker’s other features, plot takes a back seat to mood. The wisp of a narrative intercuts two story lines. The first follows a hitman (Leon Lai) who finds that the assassin’s life has slowly lost its allure.

Complicating his life is his beautiful contact (Michele Reis, a former Miss Hong Kong

FEATURING

winner) who pines after him with fetishistic

Leon Lai

ardor, although the two have never met in

Michelle Reis Takeshi Kaneshiro Charlie Yeung Karen Mok Chen Wan-lei

their nearly three-year partnership. In another part of the city, He (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a mute, boyish ex-convict, makes a living by sneaking into and running businesses after hours. Still living with his father who runs the Chungking Mansions hotel, the restless Ho falls for Cherry (Charlie Yeung), a woman getting over her breakup with the offscreen Johnny. The movie follows these episodic romances almost half-heartedly as with Wong’s other films, and digressionary moments attract much of the camera’s distracted gaze. This visually stylish and unabashedly effusive work is considered by some critics to be the quintessential Wong film.

49

Review

Turns out that When you travel, your first discovery is that you do not exist,’’ Elizabeth Hardwick observed in her book ‘’Sleepless Nights.’’ That sense of acute isolation while in transit is woven into the exhilarated, brooding tango music seeping through the soundtrack of Wong Kar-Wai’s powerfully moody film ‘’Happy Together.’’

lonely people are all the same.

–Lai Yiu-fai

The movie, which won Mr. Wong the best director prize this year at Cannes, follows a young gay couple from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, where they foolishly imagine they can salvage their stormy relationship by starting over in a new place. No sooner do they arrive than they quarrel and separate. As the movie, narrated by Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), the more introspective of the two, follows Lai around the city, the cacophonous urbanity that in other films by Mr. Wong serves as a mood-enhancing stimulant only underscores his alienation and melancholy.

Lai’s relationship with his lover, Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung), was never promising to begin with. While together, they continually collide like impatient high-strung puppies, yapping and nipping at each other when not feverishly making love. Lai is clearly the more responsible and serious of the pair, while the languidly seductive Ho, whose wanton promiscuity is a bone of contention, floats around Buenos Aires, a recklessly free spirit.

After breaking up, Lai takes a job as a doorman in a tango club. One night, Ho, who has been hustling for a living, appears with a client whose stolen watch he gives Lai to help

50

pay his air fare home. Lai is livid. But after Ho is seriously beaten up by the client, Lai allows Ho to recuperate in his shabby rooming house and nurses Ho back to health. Even then, Ho behaves like a spoiled, dictatorial brat, demanding that his lover, stricken with the flu, leave his sick bed to cook for him. Looking back later, Lai moons about how the period of Ho’s recovery was one of the couple’s happiest. ‘’Happy Together,’’ which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight at 6 P.M. and tomorrow at 9 P.M., is a more coherent, heartfelt movie than the director’s fantastical Hong Hong romps, ‘’Chungking Express’’ and ‘’Fallen Angels’’ (which the Film Festival showed on Tuesday). At the same time, it is as stylistically brash, young at heart and pulsing with life as these two earlier Wong films.

The cinematography of the director’s longtime collaborator, Christopher Doyle, lends the streets, alleys and bars of Buenos Aires a fizzing candy-colored glow. Every so often, the camera momentarily draws back for a street-scene overview in which the blinking signs, traffic and clouds accelerate into a breathless sensory rush.

These moments are contrasted with gorgeous blue-tinted shots of Iguacu Falls, the awesome group of waterfalls on the Argentina-Brazil border that serve as a spiritual magnet for the bickering lovers.

Twice in the film, the camera surveys this phenomenon in lingering, breathtakingly lovely aerial shots. ‘’Happy Together’’ also makes strikingly effective use of contrasting black-and-white and color sequences that correspond to the movie’s reflective and in-the-moment modes.

The pathos deepens as Lai, who dreams of going back to Hong Kong, takes two jobs, working days in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and nights in an abattoir, and even descends to occasional prostitution, to earn the money for his return trip. By the end of the film, you feel you have shared his squalid life of bedbugs, cheap cooking and too many cigarettes.

While working at the Chinese restaurant, Lai becomes friendly with Chang (Chang Chen), a young, straight Taiwanese determined to see the world before returning home to do his military service. Chang’s dream is to visit a lighthouse ‘’at the end of the world’’ in Tierra del Fuego, where he has heard you can bring your personal sorrows and leave them behind.

Their fleeting (nonsexual) friendship becomes the poignant emotional center of a film that captures the restless open-to-everything spirit of youth with a piercing sadness.

51

52

I didn’t see Chang, but I saw his family. I finally understood how he could be happy running around so free.

It’s because he has a place he can always return to.

53

A B O U T

Schedule 48

Venue

F E S T I V A L

56

S C H E D U L E

July 17- 19 2020

Broadway Cinematheque 3 Public Square St, Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong

july 17 A S

T E A R S

D A Y S

O F

G O

B E I N G

C H U N G K I N G

56

B Y W I L D

E X P R E S S

july 18 A S

T E A R S

D A Y S

O F

G O

B Y

B E I N G

C H U N G K I N G

W I L D

E X P R E S S

july 19 C H U N G K I N G F A L L E N H A P P Y

E X P R E S S A N G E L S

T O G E T H E R

57

V E N U E

58

Broadway Cinematheque 3 Public Square St, Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong

Nathan

Road

LANE

STREET

STREET

MING

SHANGHAI

KUN

R ECL A M AT IO N

TUNG

STREET

MAN

PUBLIC

WING

SQUARE

SING

LANE

STREET

59

Love is all a matter of timing. It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. – Wong Kar Wai