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Wong Kar-wai (1958)

A style of his own.

In the West he became famous due to his powerful and visually exciting urban stories which involve objectless drifters, lonely dreamers, longing cops, mashers, tavern women and professional killers who live in isolation. Wong's style of lyrical snapshots, quick montage sequences and blurry motion-sequences impart the feelings of the lost and agitated characters who are longing for relationships which they however only experience in faked arrangements. Often they search for salvation in death.

Wong Kar-wai was born in Shanghai in 1958 and moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1963. There he studied art design. He reflected this time of being in a foreign place with his film In the Mood for Love, a gentle love story between an editor and a secretary, which in 2000 received two awards at the Cannes Filmfestival.

In the beginning of his career he had a trilogy planned. The second part has never been made. Its third part however (Final Victory, 1987) had commercial success. It was also this film that established Maggie Cheung (Heroic Trio, Irma Vep) as a drama actress and she would later act in many more of Wong's films.

Producers gave him plenty of rope with the composition of his next film which was Days of Being Wild. It is about a Casanova in search for his mother. Unfortunately, it was a flop at local box offices. Internationally however, this film made Wong a star in the eyes of many critics.

Wong spent over two years in the desert, shooting his martial arts film Ashes of Time in which he made use of many Hong Kong film stars such as Leslie Cheung, Jackie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Bridgette Lin and yet again Maggie Cheung. It is shot in the style which is typical of Wong's direction. I am speaking of the un-chronological order of the film's sequences. Again, this film was a financial disaster. Hence one cannot expect a second part.

In only two months of time, the parallel love stories of Chungking Express were developed. A planned third story was left out of the film which would later become a film of its own entitled Fallen Angels. Both films made Wong a cult director in the West. They celebrate nights of neon light, pop music, takeaways, taverns and fast motor cycles and deal with loneliness, alienation and tiny and huge dreams.

In Argentinia, far away from all the Hong Kong enterprises, Wong shot a homosexual love story, starring two of Hong Kong's biggest film stars Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. For his work on this film, Wong Kar-wai received the award for Best Director in Cannes in 1997.

One of the contributors to the aesthetics of Wong's films is without a doubt Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Due to him, moving images started dominating the narrative logic.

One of the projects Wong Kar-wai could never finish was Summer in Beijing. The reason for that is that he did not receive an admission to shoot in Beijing. Today, only a poster of the film exists.

Shooting was abandoned after this poster was shot on the Tiananmen Square, where in July 1984 many people died.

The man on the poster is Tony Leung Chiu-wai.

Seventh feature film by Wong Kar-wai was 2000's In the Mood for Love. For Tony Leung Chiu-wai this has been the 5th time he has worked with Wong and this time he received an award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. In the Mood for Love takes place in 1962 in Hong Kong. Just like most of Wong's other films, his characters are driven by unfulfilled and insatiable yearning for love. It demands extra power this time due to conditions like narrow apartments, nosy neighbours and permanently running radios. All this adds up to a fascinating film about gazes and small gestures. The strong soundtrack with all its sounds and music frazzles, the coherent tones of red, green and rust-coloured images, the roles of objects (cravat, hair, etc.) and the actors' performances contribute to the success of this calm and contemplative quest for lost time.

During four long years after the completion of In the Mood for Love, fans of Wong Kar-wai have been speculating and eventually followed a confirmed shooting of a sequel entitled 2046. The title might be a referrence to Tony Leung Chiu-wai's charater's room number in which he and Maggie Cheung's character spent a lot of time together. Wong Kar-wai is known for both a fast working director, but also a precise director. It's this precision which takes films like 2046 almost 3 years to make. His work with Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong and Carina Lau has payed off however as he was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival this year (2004) for the Golden Palm.

Written on July 7th 2004

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