World of Wong Kar Wai.
As Tears Go By (1988)/ Days of Being Wild. (1990) Chungking Express (1994) Fallen Angels (1995) Happy Together (1997.) In The Mood For Love. (2000.) 2046 (2004.) Available on a seven-disc Blu-ray boxset from The Criterion Collection on May 31st.
My WKW ignorance: I always thought of him as Wonky Wah, but the preferred pronunciation is something closer to One Car Way. I was also under the misguided impression that I'd seen more than half of these films before. To see them on Blu-ray in these pristine, director-approved restorations is to realise how much telly, video and DVDs just don't cut it. Profound blessing on Criterion for finally making them available on Blu-ray in the UK. These seven films offer a truly remarkable record of a unique collaboration (with cameraman Christopher Doyle) over a single inspired decade (the 90s) which produced quite simply some of the most beautiful films ever made. He's not deep. This is a man who still believes wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking are cool. But his shiny surfaces and stylishly posed slices of pop culture resonate more deeply than everybody else's profundity. Beware, these films will ruin everything else for you. After watching them it's Wong Kar Wai or the highway.
What you see is what you get, but what you get is so much more than you see.
What you get here is seven of his first eight films. Missing is his third film, the martial arts slog Ashes of Time, that he shot in China. WKW found it a disappointing and dispiriting experience, though it's a shame it's not here. Without it, what is left represents his complete work as a Hong Kong filmmaker. The last of these, 2046, specifically references the One Nation, Two Systems status China had promised for the first 49 years after the handover and which they are in the process of reneging on. These films, already dripping in poignancy, have taken on an extra layer by being mementoes of a place that is no longer there.
Some of these films have rather fine English names (As Tear Go By, Days of Being Wild, 2046.) Some of them have anodyne titles that do them no justice at all (In the Mood For Love, Fallen Angels.) The WKW method is a mix of Mike Leigh and Kubrick. There's no real script and director and cast more or less make it on the set – that's the Mike Leigh part – and keep going at it for take after take and, in the later films, month after month, even year after year – that's the Kubrick part. How the finances of all of this works isn't gone into on any of the accompanying features on the discs, but the fact that he mostly works on small intimate sets with a small crew keeps costs relatively low. These are films which you can't swing a cat in, tight little labyrinths of narrow hotel corridors and cramped little rooms. Daylight and the sky are rarely sighted.
The stories he produces are thin wisps of nothing. He likes cinematic archetypes or inversions of them– moody hitmen, sad prostitutes, bitter playboys, lovelorn policemen. Instead of plots, they have a few trite little conceits – collecting pineapple tins all with the same expiration date to mark out the end of a relationship, a woman tracing the steps of the business partner hitman she organises jobs for but never meets. Often he'll have two or three narratives threads in a single film. It's all stuff that you'd struggle to make a 10-page short story from, but he'll set the mood and let them play out. Strike a pose, there's something to it.
This is also a record of a series of profound collaborations: both in front and behind the camera. Faithful leading man Tony Leung Chi-Wai (just this once I'll type out the full name) has been Mastrianni to his Fellini. He has his favourite ladies too: Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, Carina Lau Kar Ling. Off-screen, he tends to work with much the same team, most prominently costume designer, production designer and editor William Chang Suk Ping who worked in at least one of these capacities and often all three on all his films. And yet the name that is most closely associated with him is cameraman Christopher Doyle.
The Look Of Love
Film is a collaborative art form and there are few more perfect collaborations than that between WKW and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the wildman Australian. They are a perfect double act. In the extras, WKW appears as the wise man in his shades deflecting the fawning inquisitions of lesser mortals with gnomic utterances. Whenever Doyle is filmed he is always in motion, or slumped drunkenly over a table, always on the verge of embarrassing himself. The focus on Doyle is distorting – he only pairs up with WKW on his second film and of the six features he is only solely credited as the cinematographer on three of them. Chungking Express, In The Mood for Love and 2046 are only partially his work and it is not the case that he is exclusively the capturer of the best images. For example, the first story in Chungking and the final Angkor Wat scenes from In The Mood For Love are not him and they are among the most visually appealing parts of the collection.
Yet, it feels like he sets the visual language. Wong films without him just aren't the same. And Doyle's work for other people doesn't come close to his achievements here. The first scene of Days Of Being Wild with the two Cheungs (Maggie and Leslie) in an empty kiosk, her rebuffing his advances under the cinema's most charismatic clock face, immediately informs us that we have entered a visual realm unlike anything seen in cinema.
Sumptuous and sensuous, lets get those two words out of the way. There's no if about it, when Doyle is pointing a camera at them these walls can and will talk, almost to the point where they drown out the actors. The wallpaper peels, the stonework crumbles and they radiate all that they have seen, all the memories they have stored up. Over these seven films, you will see some of the greatest stars of the cinema in some of its greatest performances, and they need to be because anything less and the scenery will chew them up.
These films are so beautiful the moment you've finished you want to watch them again: even the ones you don't much care for. There are many fantastic looking movies out there but there is a quality to the visuals here that transcends being nice to look at. I think it's a quality he shares with Tarkovsky. It's a lived-in beauty.
The only film I have watched recently that could challenge it would be Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. Vittorio Storrarro's images are truly remarkable but they take over the film, they don't serve the story and the mood they get across isn't always in sync with the mood of the characters. In WKW the look exactly matches the mood, putting the viewer in a kind of suspended dream state. What you see, is what you get.
Individual reviews to follow
As Tears Go By (1988.)
Days of Being Wild. (1990)
Chungking Express (1994)
Fallen Angels (1995)
Happy Together (1997.)
In The Mood For Love. (2000.)
