University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Wong Kar-wai

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Wong Kar-wai

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Content WONG KAR-WAI by Rong Shi A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS （EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES ） May 2009 Copyright 2009 Rong Shi Table of Contents Dedication iii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Love in an Age of Innocence: In the Mood for Love (2000) 4 Chapter 1 Endnotes 15 Chapter 2: A Story of the Legless Bird: Days of Being Wild (1991) 16 Chapter 2 Endnotes 27 Chapter 3: Once Upon A Time in jianghu: Ashes of Time (1994) 28 Chapter 3 Endnotes 43 Chapter 4: The Memo of a Modern Jungle: Chungking Express (1994) 44 Chapter 4 Endnotes 57 Chapter 5: Creatures of Love: Fallen Angels (1995) 58 Chapter 5 Endnotes 71 Conclusion 72 Conclusion Endnotes 74 Bibliography 75 Filmography 76 Index 79 ii Dedication To My Mother Jiuer Li, With All My Love and Admiration, For Those Years of Innocence and Courage. iii Abstract Wong Kar-wai is uniquely positioned among Chinese filmmakers probably because his vision of ‘Chineseness’ also enjoys a transnational audience. In this thesis, I examine five of his films and I further propose that, Wong has always, in his cinematic world, engaged in an on-going dialogue regarding past and identity in the age of Globalism with the people of Hong Kong, his transnational Western audience, and himself. iv Introduction It remains a mystery if there is ever a script for any of Wong Kai-wai, a contemporary Hong Kong filmmaker’s films. After all, nothing is impossible for a filmmaker who starts out as a scriptwriter and hates shooting from a finished script, who picks a location prior to any story then shoots nowhere else but at that location, who picks actors and actress first and keeps using the same people for his eight films (My Blueberry Nights excluded). Wong Kar-wai was born in Shanghai in 1958 and moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was five years old. He studied at Hong Kong Polytechnic before specializing in television and film production at the school run by HKTVB, one of Hong Kong’s biggest television stations. Starting as a scriptwriter, he wrote a number of scripts for soap operas such as “Don’t Look Now” (1981), as well as films including Just for Fun (1983) and Patrick Tam’s legendary Final Victory (1987). His first feature-film As Tears Go By was made in 1988. Amazingly, it was selected by the Director’s Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival for presentation in 1989. In 1991, Wong went on to make a more complex, personal and experimental film Days of Being Wild before becoming involved with a two-year long project Ashes of Time. Neither of these two films has been seen on a wide scale. However, Chungking Express, a film that was made within a legendarily short period of six week while Wong was waiting for some sound equipment to come during the editing period of Ashes of Time , unexpectedly became the film that first brought Wong international attention. Fallen Angels, a film often underrated as merely a companion piece to Chungking Express came out in 1995. In 1997, 1 Wong’s next film, ironically titled Happy Together explores Buenos Aires, a city other than Hong Kong, through a gay couple from Hong Kong. After a shoot that lasted fifteen grueling months, Wong’s masterpiece, In the Mood for Love appeared in 2000, having been completed the morning of its premier in the competition at Cannes and Wong’s frequent lead actor, Tony Leung Chiu-wai was named best actor. In the Mood for Love can be seen as the peak of Wong’s filmmaking up to date in many ways. Wong’s next film, 2046, set fifty years after the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China, is often considered the sequel to In the Mood for Love. My Blueberry Nights marks a new stage of his filmmaking career when he moves the story from Hong Kong to New York and replaces the extensive use of Cantonese monologues in his film with English dialogue. I intend to explore Wong’s film world with a focus on the integration of literature and visual forms. The films in the discussion are not in the conventional chronological orders. Instead, Wong’s masterpiece, In the Mood for Love is the starting point here, via which I introduce the recurrent themes and visual style in Wong Kar-wai’s film world. Then I go back in time to discuss his films chronologically. Many critics have condemned Wong Kar-wai’s films being all about the form without real substance. Curtis K.Tsui rightly complains that Wong has “even been accused – as if this were a damning trait-of being ‘European’ in his aesthetic. It’s an odd statement to be sure; the complaint seems to imply that, because his style is unconventional (in relation to most Hong Kong cinema), he is to be immediately disregarded as a director of ‘HongKong films,’ and that one must immediately equate ‘European’ and ‘arthouse film’ as 2 synonymous terminology.” 1 I hope, in my discussion, to refute this reading and further analyze the psychological and philosophical depth of Wong Kar-wai’s films. Ngai has a point when he says that Wong Kar-wai has invented a notion hitherto completely unknown in the Hong-Kong film industry: that of auteur. My thesis is an attempt to validate Wong Kar’wai’s status as a real auteur in Hong Kong cinema as well as the world cinema. 3 One Love in an Age of Innocence: In the Mood for Love (2000) In the Mood for Love (2000), one of Wong’s greatest films, is set in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Not only has the location returned from Argentina in Happy Together, to Hong Kong, where Wong shot most of his films, but also the heterosexual couple has returned to the center of the stage after a homosexual couples’ Happy Together. In the film, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Chow Mo-wan played by Tony Leung-Chiu wai) discover over the course of time that each of their spouses is having an affair with the other’s spouse. They voluntarily and curiously enter a role-play game and take on the identity of their spouses, in hope of finding out the answer to their questions regarding their spouse’s betrayal. However, they only seem to be slipping deeper and deeper into this game of “we won’t be like them.” The film ends with Mr. Chow telling his secret to a tree in Cambodia. A Game in Multiple Perspectives The camera movement in the film intensifies the tension between the imitators. Hand-held camera is no longer the major device used in the movie. The characters are seen moving in the narrow alley, standing against the walls, cooking in the shared kitchen in the apartment building, coming downstairs to get a bowl of noodle. There is not one single exterior shot that defines a stereotypical Hong Kong which often involves busy streets and quick moving crowds. However, plenty of details in the film have, at the same time, betrayed an illusion of a nameless city and have pinpointed the location being Hong 4 Kong. When Mr. Chan, the betrayer in his marriage, goes to Japan with Mrs. Chow, he wishes his wife a happy birthday on the radio. The song he chooses to be played for her, is Zhou Xuan’s ‘Huayang Nianhua,’(full bloom). Huayang Nianhua, literally means those flower-like times or age, is also the Chinese title of the film. The 1960s was the period of time when mainland China was going through Cultural Revolution. Hence, Zhouxuan’s songs, which were deemed as decadent and counter-revolutionary were not played anywhere in mainland China. Clearly, this detail directly points towards the exterior environment as a Chinese-speaking place other than mainland China. Later in the film, the landlady (Rebecca Pan) leaves Hong Kong to the States, fearful of what might happen in Hong Kong while the social turmoil and political upheaval sweeping through the country was making its way over here. Wong’s emphasis on visual expressivity is achieved through the film’s unconventional form. Objects and body parts are focused on in a new way and with a new intensity in shots with little narrative relevance, like the lingering shots of a woman’s hand on the threshold of a door or the railing of a stairway – another homage to an important motif in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, whom Wong has recognized as a major influence on this film. 2 In addition, we find that the camera ends up shooting through some kind of hindrance most of the times, be it a doorway, a curtain, venetian blinds, a diaphanous lampshade, or one of the many mirrors that are found throughout the film. The outstanding contrasting shot comes in towards the very end of the film. We are no longer in Hong Kong. We see Chow Mo-wan whispering his secret into a hole in one 5 of the ancient building at Angkor Wat Temples, the site of the legendary Cambodian temples. As the camera zooms out, a monk’s head, backlit and out of focus, occupies the bulk of the frame, with Chow a mere speck in the lower right corner. We cannot hear what Chow is saying to the hole but we suddenly come to the realization that there is always a big world in the background of any story. Does it really matter what he says, what he does, or what kind of pain and loss he has experienced? Does anybody’s experience matter in such a big world? The final title retrospectively explains the film’s form as well as the characters: He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, The past is something he could see but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct. The film draws our attention to the very issue of perspective. As Wong has put it in the U.S. press kit, “At first, I thought In the Mood for Love to be like chamber music. All the things happen in a certain space: in apartments, in restaurants, on street corners. It’s something very intimate, in an enclosed environment-people are trying to cover it. At the end of the film, I thought we should provide another perspective, and I wrote something which is totally different: something with histories and a more spiritual side.” When Wong extensively focuses on the interior space and shoots the characters’ life with intense close-ups or through some hindrance, the viewer is constantly distanced from the characters and is prevented from identifying with them. The viewers are reminded of their position as spectators. Towards the end of the film, Wong reveals another trick under his sleeves, and tells the viewer that there is no way of getting a definite perspective of any 6 happenings. There is always a bigger world out there at the same time when the spectator is watching what is going on on the screen, which is, after all, quite limited. Questions of perspectives start to weigh on the shoulders of the viewers: Do you see what is happening? Are you sure that is what you see? How do you know this is what you see? How do you know this is what you think it is? After Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan discovered their spouses’ love affair, they curiously enter a game of imitation and role-play. They take on the role of the other one’s spouse, hoping to understand how their spouses started the affair. However, the viewer has never given any hint about the make-believe nature of their game beforehand. The viewer only realizes that it is a rehearsal instead of a real flirtation half way into the scene when one of them cannot keep performing. This pattern repeats itself over and over again and Wong leaves the viewer in a curious state of suspension of disbelief and suspension of belief at the same time. Let us take a look at some telling moments of this technique in the film. The first rehearsal occurs in an alley after they have met in a restaurant to confirm their suspicions. Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are walking side by side when Chow suddenly asks, “should we stay out tonight?” The viewer is brought into the immediate tension between them and is led to believe that it is Chow who is asking Chan to stay out. However, the viewer is disappointed when Mrs. Chan replies, “My husband would never say that.” Then Chow asks again, “how would he say it?” Chan says, “I do not know. But I know he would not say that.” The interesting aspects to this moment and moments like this need to be discussed here. First, the viewer is lead into a state of disorientation and confusion by the acting on the screen. Second, 7 who are the characters when they take on the identity of others? It is clear that it is not a “real” conversation between Chan and Chow in the sense that they are just playing the adulterous. Nevertheless, it is Chow and Chan who are saying those words and it is both of them who are making the off-screen adultery more real than ever by imagining it and acting it out for the audience. One noticeable feature of the film is its prolonged tempo. As the story unfolds, the time between when the make-believe scene occurs and when the ‘truth’ comes out is getting longer and longer. In a much later scene, the camera moves in and we see Chan eating with chopsticks. Then the camera moves to the back of a man’s head and stays there. We might just assume it is Chow again as he is the only man in the film we have seen thus far. Suddenly we hear Mrs. Chan asking in all seriousness, “Do you have a mistress?” The man answers, “No.” The woman would not give up and keeps asking him. He gives in and says yes. We think, oh, it is her husband. But the camera moves to the man’s face and we realize that we are tricked again. It is Chow after all. It is yet another rehearsal of the imaginary confrontation between Mrs. Chan and her husband. As William Chang has pointed out, “Everything that Maggie and Tony say to each other can also mean its opposite. Are they rehearsing their love, or is it real/ It’s quite complex.” 3 (qtd. In Camhi 11) Another question may be even more important, just as Brunette puts it, “Who are we? After all, and do we ever have the possibility of saying things to each other that aren’t already lines of dialogue, scripted by our culture or society?” 