Dir.: Wong Kar-wai

One of the most sensual and romantic films ever made, without one single kiss. This film is 100% pure beauty. From the colors, to the music, to Maggie Cheung... Stunning in every possible aspect, In The Mood For Love is one of the first masterpieces of the twenty first century, perfection reached in the art of film making. No matter what Kar-Wai does in the future, this will always be the film that made me 'fall in love' with him...

This is probably the most perfect and representative portray of modern life ever done in the form of film! The cinematography is a little unusual... The narrative is divided in two parts and there are some unusual and astonishing camera techniques that I admit I had never seen in a film before! Obviously, being a Wai Wong film, the main subjects are love, art and human connections...

Wong Kar-Wai was born in China and moved to Hong Kong when he was five. This obviously means he grew up watching traditional Chinese martial arts films. Everyone who was born there did. So, considering that those are always a filmmaker's first influences, it would be normal, expected even, if he would to aspire to make films such as those.

...Except we're talking about a man who emantes art and beauty from anything he does. His first film, As Tears Go By, came in 1988 (one year after I was born) and it was the start of a career full of visually unique, highly stylized art films. Ashes of Time is his... I wouldn't say 'attempt', more like his tribute to the Wuxia genre. His only film that doesn't take place in the 20th or 21st century.

It isn't, however, an action film. There are two, maybe three fight scenes in the entire film. The action is shot in a largely inscrutable manner; most of the motion is blurred, and the chaotic swordplay rendered more so by the quick cutting. Wong isn't interested in action or violence so much as the idea of them. Basicly what he does is to turn something as physical and 'real' as swordplay into a dreamlike abstraction. I can't even begin to eplain how brilliant that is to me. Ashes of Time has everything any other of his films do. The only difference is that its characters live in the martial arts' world, instead of an urban, easier to relate one. Other than that they still feel love, loss and regret.



Not suprisingly, the film doesn't follow a traditional narrative but, rather, carefully unspools a number of interconnected plot threads. The common link between all of these stories is Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) a once-active swordsman who now acts as an agent for other hired killers. As a multitude of characters pass through and by his Inn in the desert, the focus of the film moves across a number of episodes involving characters such as Yao-shi Huang (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a swordsman friend of Ouyang's, who one day gives him a gift of 'magic' wine; a swordswoman (Brigitte Lin) with a severe multiple personality identity crisis; and a blind swordsman (Tony Leung) who wants one last glimpse of his home before the final blackout.

Ouyang had abandoned his home and his true love (Maggie Cheung) in search of fame as a swordsman, and as the film unfolds we come to understand how he came to his current place in life. Cheung's character is the heart of the film, the one with more screen time, but the film would mean nothing without all of its characters, who all interact in strange, unchronological manners. The doubts and the confusion that will emerge (cause it will) from all these characters put together - at a certain point you'll find yourself completely lost, wondering who's who - won't be nice, some will find it infuriating and won't be able to fully understand its greatness after several viewings. However, the many fragments of Ashes of Time DO assemble into a clear picture. The patient and attentive viewer will be rewarded when the film ultimately reveals itself as the meticulously constructed puzzle that it is.

Ashes of Time is a gorgeous film. Even those who can't follow the story should be greatful for the fact alone that they got to see something this beautiful. Wong's poetic prose, along with hauntingly melodic music and Christopher Doyle's heavenly cinematography makes it a feast to the senses. A film of a rare and unique beauty. Even the fight scenes (shot, keep in mind, 13 years ago), beautifully choreographed, are a joy to watch and make a masterpiece like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon feel ashamed of itsef. Words are not enough not describe how sorry I am for all those who can't see the brilliance of this film.

For any Kar-Wai fan, or, in a larger picture, any Asian Cinema fan, Ashes of Time's cast is like a dream come true. I mean, can you picture Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin together, all giving some of the best performances of their careers? Cheung is fabulous as the lead, playing the cynical and bitter Ouyeng, Leung gives what might be his most emotional performance ever as the mysterious Blind Swordsman, Lin is probably the one who shines the most, playing two characters in one and Maggie's ten minutes torward the end is the most jaw-droppingly beautiful, yet haunting and sad scene you'll ever see. If this wasn't a masterpiece, the film would be worth it for that scene alone.

