Directory of World Cinema

Chungking Express, Jet Tone/The Kobal Collection.

directors: hong kong

wong kar-wai

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Partway through Wong Kar-wais directorial debut As Tears Go By (1988), gangster Wah
randomly encounters a former girlfriend, now heavily pregnant. The scene begins with
a distant view of Wah dashing through a downpour. As he arrives close to frame, the
camera glides sideways to reveal the woman standing nearby. The arcing camera comes
to rest, framing the pair in frontal two-shot. This setup presents the characters stilted
exchange as they take refuge from the rain, the woman assuring Wah that he is not her
childs father. Assuaged, Wah bids farewell and ventures back into the rainstorm. Now
the camera reverses its original path, tracking away from the woman, and reclaiming
its initial vantage point as Wah darts into the distance. Bracketed by rhyming tracking
shots, this sequence evinces a formal unity consistent with the films generally episodic
construction.
In some respects this scene is prototypical Wong Kar-wai. The fondness for action
motivated by coincidence; the use of inclement rainfall as pathetic fallacy; the interrup-
tion of genre plotting by apparently incidental action; the expression of interior states
through subtle implication (as when the womans hesitancy hints at emotional secrets)
all these features have become cornerstones of Wongs cinema. Yet the scenes visual
symmetry betrays a degree of detailed calculation, perhaps even storyboarding, unchar-
acteristic of Wongs subsequent films. Here, the indications are of economical shooting
and cutting-in-the-camera, not least because the scenes visual bookends were evidently
conceived prior to editing. Wongs next film, romance-melodrama Days of Being Wild
(1990), signals a decisive shift toward the directors now-customary film practice: an
experimental preference for shooting many improvized variants of a scene. Now a rich
lode of footage multiplies options for scene construction, and this fund of possibilities
afforded by Wongs spontaneous method of shooting, which does not presuppose
how the finished scene will look effectively relegates the sort of neatly symmetrical
sequence found in As Tears Go By. As it makes one aesthetic option less likely, how-
ever, Wongs production method promotes other formal choices. Elliptical editing now
emerges as a major strategy, thanks partly to continuity gaps arising from assembled
takes. If scenic symmetry in As Tears Go By yields crisp scene divisions and formal
finesse, ellipticality fosters ambiguous effects more in tune with Wongs sensibilities. The
romantic role-plays of In the Mood for Love (2000) register disorientation largely by ellip-
tical cutting, which blends discrete scenes imperceptibly together; the resulting temporal
ambiguity renders the protagonists relationship indeterminate. Noting this early shift in
Wongs production methods from cutting-in-camera to on-set spontaneity reminds
us not only that Wong often favours complication over clarity, but that his films formal
complexity stems in part from his distinctive, mercurial mode of production.
Wongs method embraces chance and experiment to a degree that is unusual even
for Hong Kong film production. Still, the films themselves contradict the purportedly
aleatory nature of their creation. Whereas Wong prizes exploratory shooting practices,
the postproduction phase supervised by editor William Chang Suk-ping evidently
prioritizes Aristotelian principles of coherence and unity, subjecting creative experiment
to formal constraints. For all their capricious, mazy gestations, Wongs films display
remarkable internal unity at every level of design.
The music track in Chungking Express (1994), for instance, may seem a casual col-
lage of appropriated songs, but it integrally weaves the films two-part structure into an
organic whole. A languorous, sultry jazz theme sweeps across both plotlines, ironically
juxtaposed against the protagonists chaste romances. This tune tacitly hinges the two
loosely-connected stories. More elaborately, music in both episodes articulates the
films primary theme of change. The blonde woman of the first story safeguards against
change, but Dennis Browns reggae track Things in Life mildly rebukes her: Its not
every day were gonna be the same way / There must be a change somehow. In the
second part, the elfin waitress is indefatigably obsessed with California Dreamin, a

