Perhaps the best way to describe Shanghai-born, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai is as a fetishist of romance. Throughout his entire career, which spans four decades of 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. “I’ve never worked with someone who’s put so much emphasis on a single moment,” Jude Law said in a New York Times interview in 2008, describing an entire night of shooting devoted to different angles and set-ups on a kiss within “My Blueberry Nights.” But the absolute focus on the smoking of a cigarette, a furtive glance, a kiss, the application of make-up or the fixing of a perfectly coiffed beehive is never unmoored to an emotion: there is a purpose to everything, even if that purpose is rarely straight-up storytelling in the classic Hollywood sense. 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.
But in amongst the delirious, swirling, enveloping moods he summons so brilliantly there is often a hard edge to the love affairs he details—the foolhardy, self-defeating belief by one or either party that love is, if not a game, then a competition that can be won or lost. And so his characters preemptively leave or hurt or spurn each other, for fear of future rejection. They regard the object of their affection as also part adversary, and the choreography of the romance takes on the qualities of a war, with battles won and lost along the way, strategies succeeding and failing. Which is why Wong’s preoccupation with martial arts (the wuxia literary tradition of China) is not as anomalous as it may at first seem. Not only were the old, often schlocky movies and TV shows in this genre the formative viewing experiences of the lonely and isolated Wong after he moved from the mainland to Hong Kong at age 5, not speaking any Cantonese, but the thrill of the fight, the triumph and despair all seem analogous to Wong’s view of romantic relationships. “The Grandmaster,” which opens in the U.S. this week, is the second feature Wong has dedicated to wuxia (“Ashes of Time” being the first), but it’s his first time assaying kung fu specifically. Still, neither movie represents a departure, in fact both are, in their different ways, a fusing of the martial arts Wong admires and the love stories he’s drawn to tell.
You can read our Berlin review of “The Grandmaster” here (bearing in mind that there is a different, slightly shorter U.S. cut), but if you’d rather wait until after you’ve seen it, here’s our complete retrospective on the films of Wong Kar-wai to date to get you in, well, the mood. Read; rewatch; swoon.
“As Tears Go By” (1988)
The slinky pop music of a Cantonese cover of Berlin‘s “Take My Breath Away” swells, kinetic visuals blur romantically in that now iconic shuttering step-printing aesthetic and a hail of bullets, fists and kisses fly by in a flurry of violently edited images: and so marked Wong Kar-wai’s arrival as an indelible and striking cinematic auteur. Modeled after Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” right down to the unhinged best friend and the girlfriend from afar, the crime melodrama “As Tears Go By” eschews the sin and guilt motif of Little Italy and hangs its tale on two parallel stories of love (one romantic, the other brotherly). A young, handsome gangster, Wah (Andy Lau), is caught between two people: the cousin he has fallen in love with, Ngor (Maggie Cheung), and the loyalty he has for his volatile triad “brother,” Fly (Jack Cheung), who is constantly getting into life-threatening trouble. Wah has a choice: leave the gangster life for Ngor or stick around to protect Fly, who is always one insult or major affront away from death. As you might imagine, it doesn’t end well. Named after a Rolling Stones song and incessantly featuring the aforementioned Berlin track (co-written by Giorgio Moroder; famously used on the “Top Gun” soundtrack) as its impossibly romantic theme, “As Tears Go By” would also announce WKW’s cosmopolitan, pop-song sensibilities that would continue through all his films. Not as emotionally potent or dramatically engaging as his later work, ‘Tears’ is slight by early Wong standards. But it’s still a helluva stylish and arresting debut that’s endlessly watchable and that shows a nascent flair that would later develop into his more artful and painterly eye. Cinematography aficionados will also remember this as the only early WKW not shot by Christopher Doyle (who would go on to shoot seven of his films in a row). “As Tears Go By” was lensed by Andrew Lau Wai-Keung, who also shot the first half of the two stories in “Chungking Express.” Lau would go on to be a director in his own right and helm the celebrated “Infernal Affairs” trilogy, which, in the cyclical way of things, was remade as “The Departed” by, of course, Martin Scorsese. [B]