Time Regained: The World of Wong Kar Wai

Over the course of seven features and one roughly hour-long short made between 1988 and 2004—all collected in a recent box set from the Criterion Collection bearing his name—Wong Kar-wai developed, refined, and evolved an idiosyncratic personal style in which every achingly sumptuous frame is permeated by a yearning, romantic fatalism. For the mercurial Hong Kong auteur, love is intimately tied up with loss—the end of a relationship written into its beginning, and distance providing a bittersweet counterweight to togetherness. Wong frequently sets up seemingly perfect pairings only to wrench them apart and reconfigure them. Watching his work, you often expect that big moment of romantic rapprochement, in which two people declare their love for each other and share a deep kiss. But while such moments of cathartic passion dot Wong’s oeuvre, they never serve as the culmination of a story, only its dreamlike pinnacle, one never to be reached again but which casts an indelible shadow over the characters’ lives.

While the audience can be assured that the romantic duo in a Wong film will certainly not end up together by the time the credits roll, almost nothing else is inevitable about the director’s narrative choices. Wong’s films tend to follow an emotional, intuitive logic rather than any traditional rules of narrative structure, and his stories seem to be constantly revising themselves—transferring locations, shifting emphases, and sometimes even completely trading out one set of characters for another. Wong is rarely content to tell one single story from beginning to end, though when he does, as in In the Mood for Love and The Hand, the results can be supremely compelling. More times than not, he’s fond of a wonky multilinearity in which one narrative seems to spawn another, inviting us to divine meaning from the stories’ poetic, often enigmatic, parallels.

In fact, each film that Wong has made is, to a great extent, a response to and revision of the one that came before it. The World of Wong Kar Wai isn’t a completely comprehensive overview of Wong’s oeuvre, as it excludes three of his features, most notably the 1994 wuxia epic Ashes of Time, which sits in the middle of the period otherwise covered by this set and which found the director pushing his fondness for symbolical parallelism to the extreme. But the set, which features new, Wong-approved restorations of the features he made between his debut in 1988 and 2046, provides a remarkable opportunity to enter the mind of this great film artist, tellingly described by critic John Powers in his booklet essay as being “among the least linear thinkers I’ve ever met.” Watching these films in succession allows us to explore the way images, themes, and even certain names and numbers are repeated and reconfigured throughout his work.

Wong’s debut, As Tears Go By, is a neon-soaked Hong Kong triad flick modeled on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Wong is evidently less interested in the story’s macho power dynamics or its John Woo-inspired gunplay than he is in the sweeping romance between cousins Wah (Andy Lau) and Ngor (Maggie Cheung). Appropriately, the film’s most memorable set piece isn’t some blood-soaked shootout, but rather an operatically emotional music video-like sequence set to a Cantopop cover of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” that climaxes with a rain-drenched osculation. Establishing many of the themes that would come to define Wong’s vision of romance, Wah and Ngor’s relationship is marked by restlessness, missed connections, and physical distance. Like so many of Wong’s doomed romances, the two lovers spend more time apart than they do together, enjoying a brief but torrid commencement followed by a long, languorous separation.

Wong has said that he “could have continued making films like As Tears Go By for the rest of eternity,” but instead he followed up the commercial success of his debut with the highly personal and self-consciously arty Days of Being Wild. Essentially a series of missed connections—everyone seems to be finding the right person at the wrong time or the wrong person at the right time—the film establishes some of Wong’s most resonant trademarks: world-weary voiceovers, the ticking hands of an analog clock, a gorgeous woman performing a goofy little dance, conversations across a checkout counter that buzz with unspoken sexual tension.

Whereas As Tears Go By is cast in a vivid neon glow, the era depicted in Days of Being Wild, Wong’s first of many collaborations with iconoclastic cinematographer Christopher Doyle, is presented through a gloomy jade-green filter, a visual strategy that was toned down against Wong’s wishes on many previous home-video releases of the film, but which is in full effect in the new 4K restoration included in Criterion’s box set. The verdancy of the images at first lends Days of Being Wild an expressionistic glamour, but the green-ness of everything eventually starts to feel sickly and oppressive. That shift in feeling mirrors the film itself, which opens with giddy romantic possibility but ends in dour isolation, with the perplexing image of a previously unseen man (Tony Leung) primping himself in his grimy, low-ceilinged apartment.