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song that both epitomizes her phobia of change and literalizes her urge to start afresh
in America. Similarly, What a Difference a Day Makes and Cantopop ballad Dreams
lyrically meditate on the transformations wrought by romantic love. Apart from thematiz-
ing songs in leitmotivic fashion, Wong accords music throughout Chungking Express a
palpable self-consciousness. In all such ways, the apparent arbitrariness of Wongs music
track highly heterogeneous in idiom and cultural origin masks a thoroughgoing unity.
No less harnessed to formal integrity is Wongs visual design. My Blueberry Nights
(2007), an Americanized counterpart to Chungking Express, lends its travelog narrative
a lush pictorial consistency. A putative road movie though in fact, like Happy Together
(1997) concerned as much with stagnation as with progress My Blueberry Nights
assigns a dominant colour scheme to each major locale. Deep blues and greens saturate
the New York setting; hot reds and oranges mark the Memphis milieu; golds and tans
pervade Nevada and Vegas. Similarly the New York settings window inscriptions re-
emerge in the films other major plot strands as an overt visual motif. These cohesion
devices help knit distinct plot episodes together and reveal once more the organizing
hand of William Chang (here responsible for production design as well as editing). Critics
have castigated My Blueberry Nights as loosely-plotted and unfocused, but it is no less
solidly constructed than Wongs more feted works.
Just as Wongs films exhibit internal unity, so they cohere into a broadly hermetic
oeuvre. At the production level, Wongs corpus is unified by trusted associates. The
contributions of Chang, cinematographer Chris Doyle, and a prized troupe of players
(including Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi)
have been widely recognized, not least in connection with the films visual sensuous-
ness. Then there is the dense thicket of intertextual allusions that recycles characters,
locales, and music cues across the entire oeuvre. The apparent integrity of Wongs
authorial universe tantalizes viewers into positing connections among the films narra-
tive agents and events (though, tellingly, the diegeses resist neat alignment). Dramati-
cally, too, the films converge on common terrain. Permeating these works are recurring
thematic concerns: the friction between social mores and romantic desire; the long-
ing to surmount psychic inertia; the capricious forces that thwart or furnish personal
encounters; the impregnability of time and memory; the spatiality of time; the tempo-
ral ambiguities of place.
So much unity might seem conservative, but Wongs films construct a pervasive
roughening of the viewers experience that reveals aesthetic risk. Critics regularly note
the dreamlike effects of Wongs cinema, but its seductive, narcotic qualities are offset by
tactics designed to perplex, thwart, or mislead. Put simply, these films demand a cogni-
tively alert spectator. If, ultimately, Wongs aesthetic of disturbance submits to narrative
intelligibility, it nevertheless achieves startling moments of ambiguity and irresolution.
At the level of visual style, Wongs aesthetic is neither wholly opaque nor wholly
informative. Equally, it refuses both the direct emotional payoffs of Hong Kongs popular
cinema and the affective distance of the art film. A favourite stratagem, achieved by
various means, is the denial or disturbance of facial access. Admittedly, the legible facial
close-up constitutes an active resource for Wong: at times he cannot resist lingering on
the sensuous visages of his players. But such compositions operate in counterpoint to
less instantly readable images designed to block or obscure the human face. In Days of
Being Wild, close singles and frontal staging offer no guarantee of legible facial views;
oblique body posture, intrusive shadows, or impinging foreground figures often disturb
visibility. Nor is the over-the-shoulder shot (OTS) exempt from obfuscating treatment. The
ornate, anamorphically-filmed 2046 (2004) strangulates the OTS schema, occluding much
of the frontal characters face by obstructive back-to-camera figures. As if defied by the
wide screen ratio to flout spaciousness, Wong perversely jams the onscreen pair together,
wedging them against the frame edge to conjure unnaturally oppressive framings; in the

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process, characters faces are abbreviated as beguiling fragments. Even the freeze-frame
typically an aid to dramatic clarity is in Wongs repertoire an available source of obfus-
cation. Chungking Express violates cinematic tradition by arresting an indistinct image:
fleeing a murder, the blonde-wigged woman, suspended in motion, becomes an off-cen-
tre, murky figure. (Perceptual and narrative frustration coalesce here: the oblique image
flagrantly stymies revelation just as the enigmatic woman sheds her noirish disguise.)
Wongs strategy of facial masking reminds us that typically-informative devices such as
facial close-ups, OTS staging, and freeze frames possess no essential property of legibility.
Moreover it tends to throw expressive weight onto other bodily attributes (hands, feet),
features of setting (landscape, mise en scne), and parameters of style (cinematography,
music), diffusing the conventional site of character emotion, and affectively saturating the
diegetic terrain. Neither coldly objective nor emotionally direct, Wongs visual style elicits
cognitive arousal suffused with feeling.
Wongs detractors might regard these tactics as mannerisms, but his aesthetic of
disturbance plays a crucial role in the viewers narrative uptake. Denying facial access,
for example, can trigger errors of character individuation, as when In the Mood for Love
coaxes the viewers misidentification of Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) as the cheating
husband of his neighbour, Su (Maggie Cheung). In one sequence, Su accosts a back-to-
camera figure inferably, her husband with allegations of infidelity. Wong postpones
the reverse shot of the male figure, encouraging the viewers false inferences to mount.
The eventual facial view of the man stirs a frisson of surprise: the figure addressed by Su
is not her husband, but Chow. Misdirection springs from Wongs formal play with facial
masking, prompting short-term errors of comprehension, and long-range hypotheses as
to the true nature of the protagonists relationship.
Narrative ambiguity is fostered by yet other challenges to perception. Ellipticality
deletes pivotal passages of story action, as in Ashes of Times (1994) staccato swordplay
duels. Smudge motion vitiates or occludes the actions specificity. When Ashes of Time
blends both of these techniques with oblique framings, whip pans, fast cutting, rest-
less figure movement, and erratic camerawork, the actions legibility emerges only in
brief spasmodic bursts. As often in Wong, the viewers perception is roughened but
not wholly negated; decelerated shots and communicative sound provide vital aids to
intelligibility. Yet the welter of gestures and bodies ambiguates key phases of combat
amid the ferment, the superior swordsman is impossible to discern. Such strategies both
intensify suspense (e.g. which of the duellists will prevail?) and powerfully convey the
fighters stunning, whipcrack agility. Only in the abrupt aftermath of battle is the actions
key information made apparent.
Disorienting effects are achieved by intercutting in Fallen Angels (1995). A barbershop
shootout crosscuts between the feline Agent (Michelle Reis) and Killer (Leon Lai), the
inscrutable assassin she accomplices. Though Wongs crosscutting implies simultane-
ity as does the salon space through which both protagonists maneuver the charac-
ters paths do not once intersect. Soon it becomes evident that a significant time gap
separates the parallel lines, disqualifying our assumptions of concurrent action. Wongs
initially bewildering gambit harbors narrative significance. Most simply, it foregrounds
the protagonists mutual isolation, the pair having pledged never to meet in person.
It also conveys that one protagonist follows a spatial path set by the other. Just as the
yearning figures of In the Mood for Love restage the adulterous activity of their spouses,
so Killer and Agent each trace itineraries laid out in advance. Both Agent (who privately
adopts the assassins routines) and Killer (whose work patterns are supplied by Agent)
avoid mapping purposeful trajectories of their own. Like the protagonists of In the Mood
for Love, they obliquely renounce purposeful activity and personal responsibility (I like
others to arrange things for me, proclaims the assassin). Fallen Angels protagonists,
like Chow and Su, seek emancipation from the burden of human choice and action.

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In the Mood for Love, Block 2 Pics/Jet Tone/The Kobal Collection.

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Their bad faith, more than their societal constraints, forms the mainspring of unfulfilled
romantic desire.
Wongs aesthetic of disturbance is further mobilized by generic pluralism. The viewers
genre hypotheses get thwarted by means of generic subversion or audacious genre
hybridity. Hence the viewers narrative uptake must reckon with unpredictable shifts from
convention. Wongs films are seldom generically forthright. Chungking Express starts as
a policier but swerves into breezy romance territory. 2046 interweaves baroque science
fiction and period melodrama. Happy Together, an ostensible road movie, disdains the
symbolic use of the highway as a site of human intersection, opting instead for a claus-
trophobic focus on the isolated male lovers. In the Mood for Love flaunts the materials
of melodrama (social subjugation, personal sacrifice, emotional suffering, coincidence)
but crucially refuses the omniscience ingredient to the genre; tacitly the film invokes
the norms of detective fiction, structuring its plot around an investigation, and wringing
suspense from a restricted, at times deceptive, narration (see Bettinson 2009). Each film
synthesizes standard genre tropes with quite radical points of departure, attenuating the
emotional and narrative payoffs of formulaic storytelling.
It is partly Wongs effort to frustrate the viewing experience that connects his oeuvre
to modernist traditions. Wong is self-consciously and astutely an exponent of art cinema.
But in a more local context his obfuscating strategies seem keyed to stand out against
most Hong Kong cinema, which makes maximal clarity an abiding principle. Committed to
modernisms stress on difficult experience, Wong sets himself apart from the redundancy
of popular Hong Kong storytelling. In terms of overall coherence, his tactics of disturbance
are themselves a source of unity in an oeuvre typified by generic and visual pluralism. In
the final analysis, classical principles of coherence, clarity, and unity contain those viola-
tions of convention, preventing the films from becoming wholly opaque or recondite. It
is revealing that, in restoring Ashes of Time, Wong reworked the film for greater dramatic
and expressive clarity. Ashes of Time Redux (2008), however, is still a demanding experi-
ence. Here again, Wong deters us from sheer sensuous absorption. The viewer bathing
in Wongs intoxicating imagery risks missing crucial plot details; the auteurs strategies of
disturbance force us to balance aesthetic pleasure with cognitive assiduity.
The case of Ashes of Time Redux points to Wongs position in global film culture. Like
many Wong films (particularly since the mid-1990s), this restoration was intended less
for the local Hong Kong market than for international distribution on the festival circuit.
Wongs success on this network brands him not only as a Hong Kong director, but as
an international purveyor of film art a reputation consolidated in such portmanteau
films as Eros (2004) and Chacun son cinma (2007). At festivals Wong has arguably won
admirers and critics in equal measure Happy Together and In the Mood for Love took
major prizes at Cannes, but detractors seized upon his drawn-out work methods when
a postponed, unfinished version of 2046 was shown there in 2004. Such critics decry
Wongs purported profligacy and self-indulgence. But without his unique production
methods the relentlessly varied takes and rough cuts, the protracted shooting sched-
ules Wongs films would lose that distinctive aesthetic which makes them so singularly
exhilarating and elusive.

Gary Bettinson

Reference
Bettinson, Gary (2009) Happy Together? Generic Hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for
Love, in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary
Cinema, Malden, Mass; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 167186.

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