Wong Kar-Wai

Auteur of Time

Stephen Teo

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839021268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

This study of Hong Kong cult director Wong Kar-wai provides an overview of his career and in-depth analysis of his seven feature films to date. Teo probes Wong's cinematic and literary influences - from Martin Scorseseto Haruki Murakami - yet shows how Wong transcends them all.

One

Introduction

Star of the Hong Kong–Global Nexus

Wong Kar-wai is one of a handful of Hong Kong Chinese directors whose name is readily recognised in the West. Without having to adopt a Western first name (like ‘John’ Woo, or ‘Bruce’ Lee), Wong Kar-wai has come to signify a cool, post-modern sensibility in world cinema. However, as a Chinese name that is moreover rendered in Cantonese phonetics (in Mandarin, Wong’s name is pronounced ‘Wang Jiawei’), ‘Wong Kar-wai’ sounds exotic, foreshadowing a highly local sensibility rather than a global phenomenon. It may be a truism to state that the cinema of Wong Kar-wai is a conglomeration of Eastern and Western features, but the name of Wong Kar-wai, taken in itself, is like a riddle wrapped in an enigma. How do we understand Wong Kar-wai as a Hong Kong film-maker? How do we reconcile Wong’s global standing with his local roots? Can Wong’s art be said to be both local and global at the same time? It will be the purpose of this book to resolve the riddle and the enigma of Wong Kar-wai.

We might begin with the proposition that Wong is a transcendent filmmaker on two counts: first, though his films have brought wider attention to the Hong Kong cinema, he is able to rise above his Hong Kong identity and excel beyond the pulp-fiction limitations of genre that seem to tie down much of Hong Kong cinema; second, as a post-modern artist in Western eyes, his films exceed facile stereotypes of the delicate and exotic East. Wong Kar-wai’s name may sound exotic, but the fact that Wong has won critical recognition throughout the world infers a state of mutual acceptance and absorption of East and West. However, this may in fact mirror the state of Hong Kong’s own condition as a city straddling East and West, for Wong’s films are firmly grounded in Hong Kong. In the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong and the cinema are conjoined as one. It is a dynamic interactive force; but while Wong’s films assume the kind of restless energy of the city itself, they also display obvious signs of what we may call systemic flaws, such as lack of discipline, a chronic inability to work according to predetermined scripts and derivative influences. Strengths and weaknesses are interrelated and they seem more formally ingrained in Wong’s works, although they are certainly not unique to the director. They remain a part of Wong’s creative make-up because they stem from the environment of the film industry in which he works.

Wong therefore embodies a contradiction or paradox. He is a Hong Kong film-maker who cannot disentangle himself from the system but who is widely recognised around the world for his unconventional style of cinema. Wong’s films come out of the capitalist-industrial complex supporting the mainstream Hong Kong cinema, but his films resist the mainstream. Hong Kong itself has proved resistant to his films, as judged on the whole by their consistently poor domestic box-office earnings. His most approving audience is found generally outside Hong Kong. Wong’s market is therefore the world, which appreciates him as an arthouse director; and Wong has survived as a film-maker because of this. This paradox illustrates the director’s complexity as a film-maker and the challenge that it poses in analysing his career.

This book will trace the genesis of Wong’s cinema by acknowledging his local roots and by examining his influences, which are not merely cinematic but also literary. Wong’s lineage lies not only in the Hong Kong cinema but also in foreign and local literature. It is this mixture of cinematic and literary influences that makes him a distinctive Hong Kong post-modern stylist. To begin first with the cinematic influences, David Bordwell and Ackbar Abbas, two of Wong’s more perceptive critics, have shown how he is indebted to the Hong Kong genre cinema. Bordwell states that Wong ‘came out of mass entertainment’ and that his films are ‘firmly rooted in genres’.¹ Abbas makes the same point more or less when analysing the director’s first four films: ‘Each starts with the conventions of a popular genre – and deliberately loses its way in the genre’.² Both critics see Wong as a child of the Hong Kong genre cinema and correctly analyse how the director feeds off this industry and is nurtured by it.

Indeed, it is worth our while to run through just what kinds of genres Wong’s films belong to. As Tears Goes By is a gangster movie in the mould of Scorsese and John Woo; it is also a romance melodrama. Days of Being Wild is an ‘Ah Fei’ movie-cum-romance (‘Ah Fei’ being a distinctive Cantonese genre, and slang for young ruffian or discontented punk). Chungking Express is a light romance with touches of noir intrigue (at least in the first part of the movie featuring Brigitte Lin, whose iconic presence evokes more the romantic melodramas of the 1970s with which she made her name). Ashes of Time is a wuxia (martial chivalry) movie with characters culled from a popular martial arts novel. Fallen Angels starts off as a movie about a professional killer and changes direction into various strands of melodrama (including a father-and-son relationship movie). Happy Together is a gay road movie romance trailing a pre-1997 anomie theme. In the Mood for Love is a wenyi film in the classic style, indicating a melodrama with Chinese characteristics, fundamentally a love story about repressed desire.

