Filmmaker Wong Kar Wai exists in liminal spaces— the pauses between words, the gaps between cultures, the chance encounters between strangers who will become lovers or almost become lovers before they’re strangers again. His films are about potential, not expiation; his characters are each “about to,” and that they don’t know that is heartbreaking. He’s slippery, ephemeral, a warm smell carried on a spring breeze, the first maybe after a long winter. His films exist at the moment of change after lifetimes of stagnation and rigor; His interest isn’t drawn by any narrative force, but rather by how everything is essentially the same until something changes and then it’s the same again, but in this new way. In the seven films Wong directed with Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, especially, there is a sense of cultural and interpersonal collisions that define a world moving from the past into a future in which this moment is recalled from a place of melancholy reflection. His films are living hiraeth. I find I’m mourning them somehow as they happen as if they happened to me a long time ago. And didn’t they?
READ MORE: The Essentials: The Films Of Wong Kar-Wai
Over the course of their long collaboration, Wong and Doyle created a multi-film tonal exploration of “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp“: the experience of falling in love with the same woman and losing the same woman over and over, endlessly, through the innumerable skins we wear, and she wears, in places that only exist anymore in our unreliable memory. Wong has said that, for the most part, the characters in his films are, to him, interchangeable. Specifically in regards to “Chungking Express” and “Fallen Angels,” two pieces he saw as complementary parts to one whole. He has insisted in the past that they be screened together and doing so reveals a grand, circular design, not unlike the central profession of flight attendant that runs through both: the arrivals and departures a metaphor for an idea of how everything in life is in a constant state of transformation. Maybe in that state of constant flux find Wong’s view of Hong Kong as a true “center kingdom” perched midway between antiquity and modernity; between the traditions of a Chinese mainland and the cultural diffusion of foreign ideas of the West first through Britain’s colonization of Hong Kong and then through a general proliferation of progressive ideas. Wong’s “Happy Together” poster was banned from public display, and censors considered banning the film altogether for its openness with sex and homosexuality.
But Wong’s films aren’t about the characters; they are about the point at which romance intersects with Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe suggested once that the most beautiful thing in the world was the death of something beautiful and Keats found that the only truth was beauty and so it is with Wong Kar-Wai’s films that are so lovely and also only ever about loss. They are the cinematic equivalent of liebestod and there’s something to be said for the idea that they function more as poetry or music than any other medium. His use of drop-needle music, then, is an obsessive trope one might unravel from work to work for great profit. The Mama’s and the Papa’s “California Dreamin’” in “Chungking Express” provides a fantasy destination for its quartet (octet?) of lonesome dreamers: the place where lost lovers have fled or where new lovers might flee some sunny day. In it, two cops pine for two unknowable ideals of women – a hard-bitten drug dealer in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin) and a worker at a food stand (Faye Wong) who both, largely unbeknownst to the men who have come to love them from afar, are engaged in intricate actions and possessed of complex emotional lives. Find it in “In the Mood for Love,” perhaps Wong and Doyle’s best known, at least most-beloved, collaboration in which a lonesome writer (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) falls in hopeless love with his neighbor (Maggie Cheung) and she with him. They pass coming to and from their favorite noodle stand and it’s all shot through with Proustian devastation.
READ MORE: Criterion Announces ‘World Of Wong Kar-Wai’ Box Set Featuring 4K Restorations Of 7 Films
I think it’s that sense that in the course of nothing mattering how everything matters a great deal that destroys me when I revisit Wong’s films, how they’re not culturally-specific and equally informed by Wong’s and Doyle’s sensibilities – how they tap into a larger truth by endeavoring only to be a chronicle of the little moments where your life could change and how you tend not to notice them until you’ve rushed past them. My favorite ending in any film is in “Days of Being Wild,” where a character you’ve not met before (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, again) gets ready for a night out by loading his pockets, brushing his hair, looking sharp, and feeling good. It comes at the end of another series of meetings and separations told, as many of his early films are, in two parts that rhyme but don’t necessarily intertwine, and it functions as both celebration of the hopefulness of youth and the mourning for the inevitable death of hope as youth ages into experience.
The Criterion Collection’s new box set collection featuring 4K restorations of six Wong Kar-Wai films is bookended by his first film, “As Tears Go By” and “2046,” his last collaboration with Christopher Doyle. It’s funny because before “2046,” I looked at “As Tears Go By” as the story Tony Leung Chiu-Wai’s lovesick writer is working on in “In the Mood for Love”: an action movie mostly full of gangsters and revenge but shot through with sadness and longing over a woman (Maggie Cheung, of course) who he must choose to honor or betray in the mad pursuit of his violent ends. It’s funny because 2046 is Wong revealing a different fantasy for Leung Chiu-Wai’s author Chow Mo-Wan. Far from discouraging me my flight of specific fancy, however, Wong getting into the mind of Chow cements for me how Chow is Wong’s avatar in his pictures: the creator pulling pieces from the maelstrom swirling around him to create an impression of what he’s feeling in ways wholly inadequate to the intensity of how he’s feeling them. And while Wong has Chow writing a story about how his lost love is a woman in the future embroiled in a delirious love story, for me, she’s the femme in an old noir. She’s both. She’s every woman in every movie who I have fallen in love with for a couple of hours and wondered where they were once it was over – and if she’s happy with how things turned out with the man who was me for those same couple of hours, and if she’s okay after that brief moment of excitement and possibility made everything feel different for a second, you know, now when everything’s the same again.