May be hard to believe, but Ashes of Time recalls Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Besides the love-it-or-hate-it reputation, both have insanely stellar casts; both use a violent genre as the launchpad for existential meditation; both concern themselves with the psychology beneath the bloodshed. And, of course, both have been called pretentious. I call them both art. A-R-T!

Jeremy: "It's like these pies and cakes. At the end of every night the cheesecake and the apple pie are always completely gone. The peach cobbler and the chocolate mousse cake are nearly finished. But there's always a whole blueberry pie left untouched.
Elizabeth: So what's wrong with the blueberry pie?
Jeremy: There's nothing wrong with the blueberry pie. It's just people make other choices... You can't blame the blueberry pie. It's just no one wants it."



As some of you know, My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-wai's first English-language film. It isn't, like many people insist on calling it, an 'American film', it just takes place in America and has American actors. Other than that, this is a Hong Kong/Chinese-French production, financed mainly by Block 2 Pictures (HK) and Studio Canal - nothing to do with Hollywood. It has all of the visual splendour of Wong's best films, it does, but it is not at all an essential viewing for anyone who plans to discover Wong's universe. There are eight fantastic pictures (among them three of the most beautiful films I've personally seen) to be watched before this. However, for die hard Wong fans, this is naturally one of the film events of the year. And, if you're not naive to the point of believing that it will approach the excellence of In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, then My Blueberry Nights won't disappoint you.

Wong's pre-handover films Chungking Express (one of those three films I mentioned) and Fallen Angels combined whimsy with levity to good effect, while In the Mood for Love - arguably his masterpiece - and Happy Together made us believe in true love. My Blueberry Nights tries to do the same thing, but it is less successful. Which, again, would be expected for any Wong fan.

Though Christopher Doyle isn't behind the camera, what Doyle has said about filming the style of the director rather than bringing his own style proves to be accurate. No one would rate Darius Khondji (an Iranian cinematographer who shot Se7en and Delicatessen, among others) as highly as Doyle, yet Khondji gives Wong the precise and beautiful compositions everyone has come to expect from a Wong film. It's dreamily atmospheric with neon lights, utilizing shallow focus to elaborate interior shots through glass or whatever can possibly come between the actors and the camera. Khondji isn't as restless as Doyle, but if anything that's a positive.

The stylization of Wong's dialogue may not be as apparent as his visuals, but it's always been a projection of the character's point view, particularly their memories and desires. It has never been naturalistic, though this isn't as obvious when you are largely processing it through subtitles. Even in Cantonese, dialogue was never a strong point of Wong's films. His narratives are rather aimless, as he's better at circling around what he's trying to say, and that makes for more interesting cinema than condescending preaching anyway. My Blueberry Nights was always going to be less successful, because Wong isn't working in his first language. That being said, I feel it's more that it strikes us as inferior because we excuse awkward dialogue to translation problems and liabilities. Similarly, while there's an exactness to Wong's set design, he's never strived for it to be in the department of realism. If this is suddenly an issue, it's because having lived or spent time in these places the film isn't meeting our perceptions of them. We see NYC in a different light than HK, startled by it being so calm and empty it's disquieting, but this alteration has no particular impact on the film.

My Blueberry Nights is disappointing in the sense that Wong continues to repeat himself. One might hope he could be more than a director of melancholic romances of unrequited love creating broken hearts who eventually start over, but he isn't. This is what he does. Wong's themes don't change, which is perhaps as it should be given his excellence in the subject. Wong adds to his body of work largely by altering time and place. His last film set in contemporary Hong Kong was 1995's Fallen Angels. In the Mood for Love and Eros' segment, The Hand, took place in the 1960s, 2046 in said futuristic year, while Happy Together was set in Argentina and now My Blueberry Nights in the USA.



Wong's preoccupation is what makes the human heart tick, and his films are capable of succeeding at any time or in any place because that's fairly universal, especially in the fairy tale manner he deals with it. Where My Blueberry Nights clearly fails to reach the heights of Wong's best HK films is in the acting department. The dialogue of those films was also diversionary and insignificant, but he had Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who are among the best actors on this planet at expressing the unexpressed. Certainly a large part of the emotion in any Wong film is created by the visual style, which remains the same, but the best actors took it to another level through their ability to subtly express emotions such as desire, longing, and regret.