4 This real question here is the nature of our existence. Are we merely rehearsing the environment 8 we find ourselves in after all? Or can we really construct our own dialogues and conversations? We never really find the answer to the question in Love or any of Wong’s other films. If there is any suggestion of such an answer, the characters’ choice of managing their emotions through theatrical playact might be interpreted as a negation of the necessity to ask such a question in the first place. Their final departure remains an anonymous and mysterious one as we never really get to see it. The characters rehearse their own separation and we see Chow arriving in Cambodia and telling his secret to a hole, which can be seen as his real monologue (or dialogue with an inanimate object). If their dialogue is their coping mechanism to deal with emotion and love, the monologue in the end suggests a new solution to and perspective of the matter of love. Brunette further points out that, “They (Chow and Chan) live within quotation marks and prewritten lines of dialogue. They put on an act because reality itself is too hard to bear.” 5 I would like to add to it and suggest that the role-playing itself is a choice made by the characters as well as a kind of view of life Wong tries to emphasize in this film. Chow and Chan choose to enter the role-playing game, without any preamble or explanation. In a way, this choice without explanation is a gesture of defiance itself, which is in fact already challenging the restricting social norms in the 1960s. It is also challenging the idea of having a normalized lifestyle or view of life. Why cannot playact be one’s coping mechanism and one’s lifestyle? It may be true that reality is unbearable and the characters’ playact is merely escapism. Nevertheless, we cannot deny another possibility, which is, there is no real distinction between the characters’ role-play and 9 so-called “reality.” Rehearsal is rehearsal in that it will become a scene in real life at certain moments, just like their rehearsal of their departure. We never get to see the real departure on the screen and yet we know that the real departure has happened when we find Chow whispering at Angkor Wat Temples. In a same manner, though we never see the adulterous couple in the film, we still believe that the rehearsed conversations must have happened at some moments. Therefore, role-play is the denial of such an idea as “reality” and an extension of so-called “reality” at the same time. Moving in a Global Space: In the Mood for Love begins with Mrs. Chan taking the landlady’s rented apartment and passing Mr. Chow, who is also looking for rented apartment on the stairs. Then they end up moving into adjacent apartments and becoming neighbors. The theme of moving and mobility runs through the film. We know from the very beginning of the film that Mr. Chan often goes on business trips to Japan. In fact, he is never seen in the film though his voice is heard through a door off-screen. His existence seems only to be substantiated by all the gifts and goods, such as the rice cooker, which was the symbol of the advanced technologies coming to Hong Kong from its rich neighbor, Japan at that time; Mrs. Chan’s handbag, etc. In the end, he takes his mistress, Mrs. Chow, to Japan and does not return. In a way, Mr. Chan himself becomes a symbol of mobility and moving as well. Towards the end of the movie, Mr. Chow arrived in Cambodia and revealed his secret at Angkor Wat Temples. From 2046, the sequel to Love, we know that Chow does not come back to Hong Kong either. Even Mrs. Chan, the only one who seems to be a stable, 10 immobile factor in Love, is shown coming back to the landlady’s apartment to visit her. Apparently, she has been living somewhere else. Love, together with Wong’s other works, including As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, Happy Together, 2046, are all concerned with the issue of moving and mobility. As Wong Kar-wai said in an interview to Jimmy Ngai, “one important implication of global space is that home loses its specificity, and homelessness its pathos…home is just another elsewhere.” 6 Some discussions of the question regarding role-play and identity in Love were made and the key question is, “Can we believe in two identities of ourselves?” Now a new question emerges, can we believe in the dual identities of a place? Can a place be home and elsewhere at the same time? Many critics have raised the possibility to interpret Wong’s films, from the angle of post-modernism, as political metaphors of the city of Hong Kong. In 1984, mainland Chinese and British authorities agreed to the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic in 1997, which led to a tremendous amount of anxiety in Hong Kong. Nobody knew what awaits Hong Kong in the future while the past years of British rule already started to look rather distant overnight. The city of Hong Kong suddenly became a city without a past or a future. At yet in a weird way, it also became a blank space synonymous of a global space for people to write their own personal histories and the feel of liberation was also noticeable in Wong’s films. Hong Kong is home and elsewhere at the same time to Wong’s characters and Wong himself. Cheongsam (Qipao): the Lost Innocence 11 Many critics have pointed out that the dresses (cheongsam, or Qipao in Mandarin) worn by Maggie Chuang speak for the opposing sexual forces in the movie. Qipao is a tight dress that emphasizes the curves of the woman and at the same time covers almost her entire body all the way up to her neck, except for the arms. As Brunette says, “A brilliant realization of opposing sexual forces is achieved in the more than twenty gorgeous dresses (cheongsam) that Li-zhen (Mrs. Chan) wears throughout the film. Form-fitting and tightly wound, even around her neck, they are thus at the same time highly sexual and highly repressed…” 7 My argument is that Wong’s use of the dress barely touches upon “the highly sexual and highly repressed” nature of the dress, nor the nature of the story, which may be seen as yet another case of the “typical Chinese reserved and repressed desire.” But rather, Wong’s elaborate use of the dress intends to emphasize the “lost innocence” of a particular era in history. More than one critic makes reference to Wong’s obsession with the past, especially the 1960s in his filmmaking to explain the sentiment in Love. In the same interview with Ngai, when asked, “Are you a nostalgic person? Your obsession, or near obsession, with things past is remarkable. ” Wong said, “I guess I find this ‘loss of innocence’ thing deeply intriguing. Time, to me, forever brings a loss of innocence. ” Apparently, Wong sees the past 1960s as an era with a kind of innocence that cannot be retrieved. As the story unfolds, we realize that even though Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan fall for or even fall in love with each other, the two characters never transgress the social and moral boundaries to consummate their relationship. Eventually, Chow chooses to leave Mrs. Chan and Hong Kong, unsure if he 12 would ever come back, and tells his secrecy of love to a temple in Cambodia. In a painful manner, they finally succeed in living up to their morality and their dream of “we won’t be like them.” Over and over again, the dress appears as a marker of the particular times and society they find themselves in. However constricting the social conventions may be, or unnecessary or ridiculous the game they played may be in our eyes, they kept their promise to themselves and lived their age of innocence. Maggie Cheung’s dress also appears in the film as time makers. Brunette also mentions that Wong consistently uses a change of dress to signal the time gap between two juxtaposed scenes that we would otherwise think were the same scene. 8 For example, the couple might be talking on the street, and then there’s a cut to them from a different angle, in the same place, which seems temporally contiguous. Suddenly we notice – especially if we’ve already watched the film three times – that she is wearing a different dress, and we realize that these are two different meetings. What is underlined here is the repetitiveness of their encounters. The use of cheongsam (Qipao) has, probably more than anything else in the film, helped create the ambiance of an age of innocence. We see the exposed arms and the covered neck of Maggie Cheung in cheongsam, and the curves of her body from behind as she takes small steps downstairs to get a bowl of noodles. And over and over again, we see Chow brushing by her. However, they are only minding their own business and Chow never looks back at Mrs. Chan after he has passed her. We see most of the times the tracking shots of these two people going their own ways after a brief encounter on the steps when Chan is one her way to get the noodles. Now we realize 13 that the gaze is from us, not Chow, nor Mrs. Chan’s boss who is having an affair as well with an anonymous woman in the film and Mrs. Chan helps keep it a secret from his wife. In a way, the “highly sexual and the highly repressed” dress is only imaginary in our mind as it is us projecting our gaze on Maggie Cheung. Chow almost never looks at Chan except for one ambivalent shot when they are rehearsing their own departure. The scene is beautifully shot. Chow lets go of Chan’s hand, and the camera stays on her face as he remains far away in the background. It is only suggestive that Chow is looking at her at this moment. As Chow is out of focus and only Chan is in intense close-up, it might as well be us gazing at her again. The complexity of love and the lost innocence is enhanced by the unconventional camera movement. In many ways, Love is a movie that animates Henry James’ idea to show rather than tell. It is never as much of a film about the lost love and unfulfilled desire as a film that relentlessly questions identities, perspectives and everything else. When the film starts, the viewer finds himself trying to bring light into the story and to seek a way out of the darkness, only to realize that he is still left in the dark when the film is over and the light is on. 14 Chapter One Endnotes 1 See Tsui, p.93. 2 Ciment, Michel, and H.Niogret. “Entretien avec Wong Kar‐Wai.” Positif 42 (December 1997): 8‐14. 3 Camhi, Leslie. “Setting His Tale of Love Found in a City Long Lost.” New York Times, January 28, 2001. Arts and Leisure, 11, 26. 4 See Brunette, p. 96. 5 Ibid, p. 98. 6 Ngai, Jimmy. Wong Kar‐Wai, “A Dialogue with Wong Kai‐Wai. Cutting Between Time and Two cities.” In Wong Kar‐wai. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1997. 7 Brunette, Peter. Wong Kar‐wai, Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press. 2005. p. 91. 8 Ibid. p.91. 15 Two A Story of the Legless Bird: Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zhengzhuan, 1991) In 1955, Nicholos Ray’s Rebel without a Cause was released in Hongkong. The Chinese title for Rebel without a Cause was A Fei Zhengzhuan (The Story of an Ah Fei). The term “Ah Fei” denotes a young hoodlum or a delinquent. The term is time-specific, being generally in use in the 1950s and 1960s. The Ah Fei movies came into existence following the success of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause and featured characters sporting James Dean hairstyles and mannerisms. 9 Ironically, the most memorable Ah Fei movies, such as Chan Wan’s Social Characters(1969), Lung Kong’s Teddy Girls (1969), all appeared in 1969 when the genre was going out of fashion. Social didacticism was a characteristic of the Cantonese cinema and the didactic message of the detriment of being an Ah Fei eventually made the genre unpalatable to the young. In the 1980s and 1990s, the genre resurfaced in the form of gu-wak zai (young triads) and regained the audience. Wong rode the tide and As Tears Go By came out in 1988. It was an unexpected financial and critical success across Asia. Encouraged by this success, Wong’s producer signed six of the best-known pop singers in Hong Kong for the new film, Days of Being Wild. Unfortunately, this new film, with its deliberately paced, experimentally conceived plots and narratives dumfounded its audience. It was, according to Wong, “a complete failure: In Korea, the spectators even threw things at the screen.” 10 Days tangos with Wong’s first and ongoing obsession with identity, mobility, time 16 and love. Set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the film is a bundle of love triangles, unrequited love, disappointment and metaphors whose meaning that nobody can be sure of. Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) meets Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung). Li-zhen falls for Yuddy and Yuddy leaves Li-zhen. The same thing happens between Yuddy and Mimi(Carina Lau), who is also called Lulu. At the same time, a policeman Tide (Andy Lau) is in love with Su Li-zhen and tries to help her out of her depression after she is abandoned by Yuddy and Yuddy’s friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung) quietly loves Mimi (Lulu). Yuddy lives with his aunt (Rebecca Pan), who keeps refusing to tell him the whereabouts of his birth mother who abandoned him when he was an infant. Towards the very end of the film, when auntie finally tells Yuddy that his mother is in the Philippines, Yuddy leaves Hong Kong to meet his mother there. But his mother refuses to see him, so he leaves, determined not to look back as he walks away. Yuddy seems to have lost all will to live and comes dangerously close to getting himself and Tide killed in an action-packed imbroglio when he is trying to get away with not paying for his fake passport. They escape by taking a train. After a discussion of love and life, Yuddy is killed by gangsters seeking revenge. The final images show a new, unidentified character (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) preparing to go out for the evening. the Legless Bird and the Imaginary Memory The key to one of the lasting conflicts in the film concerns memory and identity. Yuddy keeps trying to get it out of his aunt where his birth mother is but auntie keeps denying him. Abandoned by his birth mother as an infant, Yuddy is obsessed with getting 17 to know her. He is searching for memory and love more than searching for a woman that he has never seen, only has known as his birth mother. When Yuddy finally gets to his mother’s house in the Philippines, this search for memory and love eventually ends up with heartbreak – he is rejected by his mother. The camera moves in and tracks him from behind as he is walking away. The voice-over, as a distinctive Wong Kar-wai technique, comes in and says, “When I am walking away, I know that she is watching me. But I am determined not to look back. She did not give me a chance to see her. I am determined not to give her this chance either.” Based on watching Yuddy fighting with auntie for two thirds of the movie, insisting on getting to know his mother, the viewer is led to believe that Yuddy must have certain mental configuration of a loving mother who leaves him for some sad reasons. His relentless search for her is his attempt to confirm his constructed memory of a mother. The irony is that in the end, reality overwhelms and the constructed memory collapses. Yuddy responds by denying his mother the opportunity to see himself, supposedly. “She did not give me a chance to see her. I am determined not to give her this chance either.” However, the viewer cannot be sure if this is really what is happening as the voice-over never really confirms the character’s thoughts. If anything, it is often there to confuse the viewer. For example, there is a monologue early in the film: “I heard in the world, there’s a bird without legs. It can only fly and fly. When it’s tired it sleeps in the wind. It lands on earth only once in its life. That is when it dies.” We hear the voice-over again later in the film. It could be interpreted as Yuddy’s monologue as Yuddy, in some ways, personifying the legless bird given that he never holds a job or commits to either 18 Li-zhen or Mimi (Lulu). Nevertheless, at the same time, Yuddy persistently looks for his mother, which makes him the character opposite to the legless bird. Regardless of how auntie feels about Yuddy, 11 auntie makes Yuddy miserable. Just when the audience starts to think “oh, the mother is just his excuse to keep fighting his aunt as she makes him miserable,” Yuddy suddenly leaves Hong Kong to meet his mother in the Philippines, leaving the audience in a brief moment of disbelief, “wow, I can’t believe he really goes to the Philippines to find his mother.” I would like to point out that the use of voice-over largely discredits “I know that she is watching me.” Furthermore, the shots of the humid, misty Philippines reinforce the idea of tropical stupor and personal desolation and spiritual desiccation, with the voice-over rendering the character in a trance state. The viewer is never sure if what is said here is real or not as there is no way of