Days of Being Wild was a commercial failure, causing Wong to return to more commercial prospects with Ashes of Time, but while that complex, big-budgeted production was ongoing, he knocked out Chungking Express in just a few weeks. A vivacious, freewheeling explosion of music, romance, and exultant style, the film unites As Tears Go By’s gangland thrills with the moody anti-romance of Days of Being Wild, while imbuing it all with an ineffable atmosphere of effervescent longing. Featuring one of Wong’s trademark parallel storylines, the film opens on a cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro) obsessively buying tins of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1, the day he was dumped. The self-consciously exaggerated forlornness of this first segment gives way to another tale of unrequited love, this one a fizzy, dizzying tale of a snack bar attendant, Faye (Faye Wong), who finds herself infatuated with the police officer (Tony Leung) who frequents the bar. Faye Wong’s captivating performance, which is bubbly yet diffident, is a perfect match for the energetic style Wong adopts. Using time-lapse photography, smeary step-printed slow-mo, and a camera that darts and dives through the crammed alleyways of Chungking Mansions, Wong creates a pleasantly overwhelming sensation of the hectic pace of city life, a noisy, overcrowded counterpoint to his characters’ profound loneliness.

If Chungking Express finds Wong at his most buoyant—even the inevitable heartbreak has an airy, life-affirming quality about it—Fallen Angels sees him working in a mode of downcast alienation. Another bifurcated look at the loneliness of urban life, the film is the inverse of its predecessor: a bloody, nocturnal vision of Hong Kong’s seedy criminal underworld viewed through the distorted eye of Doyle’s wide-angle lens. While Chungking Express is about people desperately reaching out for connection but failing to find it, Fallen Angels examines characters who shut themselves off from human emotion, such as hitman Wong Chi-ming (Leon Lai), who refuses to get emotionally involved in his sultry female partner’s (Michelle Reis) life. The film features some of Doyle’s most complex compositions, which often place characters in the foreground gazing off dreamily into the distance as madcap action plays out behind them. With numerous callbacks to Chungking Express—including a few expired tins of pineapple—Fallen Angels is in many ways inextricable from the earlier film, the yang to the yin of Chungking Express. Seen together, they serve as a bittersweet love letter to Hong Kong—its hustle and bustle, jukebox bars, neon signs, noodle shops, and cluttered apartments.

For Wong, one of our most restless artists, and for whom nothing is worth doing unless it’s worth doing four or five different ways, the idea of a future in which everything is perfectly constant might as well be a vision of hell.

Having created one of the more indelible evocations of a place ever committed to celluloid, what was the ever-restive Wong to do for his next film other than travel halfway around the globe and make a film in Argentina? Whereas his prior efforts make stunning use of Hong Kong’s cramped verticality, Happy Together capitalizes on the vastness of Argentina with black-and-white scenes of a road trip gone sour that look like they came straight out of a Wim Wenders film. A torrid, on-again, off-again romance about an expatriate gay couple, Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), living in Buenos Aires, the film is, ironically, Wong’s most Hong Kong-obsessed work. Happy Together was released just a few months before control of the territory was transferred from the United Kingdom to China, and it’s hard not to see the ecstatic highs and depressive lows of Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai’s relationship as a mirror of the uncertainties surrounding the handover. All that anticipation and dread is summed up in the haunting image of the two men dancing a sad tango in their dingy little apartment. However, in typical Wong fashion, absence only makes the heart grow fonder, and thus the film closes with an embrace of things to come, with Po-Wing making his way back to Hong Kong as the blissful strains of Danny Chung’s cover of the eponymous Turtles track fill the air.