From these descriptions, while it is true that all these films are essentially genre films that fall within the traditions of Hong Kong cinema, it is equally true that they are transformed by Wong’s iconoclastic approach, such that it is possible to insist that they are not genre films, although they may be implicit tributes to the forms and conventions of genre film-making in the Hong Kong cinema. Bordwell and Abbas praise Wong’s singular style as a film-maker, which they see as rooted in genre or mutations of genres, but they neglect Wong’s literary influences and their role in determining the style and structures of his films. The premise that Wong’s films are rooted in literature is one that remains basically undeveloped in critical analysis of the director, a deficiency that I will attempt to rectify here.³ In considering Wong as a director with a literary bent, I hasten to add that his films are not literary adaptations in the Merchant–Ivory mould or that his is the kind of cinema that equates film with literature. Rather, Wong’smodel is someone like Alain Resnais, a film-maker who appropriates literary subjects from authors such as Jean Cayrol, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, David Mercer and Alan Ayckbourn, and transforms their writings and themes into images of pure cinema through composition, lighting and camera movements. Wong’s literariness is a sensibility of telling stories in cinematic style.

Wong Kar-wai in auteur mood

Wong’s literariness is also marked by highly literate and poetic dialogue, which is influenced by his avid reading of Latin American authors such as Manuel Puig and Julio Cortázar, the Japanese author Haruki Murakami and local Hong Kong authors like Jin Yong and Liu Yichang. How these authors shape Wong’s films will be fully discussed in the following chapters as I analyse each of his films closely. Though Wong’s interest in literature is wide – he has also cited authors like Raymond Chandler, Gabriel García Márquez and Osamu Dazai – the one author who seems to have influenced him most deeply is Manuel Puig. It was Patrick Tam, an iconoclastic director in his own right with whom Wong worked and who acted as his mentor in the early stage of his career, who had introduced Wong to Puig’s Heartbreak Tango, since when, according to Tam, Wong has tried to ‘master the structure’ of the novel by applying it to his movies.⁴

Wong may well be the Manuel Puig of Hong Kong cinema. Because he is usually regarded as a visual stylist and Hong Kong cinema itself is characterised by physical action that has little time for psychological portrayal, it is often forgotten how literary Wong can be. The comparison with Puig alludes to the seminal nature of the author’s influence and the way that Wong has digested his style of storytelling. However, given that Puig shows a clear indebtedness to cinema in his novels (inscribed as they are by excessive references to film narratives and stars), the literary nature of the author’s influence on Wong is deceptive but not out of place. Wong has tried to master not only Puig’s structures (induced by fragmented and impressionistic memories of films) but the whole concept of monologues as narrative devices reinforcing and pushing the episodic nature of his cinema into psychological and poetic realms. While the interior nature of Wong’s work, illustrated by his monologues, conveys an intimate quality, his visual skills often involve a large and complex palette incorporated in a canvas and design of epic proportions. The encompassing of both an intimate literary quality and a structurally complex epic design in his work illustrates a ‘discontinuity in our very being’, to use the words of Michel Foucault. I invoke Foucault’s perspective of ‘effective history’ as the critical approach of this book. ‘Effective history’ is opposed to ‘traditional history’, which aims at ‘dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity – as a teleological movement or a natural process’.⁵

In examining Wong’s career as ‘effective history’, the implication is that he has had a far from smooth relationship with the Hong Kong film industry. The relationship is ruptured and discontinuous, to the extent that he is both a quintessential Hong Kong director and a maverick who bucks the system. It also relates to the way that Wong looks at the history of Hong Kong and its cinema, and how this history plays out through time and memory, which is his most effective theme. Like the narrator in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Wong strives to achieve a transmutation of memory into being, setting his memory in motion in the medium of the cinema.