finding out if it is the character narrating at the moment, or reflecting from a distant future. Wong once said, “Memory is actually about a sense of loss - always a very important element in drama. We remember things in terms of time: ‘Last night I met…’ ‘Three years ago, I was…’” 12 It becomes clear that memory, to Wong, cannot be separated from loss. Time past is time lost. The passed/lost time and the irretrievable love constitute the essence of memory. The representation of memory in the film evokes Freudian interpretation. First, it does not really matter if the memory is real or not. What really matters is one person has such and such a memory. Second, memory is largely imaginary after all. In other words, that if one really had a picture taken with one’s mother at age five does not matter as much as that one has the memory of having had such a picture 19 taken. Having that particular memory determines lots of things in one’s life onwards. In the film, even if Yuddy’s constructed memory of a mother and possibly the reunion with his mother gets shattered in the end, the deliberately paced narrative that centers on what Yuddy’s life is like before the shattered memory highlights the imaginary nature of memory. Yuddy’s memory of a mother matters most to not just him, but in fact everybody in the film as he constructs his life on this memory and tells his girlfriends that one day he would leave Hong Kong to find his mother. He detests his aunt as she would not tell him where his mother is. He keeps telling the story of the legless bird as he is determined not to commit. He does not commit to any of his relationship or to Hong Kong. Yuddy’s identification with the legless birds sparks a series of drama around him. He leaves Li-zhen and picks up Mimi. Later, Mimi finds out that he is gone and confronts Li-zhen, hoping to find him, only to realize that Li-zhen does not care about Yuddy anymore. Mimi then goes to auntie’s apartment to look for him, eventually Mimi’s attempt to go to the Philippines to find Yuddy leads to the scene of drama when she hits Zeb, who has always quietly loved her to stop him from showing his affection for her. Two thirds of the happenings in the film are in Hong Kong and almost all the characters around Yuddy, the Ah Fei character, has a more or less slow-paced, stable life before Yuddy sprouts his wings and flies away. Hence, on many levels, Days of Being Wild is not as much of a film about actually being wild as about a mental state of being wild and the mundane life before one really goes to the wilderness. The imaginary memory in the film echoes Wong’s filmmaking itself. Wong Kar-wai 20 grew up in Shanghai till age five when he moved to Hong Kong with family. Wong says that he originally wanted to set the film in 1963, the year when he came to Hong Kong as a five-year-old, but moved it back to 1960 because of the election of John F. Kennedy (as he says in one interview) or the Apollo space mission (as he says in another). In any case, “there was a sense that we were moving into a new page of history… Since I didn’t have the resources to re-create the period realistically, I decided to work entirely from memory.” Hong Kong in the 1960s is constructed in the film through imagination and memory. Nevertheless, the convincing work ends up leaving a bigger impact on the collective memory of the audience than Wong intended it to. Various shots from Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, 2046 have brought to life an imaginary Hong Kong in the 1960s, a city long lost. When asked what the 1960s was like, the majority of Wong’s audience that grew up watching his film in China, a group too young to have ever lived in Hong Kong in the 1960s, refers to the scent and color of Wong’s deliberately paced films to talk about their version of the 1960s’ Hong Kong. The Wounded Narcissus In Days, there are plenty of shots of Yuddy’s reflection in a mirror. Yuddy is constantly looking at himself while combing his hair. At other moments, he is looking at something, or somebody’s reflection in the mirror. Nevertheless, his mirror image is always there. As a handsome man, Yuddy stares at his own face, which suggests, via the close-ups, Yuddy’s careful examination of himself. His face is as much of a magnet that draws women to him as his own fatal obsession. It is justified in saying that Yuddy is the 21 narcissus here, spending days and nights consuming his own image. When Yuddy is not obsessing with his image, he obsesses with his own identity: another issue may be common to most people but the pure obsession here indicates Yuddy’s narcissism. Yuddy’s implicit identification with the legless bird, his fights with his aunt and his search for his mother can all be read as his attempt to construct, revise and fix his constructed image of who he is. The narcissistic ego, Deleuze writes, is “inseparable not only from a constitutive would but from the disguises and displacements which are woven from one side to the other, and constitute its modification. The ego is a mask for other masks, a disguise under other disguises.” 13 Stephen Teo has raised the issue of Freudian Oedipal complex (the need to connect with his birth mother) to explain the “wounded ego” and the “other disguises.” Based on the limited textual/visual expression in Days, I cannot agree with Teo and conclude that Freudian Oedipal complex is the answer to Yuddy’s narcissism. After all, longing to connect with one’s birth mother is not the equivalent of oedipal complex. Instead, I would like to raise the possibility of reading Narcissism as the symptom of a temporal breakdown, which leads to the impossibility to construct history without a past or a future. In Greek mythology, Narcissus does not really have a past or a future. It is this impossibility to understand his own history that makes Narcissus someone obsessed with his own image, as it is the present, the only thing available to his understanding of himself. It is also the nature of the memory embodied by Yuddy. Yuddy does not have a past. As an abandoned infant, the past may have existed somewhere, but 22 is cut off from Yuddy’s present life and consciousness. As to the future, Yuddy is occupied with finding out his origin. He sets himself on the mission of retrieving his past and this becomes his future, a future inseparable from his past. Yuddy’s need to connect with his mother is his attempt to construct a coherent personal history. When it fails, Yuddy loses all wills. He almost deliberately provokes the gangsters and leads himself and Tide into an extremely dangerous situation and barely escapes. The suicidal elements in his death can be read as the impossibility to construct any history when there is not a past. Furthermore, the temporal breakdown is metaphorical of the moment Hong Kong finds itself in history when the film came out. In 1984, mainland Chinese and British authorities agreed to the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic in 1997. Where will Hong Kong’s past go? Where is Hong Kong’s future? Nobody knows. The uncertainty and anxiety among people living in Hong Kong suddenly became overwhelming and the sentiment continued from 1984 onwards. Yuddy’s identity dilemma can be read as Hong Kong’s situation in the 1980s in general. The past is taken out of people’s lives overnight. The future is utterly alien as it does not seem to have any bearings on where Hong Kong has been ever since the cession of Hong Kong to the United Kingdom via the enactment of the 1842 treaties resulted from the Opium Wars a century ago. Hong Kong suddenly became “a city without past or future.” 14 Chris Berry writes about the new wave in Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s in light of realism. “In the 1980s, a new generation of filmmakers reworked realism outside the parameters of earlier 23 state cinemas or, in Hong Kong’s case, commercial cinema.” 15 Wong Kar-wai might not be considered the most typical realistic filmmaker in Hong Kong cinema. However, people’s sentiments indirectly expressed in his film world are always more realistic than ever. In light of this, Yuddy’s identity crisis can be interpreted as Hong Kong’s crisis. The Subjective Time Time is represented as a subjective existence in the film. At the beginning of the film, Yuddy meets Su Li-zhen in a stadium canteen at three o’clock. Yuddy started his game and the minute before three o’clock on 16 April, 1960, Yuddy and Li-zhen made a compact to be friends for one minute. “Because of you, I’ll always remember this one minute.” Yuddy tells Li-zhen and their relationship begins. In a later scene, Li-zhen asks Yuddy if he remembers how long they have known each other after they have made love. Yuddy replies, “A long time. I can’t remember.” However, when Tide, the policeman quizzes Yuddy at the end of their Philippines adventure as to if he remembers what he did at three o’clock on 16 April, 1960. Yuddy reveals that he has not forgotten. “I’ll always remember what needs to be remembered. …But if you see her again, tell her I’ve forgotten. It’s better for everybody. ” Memory and time are intricately intertwined here. Yuddy not only constructs memory, he also fakes oblivion. Is Yuddy’s real memory always under the disguise of oblivion? Or is the pretended oblivion his new coping mechanism after his hope of retrieving the past by reuniting with his mother is dashed? How much and what he actually remembers and forgets is just like the irretrievable past, flooded by torrent passage of time. 24 Other characters in the film are also associated with time, or clocks in various ways. A cleaning lady ostentatiously cleans a clock, again and again. A scene even begins with a bizarre, angled close-up on Zeb’s wristwatch. As in many Wongian films to come, there is always constant talk of starting “from this minute’ or, “let’s remember this very moment.” Wong’s characters’ sentiments are associated with time and time is subjective to every single one of them. In one scene, Li-zhen’s monologue reads, “I always think a minute can pass fast, but sometimes it takes long.” Time is also altered by Wong’s camera movement. As Brunette has observed, “Wong’s concern with time is also formally echoed in the film’s tempo, which alternates dramatically between long moments of stasis and sudden, powerful outbreaks of violent movement. This tempo is also manifested in the alteration between very tight shots and extreme long shots, both of which seem primarily expressive rather than narrative in intent.” 16 The alternation is remarkably effective. It brings out the intensity of the violent scenes and sedates the audience in the slow-paced section. The tempo contributes to the deliberately-paced narrative. If the negativity of this alternation needs to be mentioned, the occasional nausea resulted from the constant alteration together with the oddly-angled shots is the most significant one. Days of Being Wild is the starting point for a series of Wong films to come. Wong once said, “To me, all my works are really like different episodes of one movie.” 17 In that case, Days of Being Wild, with more complexity and distinctive Wongian techniques than that of As Tears Go By, has become the preamble to Wong’s entire film world and the 25 theme of the relentless passage of time, identity, memory, and unrequited love in a city long lost gets developed and extended in Wong’s following films. 26 Chapter Two Endnotes 9 Teo, Stephen. Wong Kar‐wai. “Wong’s Heartbreak Tango: Days of Being Wild.” The UK: British Film Institute, 2005. p.32. 10 Ciment, “Entretien,” p. 42. 11 See Brunette, “Tears, Time and Love: The Films of Wong Kar‐wai .” P19. It is suggested that auntie has a complex relationship with Yuddy. Their frustrating and highly charged emotional bonds are based on lies, selfishness, and covert sexual desire. In one scene, responding to Yuddy’s objections to her younger gigolo lover, auntie says, “He makes me happy. Have you?” Later, she provocatively spits out at him, “I want you to hate me. At least that way you won’t forget me.” 12 Rayns, Tony. (Ah Fei Zhengzhuan (Days of Being Wild). ” Sight and Sound 4. 12 (December 1994 ): 41‐42. 13 Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. trans. Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum 1994) p. 110. 14 Carbon, J. “Indompte.” Positif 410 (April 1995): 36‐38. 15 Berry, Chris and Farquhar Mary, China on Screen,(New York: Columbia University Press: New York, 2006) P.76. 16 See Brunette, p. 21. 17 Ibid. p. 98. 27 Three Once Upon A Time in jianghu: Ashes of Time (1994) Wuxia genre: Betrayed by Wong Kar-wai When Ashes of Time was released in mid-September, 1994, Wong prized it as a film “far more substantial, heavier and complex” than Chungking Express, his next film that was made and released in record time in the post-production process of Ashes. On the surface, Ashes of Time is drastically different from anything that Wong has done up to date. His adherence to contemporary times and genres makes this period wuxia film something worth serious scrutiny and discussion. Two concepts need to be introduced here before we start the discussion of Ashes. The first one is wuxia. What is wuxia? What is wuxia literature, wuxia film? The closest translation of xia might be knights errant. The first generation of xia came into being around the period of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (Dongzhou , 770-256 BC) in the Zhou Dynasty. Tan Sitong has pointed out the two groups of Mohist: one is the benevolent knights errant, (ren xia), and the other is scholars/scholarship (ge zhi). 18 There is a concise summery of the great qualities of xia in Sima Qian’s monumental Shi Ji (translated into English by Burton Watson as Records of the Grand Historian of China) 19 , written between 104 and 91 BC during the reign of Han Wudi (the ‘Martial Emperor’). Shi Ji contains two chapters, Biographies of Knights Errant (Youxia Liezhuan) and Biographies of the Assassins (Cike Liezhuan), in which Sima Qian documented the feats of chivalry and loyalty of the xia in the Warring States and Qin periods. In Qian’s 28 words, They (xia) always mean what they say, always accomplish what they set out to do, and always fulfill their promises. They rush to the aide of other men in distress without giving a thought to their own safety. They do not boast of their ability and would be ashamed to brag of their benevolence. 20 The other important concept here is jianghu, which literally means rivers and lakes, and refers o the world the xia lives in. There is no authoritative definition of jianghu. It could either refer to a mythical historical time when the knights errant lived and roamed or a place that everybody finds oneself in at any given time. People who are involved in this world of jianghu are called people in jianghu (jianghu zhongren). As a famous quote from some jianghu zhongren goes, “wherever there are people, there is jianghu.” Wuxia literature features the great deeds of the knights errant in the distant periods in history. In Hong Kong cinema, wuxia film is usually associated with period drama, or guzhuang film (guzhuang, literally means ancient costumes in Chinese). Guzhuang wuxia film is different from Kungfu film, which was less based on historical figures and more on action. As a popular genre in the 1950s and 60s, wuxia enjoyed its prime for about one decade but fell out of fashion in the 70s and 80s when kungfu action genres became more popular. In the 1990s, a new cycle of wuxia movies produced by Tsui Hark, Swordsman, Swordsman Ⅱ(1992) and Swordsman Ⅲ: The East is Red (1993), brought the period format back into fashion. Teo has pointed out that “these movies revived the classical myth of the swordsman or knight-errant, but from the perspective of a new generation of 29 film-makers reacting against established norms and consciously working to update the genre to suit the tastes of the late-twentieth-century audience.” 