While Happy Together considers the future of Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love is a glorious immersion into the city’s past. A subtle, sensual romance in the vein of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, the film jettisons the elliptical, meandering non-narratives of Wong’s prior work in favor of a tightly composed story in which every tiny gesture is imbued with purpose and meaning. Wong’s restrained style is attuned to the repressed nature of two neighbors-turned-lovers, writer Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and secretary Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), who, unable to break free of the strictures of society, their own fear of being judged, and the whims of fate, fail to end up together despite their profound feelings for one another. If Wong’s other work is marked by a seemingly continuous multiplication of characters, In the Mood for Love is distinguished by the way that it pares away all unnecessary personages until Mo-wan and Li-zhen are practically the only ones left. (Even their respective spouses remain unseen.) With meticulously detailed production and costume design from Wong’s close collaborator William Chang Suk-ping, the film turns Mo-wan and Lizhen’s cramped apartment building into an intimate universe unto itself, one that slowly crumbles never to return again. As one of the film’s aphoristic intertitles puts it, “That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.”

Wong uses 2046, a sci-fi-inflected quasi-sequel to In the Mood for Love and (more vaguely) Days of Being Wild, to explore the inversion of that sentiment, imagining a dystopian future society in which there’s a place, known as 2046, where one can go to recapture lost memories. As expansive and unwieldy as In the Mood for Love is compact and controlled, 2046 is a kind of fire sale of Wong’s pet themes: romantic longing, the pain of memory, the juxtaposition between congested urban spaces and individual loneliness, and the political fate of Hong Kong. Leung reprises his role as Mo-wan, now divorced and mustachioed, who cycles through a seemingly endless supply of women in a vain attempt to overcome the loss of Li-zhen. Gaudy CGI in the film’s futuristic sequences butts up against some of Wong’s most seductive imagery, but everything occurs at a stultifying emotional remove. As usual, Wong not only revisits his past work but revises it as well, twisting the deeply wounded romanticism of In the Mood for Love into a calloused numbness in 2046. In the future as imagined by Mo-wan, nothing ever changes, and so there’s no happiness and no sadness. For Wong, one of our most restless artists, and for whom nothing is worth doing unless it’s worth doing four or five different ways, the idea of a future in which everything is perfectly constant might as well be a vision of hell.

For a seven-disc box set devoted to such a significant filmmaker, one whose films cry out for explication and interpretation, The World of Wong Kar Wai is sadly light on extras. There are no commentary tracks, no making-of docs, and only one newly produced featurette, a pleasant but inessential throwaway in which Wong answers questions from admirers like Sofia Coppola and Jonathan Lethem. In particular, the set cries out for a detailed feature on the restoration process, during which Wong, incapable of stepping in the same river twice, re-colored and even re-edited the films, altering some of them to a significant degree. Fallen Angels, for example, is presented in a wider aspect ratio that cuts off the top and bottom of the original image, and certain color sequences have been re-done in black and white. (In lieu of such context, Criterion has invested its resources into the set’s super-deluxe packaging, which includes a french-fold booklet with insert prints.)

The set does contain at least one essential special feature: an extended cut of The Hand, a roughly one-hour short originally produced for the anthology film Eros, which explores the life-altering effects of an epic hand job. What sounds like a cheap joke is instead a tender reflection on aging and the power of memory. A shy tailor’s assistant, Zhang (Chang Chen), is sent to measure a high-end call girl, Miss Hua (Gong Li), who treats him to a moment of ecstasy he’ll never forget. Wong’s most linear work outside of As Tears Go By, The Hand is an uncharacteristically straightforward affair, in which each moment is directed toward telling a self-contained story that parallels Zhang’s ascension in the tailoring business with Miss Hua’s steady decline. Though it’s one of Wong’s least characteristic works, the short offers a melancholy distillation of the central theme animating his entire oeuvre: To remember the past is to long for something which can never be regained. If Wong’s characters are imprisoned by their longings, the director himself has escaped the bitter trap of memory by constantly embracing change at every step and steadfastly refusing ever to make the same film twice.

World of Wong Kar Wai is now available from the Criterion Collection.