Wongs films wereand still aremore art house than mainstream, and he eventually took to not only writing and directing his films but also producing them since they were seen as financially risky. In addition, Wong started to favor making films without a script. This is ironic since he began his career writing scripts for other directors. But with each successive film, Wong relied less and less on a conventional script. Thats because Wong likes to think of himself as a jazz musician, and his hip, free-flowing films like jam sessions. Wongs sessions result in films that approximate jazz improvisation in their rhythms and visual riffs. He begins each project with no more than an idea and the confidence that he can ad-lib the rest.
When I spoke with Wong in 2000 during a press day for In the Mood for Love, he admitted we are not making film in a very normal way. Normally you have a script and you can send a script to people and people will decide if they will finance the film or not based on the script. But in our case we have no script, we have only a story outline. So the only people we can work with are people who have been working with us before, and they know we are going to do something. Its kind of a trust.
One actor with whom Wong shares this trust is Tony Leung Chui Wai who began collaborating with Wong on Days of Being Wild in 1991. When asked about working with Wong, Leung said its very challenging especially since you do not have a full script. We develop everything in the characters and the stories as we go. Its fun to do that because not many directors make movies that way, so hes unique. And the most interesting thing is that even though you know your character very well, after you finish all the shooting, you never have an idea what the story is about because Wong will create that in the editing room. He shoots a lot and the footage is enough for three or four movies so every time you finish a movie, you are very curious about it. When you go to the premiere you are like the audience, you want to know what have I done?
Wongs latest cinematic jam is 2046, a continuation of sorts to Wongs In the Mood for Love, which in turn was a kind of riff on his second feature Days of Being Wild. All three films have a handsome, philandering character played by Leung. In the 1991 film Days of Being Wild, Leung has a single brief scene at the very end. The character is referred to as Smirk and we see him preen narcissistically in front of a mirror. Leung was supposed to reprise this character in a sequel but the financial failure of Days of Being Wild, despite critical accolades, prevented Wong from making it. But Wong always wanted to make a sequel. In 2000, Wong got a chance of sorts with In the Mood for Love, which resurrected Leungs character as the womanizing Chow Mo-wan.
In the Mood for Love is set in 1960s Hong Kong, and concerns two characters: Maggie Cheungs Su Lizhen and Leungs Chow Mo-wan. Each one is married, and their respective spouses are having an affair. This prompts Mo-wan to strike up an affair with Lizhen out of revenge. He makes her fall in love with him and then abandons her. But years later he realizes that he had fallen in love with her as well.
2046 continues Mo-wans story but deceptively so. It opens in the future, in what turns out to be a sci-fi fantasy Mo-wan is writing. In this tale, people can take a train to 2046, which seems to be both a place and a year, to recapture memories from the past. A character in this sci-fi future recalls that in the past to forget, people would carve a hole in a tree and whisper secrets into it. This calls to mind the end of In the Mood for Love, when Mo-wan went to the Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat and whispered his secret guilt into a hole in the wall. The film playfully mixes past, present, and future, with 2046 representing both the past (the number of the hotel room where Mo-wan and Lizhen met for their extra marital affair) and the future (the last year of Chinas promised status quo for Hong Kong and the setting of the sci-fi story).
Mo-wan has been reduced to writing serialized pulp fiction tales and living in a rundown place known as the Oriental Hotel. The main story focuses on Mo-wan in the late 1960s and a series of relationships he has with women. Theres the prostitute Bai Ling (Zhang YiYi) who charges him for sex and then falls in love with him. But Mo-wan is unmoved. On the subject of love he tells her: Retail okay but wholesale is out of the question. Theres also a mysterious woman from his past who is named Su Lizhen (Gong Li) but she is not the same Su Lizhen from In the Mood for Love. Shes a gambler who helps Mo-wan out financially and then beguiles him with her mysterious past. He also has a more platonic relationship with the hotel owners daughter Jing Wen (Faye Wong) who ends up helping him with his writing. As a writer, Mo-wan doesnt challenge himself; hes satisfied writing trashy novellas. One reason Mo-wan writes such superficial stuff is that he is still a narcissistic, lonely person who lacks insight into himself and others. At one point Bai Ling notes sadly that for Mo-wan people are just time-fillers, and hes not capable of fully connecting to anyone.