21 The iconic figure of this post-modern wuxia cycle is Dongfang Bubai(Asia the Invincible) in Swordsman Ⅱ. Dongfang Bubai mastered the secrets of a sacred scroll, which enable him to fluctuate between genders, the yin (the feminine) and the yang (the masculine). Here both the heroic stereotypes and the traditional gender roles are subverted. The Swordsman series was based on a novel by Jin Yong, (also known as Louis Cha), an author of wuxia novel with a pervasive influence on wuxia literature from the 1950s till up to date. Jin Yong’s influence on wuxia cinema is incomparably significant. Wong Kar-wai turned to one of Jin Yong’s greatest works, The Eagle Shooting Heros (Shediao Yingxiongzhuan in Chinese) for the story of Ashes of Time. It is worth mentioning that a same group of characters in their different stages in life appear in at least three out of Jin Yong’s total fifteen novels. These characters include Xidu (‘Malicious West’) Ouyang Feng (the death broker and the inn owner in Ashes), Dongxie (‘Evil East’ ) Huang Yaoshi (the guy that visits Ouyang Feng once every year and brings him the wine that induces oblivion), Beigai (‘the Northern Beggar’ ) Hongqi (the barefooted guy who sets out to seek fame and success in jianghu) and the ‘Defeat-seeking Loner’ (Dugu Qiuban, the character with dual personality, Murong Yin an Murong Yang played by Brigitte Lin in Ashes). These characters are all taken from Jin Yong’s novel but are set in their younger stages in life in Ashes, i.e., before they have earned the titles of the “Evil East,” “Malicious West,” “Northern Beggar” and “Defeat-seeking Loner,” as in Jin Yong’s 30 novels. Technically speaking, Wong had never made any genre movie up to the point before Ashes, and he did not intend to break his own tradition and style in Ashes either. He felt that he should “make something from Jin Yong that is different from Jin Yong,” as Patrick Tam puts it. 22 When Ashes was finished, Wong successfully betrayed the conventions of wuxia genre and subverted the popular images of these famous Jin Yong characters. A Tale Told Posthumously The film’s plot, it must be admitted, is almost incomprehensible at the first viewing. It gets better at the third time though. Therefore, it would be extremely difficult to summarize the plot of Ashes, if not impossible. I would like to attempt a summary in order of each character’s appearance in the film. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), owing to some unknown event in his past, has exiled himself to the desert. He owns a small inn and makes a living as a death broker. He persuades his guests to take action on the people they hate and he also hires assassins to kill their enemies. Huang Yaoshi (Tony Liang Kar-fai)comes from the east to the desert to visit him once every year. Huang brings Ouyang a pot of wine called “drunken life and dreamy death” (‘zuisheng mengsi’) and tells him that one can forget everything once one drinks it. Ouyang keeps the wine but does not drink it as he feels weird about unusual things. People come and go in the desert. One day, a visitor called Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin) comes and asks him to kill Huang Yaoshi because he has jilted his sister Murong Yin. Then Murong Yin visits Ouyang and asks him to kill her brother instead as her brother 31 does not allow her to be with anybody but himself. After several alternating visits, it becomes clear that Yin and Yang are the split personalities of the same heartbroken woman whose love for Huang Yaoshi is unrequited. A poor but beautiful girl (Charlie Young) comes to the inn to ask Ouyang to avenge her brother who has been killed by soldiers. But she only has a donkey and a basket of eggs to offer as payment. Ouyang would not do it for such an unworthy payment. But the girl would not leave. She decides to wait outside the inn day after day. A nameless swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) visits the inn, in his several conversations with Ouyang, we know that he is rapidly going blind and he is waiting to fight the bandits when they come. Nameless swordsman often talks about the beautiful peach blossoms in his hometown to Ouyang. The bandits finally come but nameless swordsman has lost most of his sight at this point and can only see when there is bright sunlight. He is involved in an extremely violent fight with the bandit, clouds come at one moment and he is killed. After he dies, Ouyang goes to his hometown with the blind swordsman’s handkerchief. A woman who was shown in a previous scene moving her legs in an ambiguously sexual way on the back of a horse recognizes the handkerchief and knows that her husband is dead. Ouyang finally realizes that peach blossom is the name of this woman, the blind swordsman’s wife. Ouyang remembers that blind swordsman told him to tell Huang Yaoshi that there is a person waiting for Huang in blind swordsman’s hometown. It seems like his wife is that person waiting for Huang and this might be the reason the swordsman left his wife in the first place. 32 A down-and-out, barefooted person named Hong Qi (Jacky Cheung) comes to the inn with his camel and Ouyang takes him in his business. Hong Qi helps the poor girl with the donkey and now-only-few eggs that have already gone bad (In an earlier scene, before going off to fight the bandits, nameless swordsman grabs the girl as he passes her and unexpectedly kisses her. The girl, in an attempt to push him away, drops the basket and breaks most of the eggs.) Hong Qi loses a finger fighting the soldiers for the girl and carries on a conversation with Ouyang. Ouyang asks him if it is worth losing a finger for an egg. Hong Qi says no. But he says he felt great as “this is me”. The oddly angled shot stays with Hong Qi’s face as he says, “I knew that you would never risk your life for the price of an egg. This is the difference between us.” Hong Qi’s wife, a woman from the countryside comes to the inn but Hong Qi refuses to take her along with him to explore jianghu. He asks Ouyang to tell her that he has already left. But she would not leave as she is one of those stubborn and simple-minded women. She knows that her husband would not go anywhere without his camel. The camel is still outside, her husband must be here. So she waits and waits outside of the inn. Eventually Hong gives in, puts his wife on the back of his camel, and leaves the inn with her. Ouyang watches them go away and conveys in a voiceover that “I couldn’t help feeling jealous as I saw them off. Once upon a time I could have been like Hong Qi. But I gave up that opportunity. I do not know why.” In the last twenty minutes of the film, Ouyang’s secret from his past is finally revealed via a conversation between Ouyang’ now sister-in-law, (Maggie Cheung) and 33 Huang Yaoshi. Ouyang and this woman loved each other when they were young. As Ouyang never told her that he loved her and she needed to hear that, she thought he was too sure of himself and she decided not to give what he wanted. So she married Ouyang’s elder brother instead. On her wedding night, Ouyang came to ask her to elope with him. She turned him down. In Huang’s conversation with Ouyang’s now sister-in-law, Huang voluntarily offers his secret as well in a voiceover. “I never told her that I love her. Because I know that untasted fruit is the sweetest. She seems to care a lot for the kid. But I know she is thinking of someone else. I envy Ouyang Feng. How I’ve longed to be loved. Yet I only ended up hurting lots of people. If love is a contest, I cannot say if she is the winner. But I know very well that I’ve lost from the very beginning.” The camera pulls away from Maggie Cheung’s face and we see Huang Yaoshi taking a bite of a pear. Then there is an immediate medium long shot of Maggie Cheung standing next to the window. The camera is directly pointed at the bright sunlight that came in from the window, it is glaringly bright on the screen and we can barely make out of Maggie Cheung’s figure. The camera moves to Huang Yaoshi’s face and give us a close-up of him leaning against a door, with his head slightly tilted back. His voiceover comes in, saying “I like peach blossom only because of this woman. I see her every year at the peach blossom season. I go see Ouyang Feng every year. That’s because she’d want to learn the latest news of Ouyang from me. Thanks to Ouyang, I have an excuse to see her every year.” In the same setting, we hear Huang’s voice again after Maggie Cheung’s slow-paced 34 monologue on how nothing really matters to her anymore. But we know that it is a different scene of a flashback as the voiceover tells us that “She died soon afterwards,” the music comes to a crescendo and stops. The camera zooms in and gives us a close-up of Maggie Cheung’s stunningly beautiful face with her head on the windowsill, eyes closed. The voiceover goes on, “Before she died, she gave me a pot of wine to take to him. She hoped that Ouyang would forget her. ” This brings the viewer back to the very beginning of the film when Huang first came to visit Ouyang and gave him the pot of wine called “drunken life and dreamy death’. Now time has become a loop and the film finally starts to make some sense. Under the disguise of wuxia film, Ashes is actually a sad love tale about everybody in the film pining for somebody else that one has either lost or cannot have. Neither Ouyang Feng nor Huang Yaoshi can bring themselves to tell the Maggie Cheung character at White Camel Mountain that he loves her. Both of them choose to leave and spend the rest of their lives in sorrow and melancholy, pining for unrequited love. The Maggie Cheung character thought love was a kind of contest and refused to marry Ouyang Feng, the one she truly lovs and spends her life pondering the past. Murong Yin (also Murong Yang)’s love for Huang Yaoshi is unrequited. Blind Swordsman has to leave his wife who he loves because supposedly his wife falls for his friend Huang Yaoshi. Even the girl with a donkey and eggs seems to have fallen for the blind swordsman, who is still in love with his wife. (In one scene, we see blind swordsman’s face on the screen and hear the girl with the donkey asking, “You don’t like me, do you?”) In the film, people die, friendship 35 collapses and love becomes impossible for the living ones. So they can only spend the rest of their life feeling the weight of their sad memories of love and loss. It might be too eager of a judgment to say that Ashes is a film entirely about unrequited love and despair. Wong once said that “Chungking Express (his very next work following Ashes) represents a real break: the characters accept their loneliness, they’re more independent, and they see in their quest not a kind of despair but a kind of amusement.” 23 I would like to suggest that as utterly desperate and hopeless the characters in Ashes may seem at first glance, we can still detect the element f acceptance in it, which is represented in a series of Buddhist messages sprinkled in the film. The film starts with a quote from a Zen Buddhist canon: “The flags are still, no wind blows. It is the heart of man that is in tumult.” It foreshadows all the tumult, despair and violence we shall see on the screen as much as suggests that all the violence is resulted from the heart of man that is not in peace. The self-exile, hurts, and hatred are there to highlight people’s loneliness and also to test people’s endurance. In some ways, the characters somehow end up moving into a different level of acceptance and peace. We see the characters’ choice with life and love in the last ten minutes of the film where Wong does a wonderful work connecting the film to the happenings in Jin Yong’s novel. We see Huang’s long hair flowing in the wind. As he slowly moves, he says in a voiceover, “It’s said that memory is the fount for worry. Ever since that year, I started to erase lots of things from my memory. All I can remember is my fondness for peach blossoms.” The screen dims till we are in the dark and we can only imagine Huang, like 36 the other characters, is looking subdued or dreamlike in the darkness. When the screen brightens again, we see a big tree and a blurry human figure next to it. The subtitle reads, “Huang Yaoshi led a hermit’s life on Peach Blossom Island six year later and called himself the Master of Peach Blossom Island, also known as the ‘Evil East’.” The Peach Blossom Island turns out to be Huang’s asylum and his peaceful hermit-like life there offers the character a relatively much more peaceful state of mind if we think about all the people he has hurt and all the violence he has committed at a younger age in this film. As to Ouyang Feng, after having received a letter about his beloved’s death from White Camel Mountain, he sits at his doors for days, just looking at the desert. Then he burns down his inn and leaves his life as a death-broker in the desert behind. I would like to emphasize that the emotion and Buddhist messages here are conveyed through Wong’s highly stylized visual form. Ouyang says in a voiceover, “Soon afterwards I received a letter from White Camel Mountain. It said my brother’s wife had died from illness two years ago.” Then we see a jump-cut of lots of birds flying and chirping against bright blue sky. The camera cuts back to Ouyang reading the letter. He says in the voiceover, “I know Huang won’t come again. But I still waited. I sat at the doors for two days and two nights watching the changing clouds. I suddenly realized although I’ve been here for several years. I’ve never really looked at the desert.” The viewer sees the amazing clouds in the sky changing magnificent colors and begins to understand what Ouyang means when he says “I’ve never really looked the desert.” The implicit Buddhist message of discovering the world’s wonder in tiny details in everyday life by being really focused on looking and 37 Wong’s amazing visuals perfectly blend in. The slow-paced accompanying music sends the viewer to a state of or sedation as well as meditation. The Erotic Rejection When Ciment suggested to Wong that betrayal is the theme of the film, the director corrected him to say that the theme is rejection. 