in the mood for love (w&d wong kar wai)

Wong Kar Wai´s classic is another one which has been stored away in the memory box, to be revisited during this Cinemateca season. The remarkable thing about the film, often cited as one of the most romantic movies of all time, is that the couple in question never actually get it together. The ache of their reluctance to copy their respective spouses and actually commit adultery, no matter who much they want to, is an ache shared by the audience. When their surface calm finally breaks into emotion, it is devastating, for them and for us. Wai introduces the devilish conceit of the rehearsal into the film, permitting moments where the two would-be lovers role-play dramatic scenarios. The most astonishing of these is when they role-play their own final separation, the moment the dam breaks, and then the lovers and the director step away, saying with an almost sadistic nerve, don’t cry, this is only a rehearsal. Hamlet would have been proud of this self-mastery. The way the film seems to fracture towards the end, the would-be lovers’ separate lives running parallel to one another’s, never to cross again, is also astonishing, because this, surely, is how life works. The greatest love stories don’t get the Hollywood treatment, they don’t even have to be consummated, they live on forever in the what-might-have-been. 

happy together (wong kar-wai)

In between Fallen Angels and Happy Together, according to Imdb, the prolific director only made one film, a ten minute short where: “A Japanese-Chinese couple hangs out and shoots each other.” If this short feels like standard Kar Wai material, the subsequent film must have come as a shock. Firstly in that the director abandoned South East Asia for Argentina, of all places, and secondly because in his next film no-one dies and there’s very little violence. Instead it’s a doomed gay love story. It was a smart move, as Happy Together won him best director at Cannes. Again the film blooms with cinematographic fecundity. The grade flips from washed out black and white, perfect for a tango-vision of Buenos Aires, to washed out colour, which is equally perfect. The play of light and shade which was so integral to the lighting of In The Mood for Love, is investigated with a severity which means that sometimes Tony Leung’s face is almost entirely cast in shadow. The director seems to revel in the Rioplatense winter, that dank, monochrome fever dream which I am presently inhabiting, which gives the lie to any notion of a tropical continent. However, beyond the aesthetic joys, this film is also a fierce investigation of both love and home. By filming abroad, in a society so remote from his own, Wong Kar Wai finds himself investigating the meaning of exile, the lure of the return. The last sequences, in Taipei and Hong Kong, act as a bookend and give Leung’s journey an uplift after all the grief his lost lover has bestowed on him.

The examination of a fierce, doomed, romantic love is peerless. The attraction between the two protagonists Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai is indisputable, and rendered with wit and grace. They dance like a couple, they fuck like a couple and they bicker like a couple. It’s perhaps in the final part of this equation that the director’s portrayal of romantic love comes into its own, because he is prepared to even dwell on the tedium of love, as Autumn turns to Summer and the sun comes out of the Bonaerense gloom, but the two men remain trapped in their room and their torpor, unable to escape the knot of their hopeless dependency on each other.

Another notable aspect of the film, seen from this side of the world, is the way in which it evokes Buenos Aires so effectively. The musical score is spot on, but so is the identification of a place which can seem, from the point of a fixed camera pointed at the Obelisco, like a teeming metropolitan world, but is also a place of lonely streets with warm corners, where people dance as much to keep the cold at bay as out of desperate passion. Seen through an exile’s eyes, the peeling beauty of a faded Boca pension possesses a tragic charm, even if the reality of living there has less than zero glamour. The way the Argentine characters react to Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai, just two more characters in the barrio, where the exotic has no great premium, also seems spot on. It’s a land which seems rooted in a Borgesian timelessness, impervious to change, a place to play out elemental human dramas in peace, isolated from the rest of the world and its teeming chaos. 

fallen angels (w&d wong kar-wai)

Watching Wong Kar Wai’s early film I was struck by the similarities with Jarmusch’s early films, which I saw last year. Plot is at a minimum, style at a premium. Fallen Angels is a mess, plot-wise. What is it actually about? A hitman, which allows the director to include some balletic and completely gratuitous shoot-outs, his business partner, a beautiful woman who masturbates a lot, and blondie, a live-wire who screams and falls for the hitman, who rejects her. The only narrative logic that emerges from this potpourri is that the hitman will do one last job after deciding to get out and it doesn’t need a narrative genius to work out what will happen on that final job. The story offers little to inspire. If there is any socio-political content, it passed me by. (There might be, someone more versed in South Asian politics would have to fill me in.) But what there is is style to swoon for. The unsung hero of Kar Wai´s early film is Christopher Doyle, his cinematographer, whose woozy, sub-aqueous imagery utterly beguiles. What Kar Wai displays in Fallen Angels is a heady aesthetic, which proved more than sufficient to propel him into the mainstream of contemporary filmmakers.

my blueberry nights (w&d wong kar wai, w. lawrence block)

Wong Kar Wai had already made one affecting and intuitive road movie in the Americas, Happy Together, before he got round to his North American debut. Happy Together retained a Hong Kong/ Chinese feel through the use of its lead characters, a gay couple spiralling out of control on a road trip through Argentina, something My Blueberry Nights foregoes, with its resolutely Anglo-Saxon cast. Perhaps as a result of this, it feels like a film without a centre. The episodic narrative follows a character played by Norah Jones, who seems rootless in all the wrong ways. Not only does it feel as though she’s not really going anywhere, it also feels as though she doesn’t come from anywhere, save Hollywood Central casting. The same could be said for Jude Law, whose erratic Northern accent is supposed to suggest that he’s an itinerant Mancunian who has ended up running his own bar in New York, for reasons the script never deigns to explain. Which is not to say that the film doesn’t have its moments of bravura, Wong Kar Wai, charm, most noticeable in the performance of Rachel Weisz as a vampish  femme fatale who drives her alcoholic husband to suicide. Weisz gives it all she’s got and for a while there’s a sense of real passion, rather than contrived pseudo-passion, the kind of heightened sexual tension that made In The Mood for Love such an electrifying watch. However, this is no more than an episode in Jones’ journey, an episode that soon fizzles out with David Strathairn’s convenient automobile accident. The lighting becomes the most interesting aspect of a film which, for a supposed road movie, feels excessively pedestrian; whilst the director joins the list of greats whose Hollywood nights ended up providing more of a snack than a main course.