2046 (2004.)
As Tears Go By (1988)/ Days of Being Wild. (1990) Chungking Express (1994) Fallen Angels (1995) Happy Together (1997.) In The Mood For Love. (2000.) 2046 (2004.) Available on a seven-disc Blu-ray boxset from The Criterion Collection on May 31st.
My WKW ignorance: I always thought of him as Wonky Wah, but the preferred pronunciation is something closer to One Car Way. I was also under the misguided impression that I'd seen more than half of these films before. To see them on Blu-ray in these pristine, director-approved restorations is to realise how much telly, video and DVDs just don't cut it. Profound blessing on Criterion for finally making them available on Blu-ray in the UK. These seven films offer a truly remarkable record of a unique collaboration (with cameraman Christopher Doyle) over a single inspired decade (the 90s) which produced quite simply some of the most beautiful films ever made. He's not deep. This is a man who still believes wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking are cool. But his shiny surfaces and stylishly posed slices of pop culture resonate more deeply than everybody else's profundity. Beware, these films will ruin everything else for you. After watching them it's Wong Kar Wai or the highway.
What you see is what you get, but what you get is so much more than you see.
What you get here is seven of his first eight films. Missing is his third film, the martial arts slog Ashes of Time, that he shot in China. WKW found it a disappointing and dispiriting experience, though it's a shame it's not here. Without it, what is left represents his complete work as a Hong Kong filmmaker. The last of these, 2046, specifically references the One Nation, Two Systems status China had promised for the first 49 years after the handover and which they are in the process of reneging on. These films, already dripping in poignancy, have taken on an extra layer by being mementoes of a place that is no longer there.
Some of these films have rather fine English names (As Tear Go By, Days of Being Wild, 2046.) Some of them have anodyne titles that do them no justice at all (In the Mood For Love, Fallen Angels.) The WKW method is a mix of Mike Leigh and Kubrick. There's no real script and director and cast more or less make it on the set – that's the Mike Leigh part – and keep going at it for take after take and, in the later films, month after month, even year after year – that's the Kubrick part. How the finances of all of this works isn't gone into on any of the accompanying features on the discs, but the fact that he mostly works on small intimate sets with a small crew keeps costs relatively low. These are films which you can't swing a cat in, tight little labyrinths of narrow hotel corridors and cramped little rooms. Daylight and the sky are rarely sighted.
The stories he produces are thin wisps of nothing. He likes cinematic archetypes or inversions of them– moody hitmen, sad prostitutes, bitter playboys, lovelorn policemen. Instead of plots, they have a few trite little conceits – collecting pineapple tins all with the same expiration date to mark out the end of a relationship, a woman tracing the steps of the business partner hitman she organises jobs for but never meets. Often he'll have two or three narratives threads in a single film. It's all stuff that you'd struggle to make a 10-page short story from, but he'll set the mood and let them play out. Strike a pose, there's something to it.
This is also a record of a series of profound collaborations: both in front and behind the camera. Faithful leading man Tony Leung Chi-Wai (just this once I'll type out the full name) has been Mastrianni to his Fellini. He has his favourite ladies too: Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, Carina Lau Kar Ling. Off-screen, he tends to work with much the same team, most prominently costume designer, production designer and editor William Chang Suk Ping who worked in at least one of these capacities and often all three on all his films. And yet the name that is most closely associated with him is cameraman Christopher Doyle.
The Look Of Love
Film is a collaborative art form and there are few more perfect collaborations than that between WKW and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the wildman Australian. They are a perfect double act. In the extras, WKW appears as the wise man in his shades deflecting the fawning inquisitions of lesser mortals with gnomic utterances. Whenever Doyle is filmed he is always in motion, or slumped drunkenly over a table, always on the verge of embarrassing himself. The focus on Doyle is distorting – he only pairs up with WKW on his second film and of the six features he is only solely credited as the cinematographer on three of them. Chungking Express, In The Mood for Love and 2046 are only partially his work and it is not the case that he is exclusively the capturer of the best images. For example, the first story in Chungking and the final Angkor Wat scenes from In The Mood For Love are not him and they are among the most visually appealing parts of the collection.
Yet, it feels like he sets the visual language. Wong films without him just aren't the same. And Doyle's work for other people doesn't come close to his achievements here. The first scene of Days Of Being Wild with the two Cheungs (Maggie and Leslie) in an empty kiosk, her rebuffing his advances under the cinema's most charismatic clock face, immediately informs us that we have entered a visual realm unlike anything seen in cinema.
Sumptuous and sensuous, lets get those two words out of the way. There's no if about it, when Doyle is pointing a camera at them these walls can and will talk, almost to the point where they drown out the actors. The wallpaper peels, the stonework crumbles and they radiate all that they have seen, all the memories they have stored up. Over these seven films, you will see some of the greatest stars of the cinema in some of its greatest performances, and they need to be because anything less and the scenery will chew them up.
These films are so beautiful the moment you've finished you want to watch them again: even the ones you don't much care for. There are many fantastic looking movies out there but there is a quality to the visuals here that transcends being nice to look at. I think it's a quality he shares with Tarkovsky. It's a lived-in beauty.
The only film I have watched recently that could challenge it would be Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. Vittorio Storrarro's images are truly remarkable but they take over the film, they don't serve the story and the mood they get across isn't always in sync with the mood of the characters. In WKW the look exactly matches the mood, putting the viewer in a kind of suspended dream state. What you see, is what you get.
Individual reviews to follow
As Tears Go By (1988.)
Days of Being Wild. (1990)
Chungking Express (1994)
Fallen Angels (1995)
Happy Together (1997.)
In The Mood For Love. (2000.)
2046 (2004.)