24 The desolate desert is not only the site for certain kind of peace and realization about life and man, but also the very place where the erotic beauty of rejection, loneliness and despair is highlighted. In Ashes, a fascinating fact about rejection is that everything means the very opposite of it as well. Rejection is commitment. Loneliness comes off being the most potent when there is company. All the despair implies longing and hope at the same time. The magic wine, “drunken life and dreamy death” appears to be the very thing that induces oblivion at first. Only till the end have we learnt that it means the very opposite. It is the sister-in-law’s joke on Ouyang Feng that actually ensures him to remember his love for her forever. When Ouyang receives the message about her death, he says, “I suddenly wanted to have a drink that night. So I finished the remaining half pot of ‘drunken life and dreamy death’... I carry on my business as usual…when I am free I look at the direction of White Camel Mountain. I remember very well that a woman used to be there waiting for me.” Here the camera cuts back to Maggie Cheung’s face. She keeps the same posture of leaning against the windowsill, playing with a flower in her hand. However, she is now in a white dress with the same texture as the red one she was in as we saw in the previous scene. Her face looks even whiter and brighter, just like a washed 38 out painting. Ouyang continues in the voiceover, “That magic wine is just a joke she played on me. The harder you try to forget something, the longer it will stick in your memory. Once I’ve heard people say if you have to lose something, the best way to keep it is to keep it in your memory.” The Maggie Cheung character refuses to elope with Ouyang and marries his elder brother. However, she spends her life regretting this decision as she has never stopped loving him. Her rejection is also her lifelong commitment to love. As Huang Yaoshi says, “I go see Ouyang Feng every year. That’s because she’d want to learn the latest news of Ouyang from me.” Two interesting commitments are to be found in this revelation. First, the woman never stops loving Ouyang and she longs for him after she has rejected him; Second, Huang Yaoshi is also committed to his love for this woman despite her commitment to another man. It has become clear that the characters’ acts often speak for the opposite of their words. Furthermore, even their words often mean the very opposite of them. There is a beautiful scene five minutes into the last twenty minutes where Maggie Cheung, in her textured red dress, crawls onto her bed, looking at herself in a mirror. The camera moves close to her face and stays there. She says, “You are his close friend. I thought you’d have told him that I’m here.” Huang Yaoshi’s voice comes in, “I had promised you. So I did not say anything in the end. ” The camera gives a close-up of Maggie Cheung’s face and we see her face saturated with sadness and disappointment as she is talking to Huang Yaoshi who is off-screen. “You’re too honest,” She says, and bursts into a bitter laugh. 39 Her request to not to disclose her location is obviously an invitation to do the very opposite. How can Huang not understand that? Nevertheless, Huang obeys her request because “thanks to Ouyang Feng, I have an excuse to see her every year.” We have known by this point that Huang likes peach blossom only because of this woman as he sees her every year at the peach blossom season. The ultimate mystery of the characters in Ashes lies in a fact that whatever is said or is done could also mean the opposite. Everything can be simply a pretense and yet at the same time true. The wine is as such, peach blossom is as such. So is every rejection and betrayal. The very technique that makes this coexistence of opposing meanings even possible is Wong’s elaborate use of voiceover in the film. Ashes probably contains the most monologues in Cantonese cinema up to date. In fact, in Wong’s interview with Ngai, Ngai even goes as far as attributing the failure of Ashes in the west to Wong’s extensive use of monologues. “The use of monologue in Ashes of Time is a disaster for a western audience. I mean, recognizing those faces is already a trying task for people who are not familiar with the actors, but having three or four voices coming up without any apparent clue as to which voice belongs to whom can be a nightmare.” Wong agreed with him and admitted that it was the failure of Ashes in the west that taught him the hard lesson. Wong’s response also adds another dimension to monologue: “I always think monologue a very interesting device. It can be something happening inside a character, an internal communication, an observation; it can be something directed towards the audience, a confession or an excuse that the character wants to make; or it can be a reminder of 40 something which has happened, or even a life. The audience has to decide which is which.” 25 The extensive use of voiceover can be interpreted as Wong’s attempt to intellectually engage the audience in a viewing experience. After we have watched Ashes more than three times, we would refuse to buy into any heroic image of these martial arts masters as they often appear in Jin Yong’ novels. Ashes, as many other Wong’s works blatantly challenges any hero or heroism. Instead, it seems to convey that heroism is only possible among the ordinary people in a mundane life. As Abbas suggests in “The Erotics of Disappointment” 26 , the ambiguities of heroic space can be suggested by considering how action is represented. The early fight sequence, involving the film’s main narrator Ouyang Feng, the Malicious West of the title, typifies the pattern. It is no longer a choreography of action that we see, as in other Kung-fu or gangster movies, but a composition of light and color, into which all action has dissolved; a kind of Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting. Action has now become non-figurative. In all the fight scenes, it is only when the action slows down, that light resolves itself into something recognizably human; but when we do catch a glimpse of a human figure, it is always at the fatal moment of dealing out death, or in the throes of dying… Abbas even goes as far as saying that all the characters seem to be living their lives posthumously. I would agree with his view considering the temporal loop of the narrative in this film. The magic wine appears in the beginning of the film and we know that it is the wish of the Maggie Cheung character for Huang Yaoshi to bring the wine to Ouyang. So the starting point of the film actually marks the entire narrative a narrative about recollection of people’s life in the desert that has already been passé. The tale of despair and love is told posthumously when one of the participants is no longer there. All the images of Maggie Cheung are in fact images constructed in the other characters’ minds 41 after her death. In Ashes, all the more established martial arts masters, including Ouyang Feng, Huang Yaoshi and the “Defeat-seeking Loner,” are unable to embrace love in their life. It is only the ordinary people who are relatively free of ressentiment like the bare-foot mercenary Hong Qi, who makes his way in the world, unconventionally accompanied by his peasant wife. In Abbas’ words, It is this ordinariness that escapes Ouyang Feng’s influence, and that is the antithesis to heroism. Walter Benjamin, writing about the ordinary heroism of modern life, said it took as much energy for an ordinary salesman to survive a day in the modern city, as it took gladiators in the old days to fight in the arenas. In a similar vein, Wong’s martial art film shows us the danger of ordinary life. 27 I would like to consider Ashes a eulogy to the ordinary heroism. In one way or another, the martial arts masters Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi have never been as heroic as Hong Qi who can just make a decision and follow through, going in the world with his peasant wife. As Ouyang is seeing them off, he says he is envious as he could have been like them once upon a time. While he is lamenting his own indecision which eventually led to the loss of his love, he is also longing for the ordinary heroism. Ashes, as Wong’s only “wuxia” film up to date, is more of an art film with fight scenes than a traditional wuxia film with love stories that the audience would ever expect to see. As Wong puts it, “Traditional martial arts films are designed to stimulate the senses of the spectator. I wanted to make mine a means of expressing the emotions of the characters.” 28 42 Chapter Three Endnotes 18 谭嗣同《仁学· 自序》里指出：墨有两派，一曰 “任侠” ， “任” 所谓 “仁” 也；另一派 “格致 ” ，即他所说的“学” 。 19 Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), in two volumes. 20 Sima Qian quotation translated by James Liu in Liu, The Chinese Knight Errant (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 14‐15. 今游侠，其行虽不轨于正义，然其言必信，其行必果，已诺必诚，不爱其躯，赴士之困厄。即已存亡死生矣，而不矜其能，羞伐其德，盖亦有足多者焉。 ” （《史记·游侠列传》） 21 Teo, P 66. 22 Teo, P 67. From Stephen Teo’s interview with Patrick Tam, 27 March 2003, Hong Kong. 23 Ciment, “Entretien,” p. 38. 24 Brunette, P41. 25 Ngai, Jimmy. Wong Kar‐wai, P. 96. 26 Abbas, Ackbar. “The Erotics of Disappointmet,” Wong Kar‐wai, p.p. 60‐61. 27 Ibid. p. 66. 28 Ciment, “Entretien” p. 43. 43 Four The Memo of a Modern Jungle: Chungking Express (1994) As the film that first brought Wong international attention, Chungking Express (or, Chungking Jungle in its original Chinese title) was shot in under two months during a break in the editing of Ashes of Time with a budget of HK $15 million. 29 Wong likened it to a film made by students fresh out of film school. After two big-budget movies, for Wong, making Chungking Express was returning to his youth. 30 Wong Kar-wai, a film director who rarely works with constrains and assumptions of so-called genre films, makes Chungking Express yet again, a palette for his distinctive styles and visual expressivity. Chungking Express is what Chuck Stephens called “bubblegum cinema,” more or less a lighthearted comedy/ romance/ detective film set in contemporary Hong Kong. One of the most interesting aspects of this film is to be found in its structure of diptych. It consists of two independent love stories. As Wong said, he wanted to “experiment with shooting two crisscrossing stories in one movie”, developing the narratives as he went along, “like a road movie.” 31 The first story is about a policeman number 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), whose name is He Zhiwu, as he tells us. Policeman number 223 buys thirty cans of pineapples whose expiration-date is May 1 st , his birthday as well as the one-month anniversary of his breakup with May. May dumped him and he eats pineapple every day for a month, telling himself that if May does not come back by May 1 st , even though we have never been given any hint as to why May would possibly come 44 back, their relationship will expire. We have also been following a nameless woman (Brigitte Lin) around, a drug smuggler who wears a blonde wig. She schemes to have the Indians smuggle drugs for her, but is betrayed by the Indians. Her Anglo drug-dealer boss threatens to kill her if she does not recover the drugs. He leaves canned food at a bar and the expiration-date on the can tells her the deadline of her mission. She eventually kills the boss when there is no time left for her. The second story starts in the same food place that He Zhiwu comes to use the phone to call May. Policeman 633(Tony Leung Chiu-wai) frequents the food place to get a chef’s salad at midnight for his steward girlfriend. The owner of the place chats with him and recommends him to buy something else for his girlfriend to try. Policeman 633 takes his advice and tries new orders. His girlfriend dumps him and leaves a letter together with the key to his department at the food place. Policeman 633 occasionally chats with Feye, the new girl (the girl who used to work there is also called May) working there when he orders food. Feye enjoys loud music while working. One song that she keeps playing is the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreaming.” Feye develops a crush for policeman 633 so she takes the key left at the food place and sneaks in his apartment when he is out. She cleans, organizes and eventually totally redecorates the apartment for him. However, policeman 633 who has a habit of talking to the objects in his apartment after his girlfriend has left him, is oblivious enough to not have ever noticed. Instead, he attributes all the changes happening to his apartment to the objects themselves. He finally bumps into Feye at his apartment one day and decides to ask her out. When he goes to meet Feye 45 at café “California,” only to find out that she has left for the real California. One of the most interesting humorous aspects in Chungking Express is to be found in people’s small obsessive compulsive behaviors in everyday life. Every character seems to repeats his or her own pattern to deal to manage their emotions. In a voiceover, Policeman 223 tells us that May, who had been with him for five years broke up with him on April the Fool’s Day so he thinks it is a joke. He would like to let the joke last for a month. So From April 1 st , every day, he has been buying a can of pineapple (as pineapple is May’s favorite) that expires on May 1 st . Policeman 223, He Zhiwu’s obsessive compulsive behaviors also involves calling May and people related to May even though May is no longer his girlfriend. The first time when we see him doing so is when he calls May’s parents to chat with them. Then, when he gets paged by Ming, who seems to be a mutual friend of his and May’s, he thinks it is May. When he returns the page and talks to Ming, he thinks that Ming is passing on some message from May and tells Ming that May can call him if she misses him that much. When Ming tells him that she does not have any message from May, instead, she is just calling to ask him to run with her, as she is preparing for a contest. He blows up impatiently, “What is the matter with you? Running is such a private thing. How can you run in front of other people?” The viewer might just burst into laughter hearing him saying “running is such a private matter. How can you run in front of other people?” Though he immediately tells the viewer in a voiceover that the real reason why it is a private matter: “running takes away the water in my body so I would not cry that 46 easily.” In a much later scene, he really goes running after having left the woman with blonde wig asleep in the hotel room on his birthday morning. Even though May is no longer with him, when he catches a criminal, he still calls May as “whenever I have some good news, I would call my girlfriend May first.” Policeman 223’s obsessive calling behavior peaks towards the end of the story. When he finally goes to the food place around midnight to ask May out, only to find that May has already gone out with another guy, hence he decides never to date anybody called May. Then we see him calling probably all the women he knows to have a drink with him while he is alternating between Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin speaking to each of them. As it turns out, one of them is asleep, another one was married five years ago and has had two kids now and the last one is his classmate from the fourth grade, who no longer remembers him. He leaves, and we see only a handset at the food stand and we start to understand that his calling is ultimately a craving for human contact and connection in manifestation, against the backdrop of all the rapid changes happening to everybody in the city of Hong Kong. As to Policeman 633, he obsessive-compulsively talks to the objects in his department after the break-up with his steward girlfriend. About half way into the story, in a voiceover, his sadness becomes obvious while he is describing the objects’ feelings. “Everything was heart-broken after she had left, so I have to console each of them before going to bed every night.” We then see him consoling a bar of soup, a wet towel, two stuffed animals and a shirt left behind by her. These scenes are at the same time 47 lighthearted humor and confessions of sadness and loneliness. The other characters, if not obsessive compulsive, also seem to follow their own patterns, repetitively doing certain things, to say the least. The wigged woman always appears in a raincoat with sunglasses. When asked by the bar tender, “why the raincoat?” She says, “I think it will rain.” Later, she reveals in a voiceover that “I do not know since when I’ve become a very cautious person. Every time