Wong is nostalgically associated with a past filtered through the prism of the Hong Kong cinema. All of his films show in varying degrees a cinephiliac strain that harks back to a certain memory of a cinema that, although in the past, still retains its appeal in the mind of the film-maker. In films like Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love, he also re-creates the Hong Kong of his childhood. This suggests that Wong cannot be separated from his Hong Kong heritage, which places him firmly in the generation of Hong Kong film-makers who share a concern for Hong Kong as a geographical and historical entity – a view that Abbas has propounded through a theory of a ‘space of the déjà disparu’.⁶ The theory indicates a heritage always in danger of disappearing due to Hong Kong’s special position as a post-modern city perched between East and West, where its space becomes ‘difficult to represent in terms of traditional realism’, because history goes through ‘strange loops’.⁷ Abbas includes Wong among a generation of Hong Kong film-makers whose films have tried to retrieve the culture or heritage of the déjà disparu. Wong responds to an urge to retrieve this culture in an unpredictable fashion but with an acute sensitivity that belies his pop-art style.

Wong’s style in all its fragmented post-modern fervour, lends itself to a facile reading of his films. His detractors accuse him of being shallow, but this study will have no truck with that notion. Far from being shallow, Wong’s films form a considerable body of work that flows from the cultural roots embedded deep within the Hong Kong cinema, as well as from his own psyche. Insofar as this is a critical study and not merely a retrospective look at Wong’s films, it is a history that falls within the perspective of an alternative cinema culture that signals a certain opposition to European high art and Hollywood low art. Our current understanding of this alternative film culture is still plainly inadequate.

The perception of Wong’s shallowness may explain why there has been no book-length study of his films up to now. Wong himself tends to reinforce the impression of the shallow film-maker by playing up his image as a media celebrity. Entertainment and gossip columns generally emphasise the glitzy appeal of the director (who wears eye-catching dark glasses in public). The articles gloss up his employment of big stars and the length of time that he expends on shooting his films (a source of consternation for his stars, often leading to reports of disputes between actors and director). However, Wong is something of a celebrity in the world of academia as well. His films are included in university film courses everywhere. Students find him a popular and appealing subject for essays and theses. Though serious analytical pieces on Wong have been published in magazines, academic journals and anthologies, no writer has yet attempted a sustained textual analysis of his entire oeuvre. Again, this may reflect how Wong is viewed in bits and pieces, much like his films; or it may be a delayed reaction to another charge that tends to follow him, which is that he is an overrated talent.

Given that this is effectively the first full-length book study of Wong Kar-wai, the premise here is that we are only beginning to rate him in a serious and meticulous fashion. Wong merits a critical study of this kind not only because he is a major talent in current world cinema but also because it is a rare talent in the context of the Hong Kong film industry. He is the only contemporary director who seems able to buck the system, beating the industry at its own game without, so far, suffering the consequences (of being unemployed, for example, because of his reputation for waste and tardiness). Most Hong Kong directors work fast and cheaply, whereas Wong spends tens of millions of dollars on each of his most recent projects and takes his time. He is probably the only director who can spend two years on a project, as he did on In the Mood for Love, and impose his own deadline. When I wrote this, Wong was still working on 2046, a project begun some four years ago and then put aside in order to shoot In the Mood for Love. This is already a record of sorts. The only precedent for this in Hong Kong occurred during the shooting of King Hu’s martial arts masterpiece A Touch of Zen (1968–72). Hu was criticised for his fastidious methods, and, up to a point, was ostracised by the major studios, after which his career never fully recovered.

Wong has his share of ungenerous critics inside the industry, but he has kept on working virtually as an independent since Days of Being Wild, which was a huge financial write-off for its production company In-Gear. Wong might not have recovered from the fiasco if not for the fact that he was and is a good player of politics in the industry, and that he had a powerful friend and backer behind him at the time, namely Jeff Lau, a director of commercial hits and his partner in In-Gear, who virtually guaranteed his career from then on. Lau had apparently guaranteed Days of Being Wild by persuading Alan Tang, the major partner who bankrolled the project, that he would cover its losses by making another film for the company that would be a sure-fire hit. Wong’s friendship with Jeff Lau has endured to this day, and their association symbolises the kind of symbiosis that the Hong Kong film industry has come to rely upon, where one director is known for purely commercial films, the other for iconoclastic ‘art’ films. Such a symbiosis shows how Wong was able to rely on the commercial industry as a means to realise his dreams, while giving something back to the industry by supervising overtly commercial projects such as the 2002 Chinese New Year holiday movie Chinese Odyssey 2002, directed by Lau, to offset his image as an uncommercial director.

The shape of the industry has changed from King Hu’s time, when an artist of Hu’s calibre could not be accommodated by the system, to one where an artist of Wong’s ability can call the shots and play the game adroitly within the industry. The reality is that since Wong came into critical prominence in the early 1990s, the film industry has been plagued by a shrinking regional market that resulted from the financial meltdown in the eco...