Search for a film:

March 09, 2006

A Few Clumsy Passes at Wong Kar Wai

Wong Kar Wai

By Andrew

Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucu Paloma (Live) (from Happy Together)

When your heart is broken, you look back on good memories with bitterness. The one who has betrayed you is the same one you loved, and you are torn. What should make you smile only makes you cry. Open questions you once brushed aside as quibbles are suddenly as serious as cancer. But as you diagnose it all, you acquire a unique chance to grow — to realize that the previous image of your love was only partial. So while Terrence Malick broke my heart with The New World, I realize that the film and its problems are as much Malick's as is my beloved Badlands, the dearly departed Days of Heaven and the rough and tumble Thin Red Line. My heart struggles to come to terms with the fact that The New World revealed little new about Malick. Elements of the film are present in each of his previous works — it's only now do I realize the trouble his form and style can get him into [see my earlier review of the film below to know what I mean]. It will take me some time, and some healing, to build up the requisite nerve to give Terrence a second shot.

Until that time, I have found a new director to love. He is as beautiful as Malick, and like Malick he refuses to rush through his films. He likes to take it slow. But his films aren't afraid to allow the actors to build their characters, and in doing so they remain less open to cheap stereotypes. I am talking about Wong Kar Wai.

The moments we have shared have been heavenly. He takes me places I never thought I would go. In Chungking Express [1994], he drew out my sympathy for not one, but two cops — which, for anyone who knows me, is quite the achievement. The film is cut in half between two different stories, each centered on a different Hong Kong policeman (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu Wai). Each story begins with the cops licking their wounds — not after cracking some hardcore case, but from women in their lives leaving them. Whereas their jobs demand power, control, discipline, and manipulation of others, Express exhibits the loneliness and longing that characterizes their private lives. They develop strange superstitions; they eat uncanny amounts of pineapple, and they talk to dish rags. They hang out too much at a marketplace lunch merchant, which I can only assume is the namesake of the film, moping about and drinking coffee. We realize how much the success of their jobs depends on their inner voids being filled, when their longing leads them both to eventually betray their employment — and fall in love with criminals (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong).

Wong's films are as dreamy as Malick's — both directors dream in breathtaking color — but the dynamics of the dreams are much, much different. Malick's characters tend to interact with wide-open landscapes, often getting lost within them; Wong's characters are trapped within Hong Kong like a neon labyrinth. Very rarely does Wong show us the sky. The characters seem bound to one another through the close quarters of the city, but a great distance characterizes their love for one another (that these are films set in a foreign city, produced by another culture, also probably puts a certain distance between me and the films). This is true of Chungking Express - perhaps it is why the literal English title reads "Chungking Jungle" - and it is also true for In the Mood for Love [2000]. In the Mood presents us with a couple living in 1962 Hong Kong. We watch as man (Tony Leung Chiu Wai again) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) move in next door to each as neighbors, slowly get to know one another, and slowly admit to themselves that their spouses are cheating together. The love that grows between them is like another character in the story — but like the cheating spouses, who we never actually see on screen, we only hear it in whispers, in glances. We feel that it is there but is too costly to name. Not only does the city contain them — so do obligation and circumstance.

As a love story, Happy Together [1997] is set in an entirely different city at an entirely different speed. Rather than being contained by the familiarity and convention of the city, the characters are drawn to one another because the city itself is foreign to them. The film follows two male lovers, Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu Wai one more time, its hard not to fall in love with him through all these films), who have traveled to Buenes Aires to escape something in Hong Kong ("Buenos Aires Affair" was the international English title of the film). Their relationship goes every which way at once, and they spend most of their screen time together arguing. While Lai struggles to hold down a job, and dreams of settling his conflicts back home, Ho's escapades take place largely off screen, carrying on affairs for fun and profit, and running back to Lai whenever his health or sanity are in need rejuvenation. An Argentinean tango is woven throughout the film — the actors deepen what otherwise could have been a painfully shallow metaphor. Another central metaphor is literally deep — the Iguaza Falls of Argentina, which Ho Po-wing and Lai Yiu-fai vow to see together one day, but never do.

(The gorgeous song that plays over our first image of the falls early in the film — "Cucurrucucú Paloma," as performed by Caetano Veloso — is linked to above. A blog explains to me, "The song is about a man whose lover has somehow injured him or possibly left him for reasons beyond her control. His subsequent mourning drives him to drink and later, to his own death.")

Ho eventually leaves Lai, slowly drifting away, and the film moves towards conclusion as we watch Lai finally gather up the final pieces of mind he needs to return to Hong Kong. Ho Po-wing maybe gone, but he is always in Lai Yiu-fai's mind, as is happiness and loneliness.

In all these films, Wong Kar Wai explores what Theodor Adorno thought to be fundamental to happiness. "To happiness, the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it." In other words, happiness — and love, too, Wong seems to insist — are felt strongest in their denial, or the absence. They lie just beyond our grasp, as perpetual dreams, because they exist most presently in our memory. As bell hooks observes in her book All About Love, love is not a state of being — it is foremost a practice struggle, something we work towards (as Lai Yiu-fai realizes, his happiest memories were nursing Ho Po-wing back to health).

As Chungking Express's cops come to realize, love is not something we can control, discipline, or manipulate. Malick's misstep, in The New World, was to think he could manipulate images of Native people in the past for the purposes of his own love story — but in doing so, he just reinscribed the daily violence Native people experience in the present. A typical American move in a typical American movie, but hardly a love story. Ben tells me that the recent 2046 is Wong's monumental misstep, something equivalent to The New World. Until I see that film, at least, Wong Kar Wai's films live as happy memories in my mind, and I love him for it.

Back to Top