when I put on a raincoat, I put on sunglasses as well. You never know when it is going to rain or when the sun is going to come out. ” Feye, the girl at the food stand, keeps playing and shaking her body with the loud music she plays at work. She also keeps sneaking in policeman 633’s apartment, cleaning it and eventually totally redecorating it. People’s obsessive behaviors are often associated with humorous anthropomorphization of objects. On the night of April 30 th , policeman 223 comes to the convenient store but does not find any can of pineapple that expires in two hours on the shelf. He goes to the cashier and asks why there is not one that expires tomorrow. The cashier says of course he would not put those old ones out as nobody wants to buy those. “People would like fresh new ones,” as he says. Policeman 223 follows the cashier around in the store, lecturing him, “new, new, new. It is all these people’s fault! They just forget about the old and lust after the new one! Do you know how much labor it is to make a can of pineapple? You have to grow the pineapple, pick them then cut them. Is it your say to just throw them away after all this labor? Have you ever given any consideration of the can of pineapple’s feelings? ” The cashier replies, “Sir, I am only 48 working here. You ask me to consider pineapple’s feelings, have you considered my feelings? I have to move them, lift them and carry them. Of course I wish they would never expire. That would have saved me all the labor. ” In a later scene, we see He Zhiwu almost obsessive-compulsively eating a stack of expired cans of pineapples. He east an OK one, then comes to a worse one, then he sprinkles salt or pepper on it. He opens the next one, smells it and frowns. A jump-cut lets us see him holding a fork with the cut pineapple on the tip of it in front of a dog. The dog reaches over, takes a sniff and turns away. He has to put it in his own mouth to demonstrate that it is edible. Then he snuggles the dog, saying in another voiceover, “I heard people say that dogs are the best friends to human. Why would not he share my pain with me at this moment then?” Then he goes to the kitchen, puts some ketchup on the pineapples and eats them. Eventually, he concludes that “I do not know if it is a record. But I ate all the pineapples that night. Thank God that May does not like durian. Otherwise, I would have been damned. ” People seem to be utterly incapable of ever forming intimate relationships in Chungking Express, nevertheless, they have no problem communicating with all kinds of objects. According to Abbas’ observation, “One of Wong’s most constant themes, found in all his films in different modalities, is proximity without reciprocity; that is to say, how we can be physically close to a situation or a person without there being any intimacy of knowledge.” 32 The fast-paced cosmopolitan city of Hong Kong, as one of the most densely 49 populated areas in the world (with a population density of 88,633 per square mile) 33 inevitably makes everybody nobody, merely an anonymous face in a quick moving crowd. “At our most intimate,” policeman 223, He Zhiwu says of the wigged woman, at the very beginning of the film, whom he first passes by in a quick moving crowd, “we were only 0.01 cm apart.” But the wigged woman then was just an anonymous body to him as they had no knowledge of each other at all. Nor will they ever get to have that knowledge throughout the film. In a much later scene, when policeman 223 finally drowns his sorrow in a bar called “Bottoms Up,” he vows to fall in love with the first woman that walks in the bar. The wigged woman with sunglasses walks in. We see his smile, with the woman in the back, out of focus. And he decides to talk to her. This is an ironic moment as the viewer knows for fact that this is not the first time they meet, as He Zhiwu believes in. They have “encountered” before, in a quick moving crowd and he knocks into her on the way chasing a thief. The same saying about people’s physical proximity without reciprocity comes up again towards the end of the first story. As policeman 223 walks out of the food place, he brushes by Feye, the new girl at the food place who is sweeping the floor. “At our closest moment, we were only 0.01 cm apart. 6 hours later, she fell in love with another man.” We remember at the beginning of the film, He said the same thing of the wigged woman, “At our closest moment, we were only 0.01 cm apart. 57 hours later, she fell in love with another man.” Then we see an interesting shot that runs several seconds while the camera 50 stays with policeman number 633 and Feye. In the foreground, people walking by are reduced to blurry shapes and colors, out of focus. There people, just like 223 and 633 and the other characters in the film who all brush by each other at one point or another thus far, speak for many possibilities of many other encounters and stories. In fact, if we look really, really closely, we will recognize Wong’s Hitchcock-like technique in Chungking Express. The two stories overlap and the characters appear in each other’s story. Policeman 633, leaning against the handrails on the ground level of the subway station, appears for a couple of seconds when the wigged woman is running away from her boss’s people that seek revenge in a subway station. He is also suggested to be in the background, out of focus, in the food place while policeman 223 chats with the shop owner. The most telling moments of “proximity without reciprocity” come when people find themselves in a small space, minding their own business and having no knowledge of the other person even being there. When the wigged woman and policeman 223 go to a hotel after their encounter in the bar, she immediately collapses in bed and falls asleep and he chooses to stay up, watching films and eating chef’s salads. In the voiceover, we hear policeman 223 saying, “I did not expect that her ‘rest’ really means ‘rest’. That night, I watched two Cantonese movies and ate four chef’s salads.” The shots of them spending their night together in a small hotel room could not be more different from shots of two strangers, who have no connection whatsoever, spending an uneventful night respectively in their different apartments. 51 The same thing happens in the second story when policeman 633 appears utterly ignorant of Feye’s existence in his apartment. Policeman 633 sometimes comes home to have lunch, hoping to find his steward girlfriend at home. We see him going to the closet first, saying, “Just come out on the count of three. I know you are here” as she used to hide there before jumping out to surprise him. He counts three in front of the closet and leaves. Then the door or the closet opens, Feye quietly comes out and walks to the bathroom to hide without being detected. Policeman 633 then goes to the bathroom, the same game is played and he still never sees Feye as she is under his piles of laundry. Only the viewer, not Policeman 663 ever knows that he was once really close to Feye. The viewer as well knows that the moments of their most proximity is also when the gap between them is the widest. When people are communicating, the sense of isolation is even more overwhelming. As the cousin of the food stand owner, Feye claims to pay the power bill, but in fact disappears every afternoon to clean policeman 663’s apartment. When the power at the food stand is finally out due to overdue electricity bill, her cousin comes to talk to her, “I really have no idea what you have been doing these days. Now the power is out. ” She replies, “I’ve been going to the doctor’s.” “Going to the doctor? I haven’t seen you taking any pills.” “I have. You just never notice. ” “Well, when will you be fine?” “Soon.” The fact that he never even asks why she goes to the doctor’s suggests little more than indifference. Now when we think of the song “Californian Dreaming,” that is repetitively played by Feye, we come to understand it might be more than a pure coincidence. Feye may have always been longing for somewhere else other than this food 52 stand even though she claims that she does not like to think when she meets policeman 633 the first time. A World of Anthropomorphization Although the characters seem to be indulgent in their isolations in the jungle of Chungking Express, they have no problem forming an intimate relationship with inanimate objects. Policeman 223 takes the wigged woman to a hotel and ends up watching movies and having French fries all night long. When the night creeps to dawn, before he leaves, he takes off her heels and carefully cleans them for her. In a voiceover, he gentle tells us that “My mom told me if a woman falls asleep in her heels, her feet will swell the next day.” Then we see him going into the bathroom with the shoes. “She must have walked a long way last night. For a pretty woman like her, her shoes should be very clean.” He says as he eyes the shoes affectionately and carefully cleans them with his tie. Then we see a low-angle shot that focuses on a pair of clean white shoes next to the bed, with his feet moving father and father away. Policeman 633 also has a fairly intimate communication with all the objects in his apartment. We hear him, in a voiceover saying, “Do you know that you have become much skinner?” We can only see a black screen so we have no idea who he is talking to. When the screen brightens again, we see him occupying only the left half of the screen, talking to a bar of soup, “You used to be chubby, look at you, only a dry, slim piece now. Why do this? Have some faith in yourself.” Then the camera cuts to him holding a dripping wet towel, muttering, “I already told you not to cry. When will you ever stop 53 crying? Be strong. Look at what you look like now, all cramped into a bundle.” He drops it on a counter and picks it up again, “ok, let me help you.” He drains the towel and puts it up. It turns out to be a totally worn-out towel. He goes on and on, asking stuffed animals to stop being angry with the steward ex-girlfriend while combing them, ironing his ex’s shirt to keep it warm. The characters have created an anthropomorphic world for themselves. The humor is childlike and yet sorrowful at the same time. The anthropomorphized objects are little more than vivid manifestations of their emotions and projections of their fragile inner selves. Back to the Global City In Chungking Express, Hong Kong is represented as the site of globalism. People of different nationalities and races all live in this densely populated global space. We see the Chinese, the Indians, the Anglos going around, minding their own business in different communities. There is no other candidate better than Takeshi Kaneshiro, who speaks perfect Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese to play Policeman 223. When he sees the wigged woman in the bar, he decides to love her as he has vowed to love the next woman that walks in the bar. The voiceover comes in and says, “I have a feeling that she will like me. However, I would like to ask her a question to make sure. ” He comes next to her, asking in Cantonese, “Ms, do you like pineapple?” She does not respond, in fact, she does not even look at him. He thinks to himself, she might not be a local. Then he tries the same line in Japanese. She takes out a cigarette and starts smoking. When he does not get 54 a response, he switches to English. Finally, he asks her in Mandarin and she takes a look at him and says, “Well, your mandarin is not bad.” Two aspects need to be said about this interesting exchange of words. First, this simple exchange of words is highly illustrative of Hong Kong’s diversity and globalism. Everybody could be from a different place or speak a different language so one is never sure who he or she just meets and what language one should pick to start a relationship with that person. In a later scene, when policeman 223 finally decides to ask another May (the girl at the food stand) out, he learns that May already went out with another man. Dumped by two Mays, he starts calling all the women he knows in Hong Kong to have a drink with him. Supposedly they all come from different places as he is alternating between different languages. This is probably the very trait of Hong Kong that make the characters in Chungking Express confide to the objects instead of people as who knows what language you should speak to the other people to even open the possibility to mutual understanding. Second, the wigged woman still remains an anonymous figure after the exchange as this exchange does not provide us with anything about her history and her story. We have already heard her speaking English to the Indians first, then Cantonese to the local tailor when she is looking for the Indians. However, for whatever reason, she only responds to policeman 223 in Mandarin. Where is she from? What is her story? We know nothing but that she is a multilingual drug-smuggler and a killer. As the site of globalism to the characters in the film, Hong Kong represents unlimited possibilities. The ubiquitous global culture comes in Feye’s “California 55 Dreaming,” which almost runs through the entire second story. Eventually Feye leaves Hong Kong for the real California. The presence of global culture in Hong Kong has significantly changed the characters’ perceptions of “home” and “elsewhere.” They love and lose their love, but their loss also transforms them and eventually they move on. They do not have an ultimate attachment to a place, a city, a profession or a lifestyle. They are always reforming themselves just like the city itself with constant changes. At the end of the film, when Feye returns as a steward, she sees policeman 633 redecorating the fast-food place and there is a hint of a new romance. We know whatever story they are going to have, they will no longer appear as policeman 633 and the girl working at a food stand. Chungking Express is ultimately a memo of some people who have once lived in the modern jungle. 56 Chapter Four Endnotes 29 Wong himself claimed that he shot it in six weeks. See Mary Jane Amato and J. Greenberg, ‘Swimming in Winter: An Interview with Wong Kar‐wai’, Kabinet, no. 5 (summer 2000), <ww.kabinet.org/magazine/issue 5/wkw1. html>. 30 See Teo, p. 49. 31 See Teo, p. 52. 32 See Abbas, “The Erotics of Disappointmet,” Wong Kar‐wai,”p.43. 