My Blueberry Nights still doesn't play events as being of increased significance, but it's much talkier than Wong's HK films, sometimes bogged down to the point we wonder if Lawrence Block intended the script to be a play. The real problem though is while the feelings are thankfully still expressed through interest rather than declaration, the Hollywood actors are typically too focused on dialogue, and thus don't do as good a job at surfacing the interior. It's basically the Western-Asian differences emerging all over again. They don't need words to express themselves, we were born in a culture where people talk for a living.

Wong had more success pairing an actor (Tony Leung) with a well known singer (Faye Wong) in Chungking Express (partially because he also had Brigitte Lin to rely upon), but Norah Jones does fine in her acting début. It's pretty clear that she'll never have an actual career as an actress, but her role is simply to be a passive witness to the unfulfilled dreams and unrequited love of desperate hardened addicts. Her two encounters with Jeremy (Jude Law) bookend three short stories of rocky relationships, with Elizabeth (Jones) learning from the failure of others. There's never much doubt she'll start a relationship with fellow hopeful innocent Jeremy, the British diner owner she meets at the outset when she's trying to reconnect with her long-time boyfriend who recently left her for another woman. The slight wistful film is her 300 day road trip to purge the pain and heartbreak of the failed relationship before beginning a new with Jeremy, who she writes to from her various stops but never provides with a return address.

The only advancement for Wong is the story of Leslie (Natalie Portman looking about as trashy as she's capable of as a bleach bland with short curls), as her problems are with her father rather than a lover. Natalie injects the screen with energy, a welcome change of pace towards the end of the film, and thankfully Jude Law manages to shake off the slickness that has characterised many of his roles, and is quite charming and endearing as Jones' maybe-love interest. David Strathairn is still the one who shines the most as the broken, disenchanted cop, while Rachel Weisz looks madly beautiful (as always) and impresses with the American accent. There's also a small, priceless appearance by Cat Power as Jeremy's ex-girlfriend, who also contributes for the soundtrack with two of her fabulous songs ("The Greatest" and "Living Proof").

If Wong really does remake The Lady From Shanghai in 2009, an overlooked Orson Welles near masterpiece, especially doing so with Nicole Kidman, that'll be his first sell-out. In the meantime, while this English-language debut veers closer to an introduction for those with subtitlephobia than the bold faced entry in his filmography we always hope for, it does add a little to his resume, it's interesting and pleasurable enough, and most importantly it's clearly still a film by Wong Kar-wai.

NOTE: THIS IS A REVIEW OF WONG KAR-WAI's SEGMENT, "THE HAND" (I HAVEN'T SEEN THE OTHER TWO BY ANTONIONI AND SODERBERGH).



This little 40-minute short, The Hand, is a magnificent Wong Kar-wai piece. Wong sets it in the Hong Kong of the 1960s that he mined so well in In the Mood for Love and 2046, with that same romantic sense of a time long gone and the passing of time. The story is the one of a tailor's apprentice named Zhang (a barely recognizable Chen Chang, whose look here echoes Tony Leung's in 2046) assigned to custom-make clothes for renowned Hong Kong courtesan Miss Hua (the diva Gong Li).

In their first meeting, Miss Hua uses her hand on Zhang, pleasing him sexually and telling him he must know a woman's touch to make truly beautiful women's clothes. She becomes his muse and the great love of his life. Something passes between them every time he measures her for a new outfit. He becomes her protector, be it from eviction or the onslaught of age. Even when they finally kiss, illness prevents it from actually being on the lips - her hand remains the focus of their desire.

Already working with familiar material (peeling old Hong Kong apartments, buttoned-down dandies, tragic femmes), Wong risks self-parody as Zhang pines stoically and Hua spirals downward in classic Wong fashion, but the time constraint keeps him from the sprawl that diluted 2046. The result, while not as masterful, is something like Wong demi-glace: condensed, rich, sensual, provocative, almost overpowering.

With the precious help of Christopher Doyle's heavenly cinematography, Wong is able to create an atmosphere of charged eroticism in the seemingly paradoxical and counter-intuitive act of dressing a woman. Separating the essence of the innate intimacy in their unspoken ritual, Wong retains the imbued sensuality of In the Mood for Love and 2046 to create an equally understated and voluptuous tale of transfigured desire. A must-see for any Wong Kar-wai worshipper.