2046 ends with the same sense of sad regret that closed In the Mood for Love. Mo-wan seems to realize what he has lost and what that means. He says at one point that I want a happy ending. I had it in my grasp. The film ends with the image of the hole that one is meant to whisper secrets into and once again, Wong closes with an open-ended conclusion that leaves space for yet another chapter to be added.
The more Wong films you have seen, the more you will appreciate 2046, and the more connections you will make. There are shots that repeat images from Wongs past films: Leung checking his look in the mirror just as he did in Days of Being Wild, Gong Li seductively leaning against a wall just as Maggie Cheung had done in In the Mood for Love, and Faye Wong gazing at her reflection in a window that seems identical to a shot of her in Chungking Express. This penchant Wong has for repetition alludes to ritual and the cyclical nature of life. One character picks up where another left off, and people are destined to repeat themselves on into the future.
If 2046 is your first sampling of Wong, then I suggest not worrying about plot or narrative but rather just letting the film wash over you. Just bask in its delirious seductiveness. Wongs films can easily be enjoyed as visual and audio sensations in which sound and image break free from rigid narrative bonds to behave like a charged ions. His films are in constant movement, although the characters and narratives never seem to arrive at a particular destination. His films are like very dense, exquisitely clever music videos where image and music blend seamlessly to create a mood. And music is always crucial to a Wong film. Here as in In the Mood for Love, Shigeru Umebayashi Polonaise sets the predominant mood of love and loss. And a reprise of a tune from Nat King Cole marks each passing year at Christmas. Wongs unique cinematic rhythms are definitely an acquired taste, and his elusive and unapologetically enigmatic style can prove frustrating to those wanting or expecting a conventional narrative. But his unwillingness to deliver whats expected is what always makes his films audaciously fresh.
Wongs style also highlight an obsession with time. The way he fragments the narrative links him to such French New Wavers as Alain Resnais. Like Resnais, Wong prefers characters that are afflicted by loneliness and a sense of alienation, and favors narratives that seem plotless in a traditional sense. Both filmmakers are also interested in the nature of memory. But while Resnais takes his cue from writer Marcel Proust and allows his characters to lose themselves in subjective recreations of their past, Wong offers characters who seem to have lost touch with their memories or who seem adrift in time. In Days of Being Wild, a character notes that I always thought one minute flies by but it can linger on. At one point, Mo-wan poises his pen above the page as he is about to write. The shot holds and a title comes up that says One-Hour Later, and the pen has not moved. Then another title says Ten-Hours Later, and still no change. It is as if the moment were frozen in time. Wong takes pleasure in such manipulation of timeelongating it, compressing it and just plain distorting it. In Wongs world, a single moment can change a life forever, and a missed opportunity can haunt someone for the rest of his/her life.
Time as it relates to memory and the past comes through in the voiceovers and interior monologues of the characters. These are also used in to signal the loneliness of Wongs characters. And from a practical standpoint, shooting scenes without dialogue and adding a voiceover later allows Wong more flexibility in editing his improvised stories.
Wong describes himself as hard-working but not disciplined. His films reflect this in their complex yet freeform, loose style. They are meditative, personal, playful and even self-consciously arty. Wong tries to do something different with each film, yet his body of work reveals a fascination for similar themes of time, loss, memory and the possibility and impossibility of love. Some may criticize his films for emphasizing style over substance but for fans, his films exemplify style as substance. His fractured and fragmentary narratives go against audience expectations and bring freshness to tired genres like the gangster film (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels) or period actioners (Ashes of Time). His expressionistic visual stylewhether its the blurred slow motion of Chungking Express, the slow, steady, voyeuristic shots of In the Mood for Love, or the richly textured cinemascope of 2046conveys the emotions of his characters and dictates the atmosphere of his film. 2046, as with so many of his films, asks you to surrender to its breathtaking and ultimately bittersweet romantic spirit. Nobody is as rapturously romantic as Wong and yet his films avoid the maudlin sentimentality of most romantic fare. Wongs films contemplate the idea of love rather than depict the melodrama of romantic relationships. His films are beautiful yet tinged with sadness and an aching sense of desire.
You can check out Beths NPR features on Wong Kar-Wai at the following links:
In the Mood for Love and Happy Together -----