33 See the population density chart. (http://www.demographia.com/db‐dense‐nhd.htm) 57 Five Creatures of Love: Fallen Angels (1995) Wong’s next film, Fallen Angels (1995), on the first viewing, seems to be similar to Chungking Express in terms of style and narratives. In fact, its origins stem from Chungking Express. As the third story that was never made due to the problem of length, now Fallen Angeles was made into another feature film with a structure of diptych. The plot is minimal since the film depends more than ever on Wong’s experimental visual expressivity. Hitman Huang Zhiming (Leon Lai) carries out projects arranged by his female work partner (Michelle Reis), who is in love with him and sneaks in his abode and cleans it while he is out. She goes through his trash to find out what he does recently and she frequents the same bar that he goes to and sits in his seat to feel more connection to him than there actually is. The hitman only wants to keep their relationship professional. Eventually he gets tired of being a killer and wants out of the business. It is suggested that his female agent arranges the last project for him and gets him killed (while she is arranging the last mission on the phone, she says “I want to put up an ad for my friend. Front page,” which is different from the line she used to say more than once on the phone, “I want to visit my friend. Keep a seat.”) At the same time, a blonde girl sees the hitman at a McDonald’s on a rainy day and follows him. As it turns out, she used to be together with the hitman but he obviously does not remember her anymore. She has the hitman stay over at her place for the night, hoping he would like her again someday. The hitman makes it clear to her that he only wants some company that night. In the end, 58 he leaves her once again on a rainy day. The other story in the film centers on a mute man, He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who lives with his father, who runs a flophouse in Chunking Mansions (site of the first story in Chungking Express) where the female agent resides. As a mute, he has difficulty finding a job, so he breaks in people’s closed shops at night and runs the business. He falls in love with Charlie Young, who is of course, in love with her last boyfriend even though he is marrying another woman. By the end of the movie, the mute man and the female agent meet at a food place and she asks him to take her home. When they are on the motorcycle, she holds him tight and says that she has not been close to any man in ages but now she feels really close to him. A City Seen Through a Super Wide-Angle Lens As Brunette has observed, “The film is chiefly known for its ‘experimental’ nature:…The accent, as always, is on visual expressivity – abetted by the aural - through editing (lots of jump cuts), camera movement, and camera angle (a huge number of canted shots) rather than on narrative or theme per se.” 34 One of the most experimental techniques Wong employs in this film is the use of a super wide-angle 9.8 mm lens. Wong actually called it the “standard lens” of the film, and the effect this exerts on the viewer is a distortion of space, which essentially, in Teo’s terms, is “a sense of distance in closeness, of being near and yet far away.” 35 Christopher Doyle explains that prior to Fallen Angels, the widest-angle lens that was considered usable was 18mm. In most of Wong’s previous 59 uses of this shot, the background has, owing to focal-length limitations, necessarily been out of focus; here, the extreme wide-angle lens allows everything to be simultaneously sharp. 36 The title, Fallen Angels evokes a biblical reference: the fall of Adam and Eve and God’s curse upon the ground; or a more apocalyptic New Testament vision of angels who left their first estate and descended into the hell of the city, reserved in everlasting chains under darkness awaiting judgment day. 37 The characters in this film are all socially isolated creatures, wandering around in the cityscape, desperately looking for love or human connection but unable to attain it. Lots of shots place the character in a small corner of the screen with the traffic in Hong Kong, or the emptiness of the landscape occupying the rest of the screen. For example, the hitman lives in a flophouse called “No. 1. Fragrant Residence.” Contrary to the romantic name, his room looks more like a dark, narrow doorway with little furniture, looking cramped and claustrophobic. He often goes home and pushes the window first, then we see him occupying the left half of the screen, looking out from his barred window, while the busy traffic, reduced to shadows and lights, flooding through the right half of the screen with the neon light lit sign “No.1. Fragrant Residence” in the middle as a divider. At other times, the columns at subway stations appear enormous to the viewer. The space, shot with the super wide-angle lens, seems oppressively close to the viewer throughout the film. 60 They Are All Alone Like all Wong’s films, Fallen Angels is also told from multiple perspectives of the characters and their isolated existences are more than ever striking. The hitman, in Teo’s terms, “is a blank space, an anonymity,” 38 which I would not entirely agree with. The hitman, as mysterious as he may seem to be at first glance, is in fact someone with his own history and his own story to tell. Though he remains anonymous till half way through the movie when we get his name for the first time, he still leaves treads for his partner, and the viewer regarding his habits, like what kind of beer he drinks and which bar he goes to. At the beginning of the film, the killer is already more than willing to tell us the reason he has gone into this profession, “I am a lazy person, so I prefer some other people making the arrangement for me. That is why I need a partner. One does not have to think much to be a killer…who is going to die, when and where all have been arranged for you.” In a later scene, the hitman hops on a bus after he has done some major killings and meets Ah Hai, an old classmate from elementary school. It is the first time when we get to know the killer’s real name, Huang Zhiming via his old schoolmate. In a voiceover, Huang Zhiming tells us that “Everybody has a past. Even if you are a hitman, you are bound to have classmates from elementary school as well.” When asked about his family, Huang takes out two photos from his wallet. While Ah Hai keeps praising his black wife in the photo and his son, Huang Zhiming tells us the truth, “Several years ago, I gave a black woman $30 to get a photograph taken. Ever since then, whenever people ask, I say 61 this is my wife. As to the kid, I just bought him an ice cream. ” Ah Hai gives Huang a wedding invitation before getting off the bus. Huang takes it reluctantly and we hear him saying in another voiceover, “Every single time when I get a wedding invitation, I want to go. But I know this is not my kind of occasion.” His partner, at the same time, is also explaining to the viewer all her behaviors. We see her go into the killer’s room, cleans it, dumps the trash in a bag and takes it away. Then she lays all the trash around in her own place and tells us that “Going through one person’s trash can tell you a lot about what this person has been doing recently.” After she has discovered the bar the hitman frequents through a box of matches in his trash, she starts going to that bar. Again, she gives another personal revelation, “Sometimes when I come to this bar, I sit in the same seat where he sat. I feel closer to him doing this.” The characters’ social isolation is highlighted by their unsuccessful communications, or, their futile attempt to communicate with each other. When the hitman gets injured in a major killing, he conveys to us that he gets injured quite often recently and he is tired of pulling bullets out of his own body. He eventually decides to leave the business. He goes to the bar and engages in a long revelation with the viewer. In a voiceover, he says, “If I am right, she will come here in a couple of days to look for me. I am quite sure about this because we are partners. As partner, aside from getting to know her, you have to give her opportunities to get to know you as well. Sometimes, I leave some leads for her to let her know where I have been and what I have done recently. After all these years, she has become part of my life. But everything will be passé in time. I want her to know that I am 62 tired of this kind of life. But I do not know how to.” Unable to communicate his wishes to his partner, he gives the bar tender a coin and leaves a number 1818 for his agent. When the woman takes the number and picks the 1818 th song from the jukebox, she hears a song that tells her to “forget him.” There are many shots of Huang Zhiming and the agent sitting together, supposedly talking to each other but we hear nothing. It is interesting how the characters cannot carry on a dialogue and yet at the same time, more than willing to form a very communicative relationship with the viewer. Not only have their monologues replaced their dialogues, their relationship with each other has also been substituted for their respective relationship with the viewer. More than anything else, the characters seem keenly aware of their own loneliness and isolation. The mute man, He Zhiwu (also the name of policeman number 223 in Chunking Express) conveys in a voiceover when he first appears as someone hiding from the cops in a closet in the flophouse, “Every day, we have lots of opportunities to brush by other people. Some of these people might become our friends or even confidants. But I know that these cops definitely will never be my confidants. My name is He Zhiwu. My prison number was 223.” At one point, He Zhiwu considers making videotapes to send as greetings, as his boss Sato-san does to his son, but decides against it: “who would I send tapes to? I really don’t want to send them to myself.” This echoes the killer’s reason for deciding against buying life insurance from his old schoolmate Ah hai: “I don’t know if the insurance company would insure a hitman. But who would I name as the beneficiary?” 63 Even the sex scenes, rendered as scenes of the absence of love and even the loved object, only add to the characters’ lonely and desperate existence. According to Larry Gross, “nothing is more typical of the world of Wong Kar-wai than a sex scene where one of the participants isn’t present.” 39 It is never more true anywhere else than in Fallen Angles. We see the female agent, clad in fishnet stockings and high heels, masturbating alone in the hitman’s bed. In a later scene, we see the hitman together with the blonde girl at her apartment. He puts on a shirt that she gives him. Looking at the shirt, he seems to remember something and asks her whose shirt it is but she refuses to answer. He has forgotten who she is. She finally tells him that they have been together before but he does not remember. Or, he never really knows who she is as he used to call her “baby.” She dyes her hair blonde so that she would make a longer lasting impression this time. Unfortunately he still does not seem to want to remember her: “I never said I like you. I just want some company tonight.” She consoles herself by muttering, “Maybe you will like me tomorrow.”We see them kissing in the cramped bathroom with a tilted camera distorting the space. We know that they presumably have had sex even though he has no recollection of who she is and she is merely imagining him as someone else who would love her the next day. In a way, neither of the two people is at present during the sex. The accompanying music here is the song “Forget Him,” played from the jukebox by the agent using the coin the hitman left for her. Then the music connects us to the next scene when we see the agent, once again, only with different stockings in the hitman’s bed this time, masturbating. We also hear her sobbing for a long time after the masturbation. Both 64 the masturbation scenes are rendered in an desolately beautiful, but non-erotic way, despite the presence of the fishnet stockings and heels as the camera is placed at the level of the bed and the wide-angle lens heavily distorts the agent’s legs. Desperate sex becomes the summation of their loneliness and futile attempt not to be isolated. Children in a Comic Book of Fallen Angels Another interesting thing about Fallen Angels that has not been expressed thus far in his other films, is to be found in the character’s childish behavior and characteristics and the comic effect. Wong’s own take on what he thought he was doing in this film is somewhat surprising, but only at first glance. “For me,” he told Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, “Fallen Angels was like a comic book, with four completely one-dimensional principal characters. The only real character, in the strong sense of the term, was the father of one of the young people. In this sense, the film reflects the enormous influence of the comics on Hong Kong cinema. The audience can then compare real characters with the comic book heroes.” 40 The arguably best-constructed comic figure in the film is He Zhiwu. Unlike Chungking Express, the two independent stories overlap quite early on in Fallen Angels. By the end of the first twenty minutes, we have already seen He Zhiwu and heard his story. As a mute, he has difficulty finding a job, so he breaks in people’s closed shops at night and runs the business. He tells us in a voiceover while gesturing at different hog legs in a butcher shop, “I’m a very open person and I used to be very talkative as a kid. 65 However, I stopped talking after I had eaten a can of pineapple that passed its expiration date. I have few friends and it has been difficult for me to find a job.” The monologue is rendered with a cheerful tone. Then he picks one hog leg and starts chopping it with a butcher knife, which seems incredibly violent and invasive with the camera lens distorting the size of it in the foregrounds as he is chopping: “Eventually I decided to be my own boss. Because I do not have any money to start a business, I reopen the closed shops at night and run a business without the start-up money.” As he is communicating to the viewer, he walks to a table and hops onto it, the he starts giving a hog a full-body massage.“I’m not the type who takes advantages of others. I just think it is very wasteful. Now that you’ve already paid the rent, why not run the business? Who says nobody goes to buy hog meat at 3 a.m.? I did, yesterday. Doing business should be all about meeting everybody’s needs. Buddha himself once said, ‘if I would not descend into hell, who else would?’ He further extends his point, “Owning one’s own business is about love, endurance and patience, so I work late every night. Though I do not make much money, I am very happy.” The mixture of comic effects and seriousness of the message in the monologue here is mind-blowing for the viewer at the first viewing. But the comic effect does not stop there. We see a series of scenes when the mute guy is forcing his business on people at a laundry place, vegetable stand, barber shop and an ice cream truck. When people try to run away from him, he chases them, literally drags them into his shop and forces them to be his customers. We see one of his poor customers holding three ice creams while 66 talking on the phone with presumably his wife, “Well, you go to bed. Don’t wait for me.” “I am eating ice cream…one or half a cup would have been fine. But who knows how many cups are there tonight. No, it is not a contest. I have to pay. Who is lying to you? If you do not believe me, come down stairs and see for yourself. ” Just when he barely finishes his conversation, he is handed over with another big volcano ice cream. The mute man looks at him, with an innocent smile. In the next scene, we see the truck packed with customers. The poor man is talking to a woman, “I told you just come downstairs by yourself. I did not ask you to take the entire family! Dad is old, how can he handle so many ice creams? The kids have to go to school tomorrow.” The mute man, again, cuts in and gives him an enormous ice cream. “Sir, I have not heard anybody died from eating ice cream in Hong Kong. I do not really want to try. Can I just pay you? Give me a price. I will pay. I really cannot eat this much. ” The mute man thinks for a second, shakes his head, smiling childishly. All these forceful acts are rendered in an odd way when the mute man’s invasively forceful behavior seems childlike, innocent and instantly forgivable at the same time. In the next scene, we see the mute man driving the ice cream truck with the family in it on the open road. In a voiceover, we hear him saying, “I know that my ice cream may be more expensive than other people’s. But I think this family will think it is worth it tonight. I like ice cream very much. An ice cream truck used to come to my doors every day when I was a kid. I was very happy every time when I saw it. One time I asked my dad why he did not go driving ice cream truck. He did not answer me. I learnt later that my mom was killed by an ice cream truck.” As Brunette has rightly pointed out, 67 “the funniest and most endearing moments in Fallen Angels rely upon a French New Wave kind of semi-nonsensical humor reminiscent of films like Francois Trufaaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, as when Ho (He Zhiwu) tells us, after he commandeers an ice cream van, that his father never drove an ice cream van and still doesn’t like ice cream because his mother was killed by one of these vans.” 41 While some of the characters’ idiosyncratic behaviors are childlike and comical, some other humorous moments come in the most ordinary monologue and acts as well. He Zhiwu has a close relationship with his father who runs a flophouse in Chungking Mansion. When he introduces his father, he gives an analysis of their relationship, “My dad works at Chungking Mansion. He has not talked much ever since my mom died. Nor does he like ice cream. Maybe because neither of us talks, our relationship has been great.” Later, He Zhiwu picks up a video camera, follows his father around and shoots his entire day as it is his father’s 60 th birthday. He even tries to videotape his father in the bathroom and gets kicked out. All the ordinary acts seem innocently childish and sweet. However, it should also be noted that these ordinary sweetness is often only there till it breaks into the unexpected violence. We have, more than once, seen the totally disarming scene of the characters eating in some small food places while the people in the background suddenly starting an extremely violent fight. He Zhiwu often jumps out, getting involved in the fight, only to get terribly injured. However, he then gives the bright smile and contently comments on how he would not miss out the opportunities to brush by people in life so he creates opportunities to “brush by” them. 68 Even Charlie Yang, the frantic girl who always appears to be on the verge a mental breakdown can be interpreted as a one-dimensional, comic figure who is obsessed with looking for “Blondie Ling,” who supposedly has stolen her man’s heart. We first see her on the phone delightfully talking to the man she likes. After having learnt that Situ Huiling, a girl with dyed blonde hair is going to marry that guy she thought she would marry, Charlie Yang loses it and seeks revenge. She calls the girl “Blondie Ling.” The mute guy falls for Charlie Yang and kindly offers her a ride to look for “Blondie Ling.” In a later scene, we see both of them kicking a door open, look around through the crack with He Zhiwu holding a bottle of wine and Charlie Yang yelling out, “Blondie Ling, I know you live here, come out! Just come out! If you do not come out on the count of three, I’m going to burn down your place!” She starts counting and just when we begin to think there is going to be a catastrophe, a jump-cut shows us an empty hallway. Her voice comes in again, “well I think she lives on the next floor.” The same thing happens over and over again. We realize from the comical and nonsensical effect that Charlie Yang has no idea where Blondie Ling lives and she is merely going to random apartment buildings to search for Blondie Ling one floor after another. There can be more than one implications extended from this scene. One of them is about play-act. Both Charlie Yang and He Zhiwu are merely indulging themselves in playing the characters who have to go through tremendous labor to get their true love. He Zhiwu is going to different apartment buildings to play the helpful boyfriend who helps his girlfriend; while Charlie Yang, without any interest in the mute guy, is satisfying her own fantasy of revenge and getting 69 her love back in this delightful and exciting play. A similar play-act happens again later in the film when they go to see a game at the stadium while the mute guy is indulging in his character, thinking rather innocently that he is making her happy by taking her to a game that she mentioned she would like to see. Only has he found out in the end that she wanted to be there only because her lost love, Johnny mentioned he would like to go. However, Johnny never showed up and she broke into tears due to sheer disappointment. We see the girl crying on the mute guy’s shoulder after the game with an empty stadium in the background. Knowing that they can never be satisfied in this play-act, we feel that the empty stadium only manifests the emptiness of their play and their loneliness. If we take Wong’s words of seeing Fallen Angels as a comic book, we might as well conclude that it is ultimately a comic book about children. The characters in Fallen Angeles, with their own idiosyncratic childish obsessions and behaviors, are all lovable and forgivable as they are just a group of lonely kids wandering around in the city of Hong Kong and looking for some answers after all. 70 Chapter Five Endnotes 34 See Brunette, p. 61. 35 See Teo, p 84. 36 See Brunett, p. 61. Christopher Doyle has been the director of photography in most of Wong’s works, including Fallen Angels and he discussion of the effects of a super wide‐angel camera adds another interesting dimension to Wong’s visual expressivity. 37 See Teo’s interpretation of the title, Wong Kar‐wai, p. 86. 38 See Teo, p. 87. 39 See Brunette, p. 66. 40 See Brunette, p. 70. 41 Ibid, p. 65. 71 Six Conclusion As I have tried to demonstrate throughout this thesis, Wong’s cinema world is one that integrates literature and visual style. As the auteur of his films, Wong sets out to explore a set of themes, among which that of the past, love or the absence of love and global space of the city of Hong Kong can be seen as Wong’s personal obsessions. I would like to emphasize here that Wong Kar-wai’s influence extends well beyond the scope of Hong Kong cinema, into world cinema. Many critics have debated if Wong’s is a real postmodernist filmmaker. I think the label of “postmodern” itself is rapidly losing its explanatory power. Hence I would like to avoid labeling him and just emphasize that Wong’s diligent search for new ways to tell cinematic stories makes him one of the greatest filmmakers who have truly opened a new world of cinema. Wong Kar-wai has consistently experimented with different storytelling and challenged the notion of genre film. The structure of diptych as we see in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels does not really fall into any category of narratives found in any genre films. Another effect of the diptych structure is related to the viewer’s changed viewing habits. Given that different stories overlap and the normal temporal experience is no longer in practice in the film, the viewer has no other choice but to focus on each character to make sense out of the stories. Therefore, the viewer is introduced to each character’s emotional world mediated through the character’s perspective. The presence of multiple perspectives is further emphasized by Wong’s distinctive visual forms. Curtis 72 K.Tsui is right when he says that “in Wong’s case particularly, form is the essence of his films-it is, in many ways, the narrative of his work …. It’s not a case of style over substance; rather, it’s style as substance” 42 It does not mean Wong’s films are merely films of unusual camera movement and super wide-angle lenses. More importantly, Wong conveys, via his visual style, that it is already impossible to distinguish personal experience from perspective. Everything is mediated through perception and what we see on the screen is the only possibility into the character’s internal world, which does not necessarily mean that this one is the only version of the story. To recall the ending scene of In the Mood for Love: we are no longer in Hong Kong. We see Chow Mo-wan whispering his secret into a hole in one of the ancient building at Angkor Wat Temples. As the camera zooms out, a monk’s head, backlit and out of focus, occupies the bulk of the frame, with Chow a mere speck in the lower right corner. Liberated from the intense close-ups of claustrophobic space and the characters’ gestures, we suddenly realize that there is always a big world out there, in the background of any story. Wong Kar-wai’s film world is just an extended ending scene like this: it is there to remind the viewer of the bigger world beyond the one on the screen in the dark. It is the ending scene of what we think we know, as well as the opening scene to what we might know or what we might never know. 73 Chapter Six Endnotes 42 See Tsui, p. 94. 74 Bibliography Abbas, Ackbar. “The Erotics of Disappointment.” Wong Kar-wai. Ed. Ed Jean Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai. 39-81. Paris: Editions Dis V oir, 1997. Berry, Chris and Farquhar Mary, China on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press: New York, 2006. Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961, in two volumes. Carbon, J. “Indompte.” Positif 410 (April 1995): 36-38. Camhi, Leslie. “Setting His Tale of Love Found in a City Long Lost.” New York Times, January 28, 2001. Arts and Leisure, 11, 26. Ciment, Michel, and H.Niogret. “Entretien avec Wong Kar-Wai.” Positif 42 (December 1997): 8-14. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. trans. Paul Patton, London and New York: Continuum 1994. Gross, Larry. “Nonchalant Grace.” Sight and Sound 6.9 (September 1996):6-10. Ngai, Jimmy. “A Dialogue with Wong Kai-Wai. Cutting Between Time and Two cities.” Wong Kar-wai. Ed Jean Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai. Paris: Editions Dis V oir, 1997. Rayns, Tony. (Ah Fei Zhengzhuan (Days of Being Wild). ” Sight and Sound 4. 12 (December 1994 ): 41-42. Reynaud, Berenice. “Entretien avec Wong Kar-wai.’ Cahiers du cinema 490 (April 1995): 37-39. Teo Stephen. Wong Kar-wai. The UK: British Film Institute, 2005. Tsui, Curtis K. “Subjective Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-wai.” Asian Cinema 7.2 (1995): 93-124. 75 Filmography Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zhengzhuan, 1990) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Producer: Rover Tang Executive Producer: Alan Tang Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle Production Designer: William Chang Editors: Patrick Tam, Hai Kit-wai Sound Recordist: Chan Wai-hung Cast: Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Jacky Cheung, Rebecca Pan, Tony Leung Chiu-wai Production Company: In-Gear Running Time: 92 minutes Color Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin, 1994) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Producer: Chan Ye-cheng Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle Production Designer: William Chang Editor: William Chang Music: Frankie Chan Cast: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Faye Wong, Valerie Chow Production Company: Jet Tone Running Time: 90 minutes (HongKong VERSION), 102 minutes (international version) Color Ashes of Time (Dongxie Xidu, 1994) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Producer: Tsai Mui-ho Executive producer: Chan Pui-wah Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle Production Designer: William Chang Editors: Patrick Tam, William Chang, Hai Kit-wai, Kwong Chi-leung Music: Frankie Chan, Foel A. Garcia Martial Arts Director: Sammo Hung Cast: Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jacky Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Charlie Young, Bai Li, Ni Xing, Siu Tak-fu Production Company: Jet Tone, Scholar Films, in association with Beijing Film Studio, Tsui Siu-ming Productions and Pony Canyon Running Time: 95 minutes 76 Color Fallen Angels (Duoluo Tianshi, 1995) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Producer: Jeff Lau Executive Producer: Jacky Pang Yee-wah Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle Production Designer: William Chang Editors: William Chang, Wong Ming-lam Music: Frankie Chan, Roel A. Garcia Cast: Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Young, Karen Mok, Chan Fai-hung, Chan Man-lei Production Company: Jet Tone Running Time: 101 minutes Color In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Executive Producer: Chan Ye-cheung Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-bin Production Designer: William Chang Editor: William Chang Original Music: Michael Galasso Music: Shigeru Umebayashi Cast: Tony Leung-Chiu wai, Maggie Cheung, Rebecca Pan, Lei Zhen, Siu Ping-lam, Chan Man-lei, ChinTsi-angT Production Company: Block 2 Pictures, Paradis Films, Jet Tone Running Time: 95 minutes Color Other As Tears Go By (Wangjiao Kamen, 1988) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Producer: Rover Tang Executive producer: Alan Tang Director of Photography: Andrew Lau Production Designer: William Chang Editors: Peter Chiang, Patrick Tam (uncredited), William Chang(uncredited). Music: Danny Chung Cast: Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, Alex Man, Wong Ang, Wong Bun, 77 Chan Chi-fai, William Chang, Kong To-hoi Production Company: In-Gear Running Time: 100 minutes Color Happy Together (Chunguang Zhaxie, 1997) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Executive producer: Chan Ye-cheng Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle Production Designer: William Chang Editors: William Chang, Wong Ming-lam Music: Danny Chung Cast: Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Chang Chen Production Company: Block 2 Pictures, Prenom H. Co., Seowoo Film Co., Jet Tone Running Time: 97 minutes Color 2046 (2004) Director/Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai Producer: Wong Kar-wai, Yimou Zhang Director of Photography: Christopher Doyle Production Designer/Editor: William Chang Music: Peer Raben, Shigeru Umebayashi Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Li Gong, Takuya Kimura, Faye Wong, Ziyi Zhang, Carina Lau, Chen Chang Production Company: Block 2 Pictures, Paradis Films, Orly Fils, Jet Tone, Running Time: 120 minutes Color 78 Index Abbas, Ackbar 35, 36, 42. Berry Chris 19. Christopher Doyle, 51. Ciment, Michel and Hubert, Niogret 2,12, 32, 57 Deleuze, Gilles 18. Ngai, Jimmy 8, 9, 34. Brunette, Peter 9, 10, 21, 32, 50-51, 56-57, 59. Tam, Patrick 25. Stephen Teo 12, 23-24, 37, 51-53. wuxia genre/film 22-24 Water Benjamin 36 xia 22 jianghu 23. Tan Sitong 22 Tsui Hark 23 Swordsman series 23 Sima Qian 22 Jin Yong (Louis Cha) 24 The Eagle Shooting Heros (Shediao Yingxiongzhuan) 24 79

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shi, Rong (author)

Core Title Wong Kar-wai

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 05/13/2009

Defense Date 04/01/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chinese cinema,globalism,Hong Kong,identity,loss,OAI-PMH Harvest,past

Place Name China (countries), economic regions: Hong Kong (geographic subject)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Cheung, Dominic (committee member), James, David E. (committee member)

Creator Email rong.sharon@gmail.com,rongshi@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2241

Unique identifier UC1214791

Identifier etd-Shi-2775 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-237756 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2241 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Shi-2775.pdf

Dmrecord 237756

Document Type Thesis

Rights Shi, Rong

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu