Movies

Article 1
Bits and Pieces of Love Stories from a Writers Mind A Wondrous Journey,
2 January 2006 , Author gradyharp from United States
Reference Choi, Sean., Fa yeung nin wa, imdb 6 Mar. 2002. HYPERLINK httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0118694httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0118694 (3 May, 2010).

Kar Wai Wong is more than a film director (though he is one of the finest directors working today) he is a visual, poetic, creative and daring artist capable of more cinematic miracles in one isolated film than most directors achieve in a lifetime. 2046 is a visually stunning, intellectually challenging, emotionally charged view of love and lust in todays kinetically dysfunctional society.

There is no one way to interpret this non-linear film and therein lies much of its rewards. The main character Chow (Tony Leung) is a writer and a libertine who has pushed his vacuous life around with his hormones and though he has had many affairs he has failed to find the illusory love. He has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, makes his living writing columns of newspapers while his novels formulate in his mind. One of his novels is called 2046, the title based on the room number in a hotel where he witnessed a bizarre incident involving a gorgeous woman, and resulted in his moving into the adjoining room 2047 where is meets the hotel managers daughter in love with a Filipino Japanese man her father loathes. He desires this unattainable woman and fuses her with a fictional android in his novel which now uses 2046 as a year or time or place where people go to find memories. He continues to encounter women for whom he desires more than surface relationships (there is a stunning lady gambler cameo who represents everything he lusts and longs for, etc) but he is never able to find his tenuous ideal his memory is his only source of consolation.

The actors in every role include many of the finest actors available Li Gong, Ziyi Zhang, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, Takuya Kimura, Chen Chang, and of course Tony Leung. But it is Kar Wai Wong, the writer, director, choreographer, colorist, visionary that makes this excursion into the interstices of the mindimagination so overwhelmingly satisfying. Whether the viewer elects to view the story as a continuation of the directors previous films, or as reality vs memory, fiction vs imagination, sci-fi excursion, or simply a plethora of vignettes about the challenges of finding love in a world geared toward instant gratification, this is a magnificent achievement. In many ways the sound track could be turned off (though the beautiful musical score by Peer Raben and Shigeru Umebayashi with a lot of help from Maria Callas would be missed), and the inventive cinematography and visual image manipulations by Christopher Doyle, Pung-Leung Kwan and Yiu-Fai Lai such as the constant dividing of the screen into triptychs and diptychs would remain some of the most beautiful photographic images on film.

This is not an easy film to follow and it is most assuredly one that will grow in importance with repeated viewings. The comparison with Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad suggests its potency. But free the mind and enter into the world of 2046 for one of the most satisfying cinematic achievements of the recent past.

Article 2
Reference Lee, Ken., 2046 (2004), imdb 20 Oct,.2004.  HYPERLINK httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0212712 httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0212712 (3 May, 2010).

Filming was shifted from Beijing to Macau after Chinese authorities demanded to see the completed script. The director never uses scripts.

The number of the hotel room where Chow stays is 2046, which is the directors next feature length film.

Maggie Cheung wears a different cheong-san dress in each scene. There were 46 in all, though not all made it to the final cut.

Kar Wai Wong was shooting the finale, and editing the film a little over a week before its debut at Cannes.

Chosen by Les Cahiers du cinma (France) as one of the 10 best pictures of 2000 (05).
Director Kar Wai Wong found the English title for In the Mood for Love while listening to a song from a Brian Ferry CD with a similar title, Im in the Mood for Love. It is a cover of a 1930s song with the same title, Kar Wai Wong used the title and the song in an early Hong Kong trailer of the film, and it was also used in the USA trailer of the film.

During filming, Kar Wai Wong improvised often with the actors, crafting the story and mood of the film as he went along. Originally, In the Mood for Love was a much more obvious romance film, with the actors throwing witty dialog at each other and engaging in several scenes of love-making. Eventually, the actors and director decided to tone the mood down to the more subtle version that was released in theaters.

Article 3 Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time, by Stephen Teo
Reference Teo, Stephen., Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time, Archive.sensesofcinema Mar, 2001.  HYPERLINK httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113mood.html httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113mood.html (3 May, 2010).

Stephen Teo is the author of Hong Kong Cinema The Extra Dimensions (London BFI, 1997). He is currently engaged in his research project for a Ph.D degree at RMIT University (Melbourne).

In Dream Time
It is by no means coincidental that the two most celebrated Chinese-language films of the last two or three months - Ang Lees Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love (2000) - hark back to old genres and times past. Some grand design of time has brought the films about. Both directors and their films recollect childhood memories of pleasures induced from going to the cinema. Both men are roughly of the same generation (Lee was born in 1954 Wong in 1958), and have come of age as directors at about the same time this, above everything else, appears to have informed their choices of genre. In the case of Ang Lee, the directors own memories of watching martial arts pictures spawned boyhood fantasies of a China that probably never existed. (1) Watching the pictures of the wuxia (sword and chivalry) genre throughout his formative childhood days evoked a dreaming time for Ang Lee - his film being in his own words, a kind of dream of China. (2) Both Ang Lee and Wong Kar-wai, each in their own ways and working in radically different genres, have tried to duplicate this kind of dream time in their respective movies.

Wongs In the Mood for Love is a romance melodrama, which tells the story of a married man (played by Tony Leung) and a married woman (played by Maggie Cheung), living in rented rooms of neighbouring apartments, who fall in love with each other while grappling with the infidelities of their respective spouses whom they discover are involved with each other. The two protagonists are thrown together into an uncertain affair which they appear not to consummate, perhaps out of social propriety or ethical concerns. As Maggie Cheungs character says We will never be like them (referring to the off-screen but apparently torrid affair of their respective spouses). The affair between Cheung and Leung assumes an air of mystique touched by intuitions of fate and lost opportunity is it a Platonic relationship based on mutual consolation and sadness arising out of the betrayal of their spouses Is it love Is it desire Did they sleep together Such ambiguity stems from the postmodern lining of the picture (its look as processed by Wongs usual collaborators, the cinematographer Chris Doyle and art director William Chang), which is more in line with Wong Kar-wais reputation as a cool, hip artist of contemporary cinema.

However, there is a conservative core to the narrative that is quite unambiguous, clearly evident in the behaviour of the central protagonists, both of whom act on the principle of moral restraint. In this regard, the film reminds me of the 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small City, directed by Fei Mu, the plotline of which is slightly mirrored in Wongs film. (3) In Spring, a wife meets her former lover and flirts with the possibility of leaving her sick husband. In the end, she falls back on the principle of moral restraint. The director Fei Mu was reputed to have ordered his players to act on the dictum Begin with emotion, end with restraint As a result, the film ends on a note of moral triumphalism colored by a sense of sadness and regret, reinforcing the inner nobility of the characters - a theme which Wong regurgitates with the same sense of brevity and cast of subtlety. The soulful nobility of the characters in both films is a touching reminder of the didactic tradition in Chinese melodrama, where the drama serves to inspire one to moral behaviour - and when the actors are as beautiful as Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, the note of restraint is all the more poignant and all the more ennobling (the attractiveness of the characters preying on our own natural inclinations or baser instincts building up a kind of suspense but finally leading to an anticlimax that is as close to a philosophical statement as Wong Kar-wai has ever got his audience to).

Whether or not one sees In the Mood for Love as a film about sexual desire or alternatively, about moral restraint, there isnt that much more to the plot. It lives up to its English title as a veritable mood piece, and is essentially made up of rather passive and variable substances the characters and their interchange of feelings that are nothing more than fleeting moments of time. Added to all this is Wongs dense-looking mise en scne that combines the acting, art direction, cinematography, the colours, the wardrobe, the music, into an aesthetic if also impressionistic blend of chamber drama and miniature soap opera. Wongs key elements - what older critics might call atmosphere and characterizations - are thus grounded in abstraction rather than plot, and its hard to think of a recent movie that offers just such abstract ingredients that are by themselves sufficient reasons to see the picture. But it is precisely this quality of aesthetic abstraction that makes up an ideal dreamtime of Hong Kong, which is Wongs ode to the territory.

The Melodrama of Mood
The English title itself, of course, strikes the key to the picture, suggestive of foreplay or a kind of mind-massage. What Wong Kar-wai does for an hour and a half is to butter up his audience for two or three levels of mood play a mood for love, to begin with but even more substantially, a mood for nostalgia, and a mood for melodrama. In Wongs rendition of the melodrama, we have a romance picture that works mainly as a two-hander chamber play, illustrated by contemplative snippets of popular music that also help to recreate the ambience of Hong Kong in the 1960s. The elements of nostalgia and melodrama that play on our feelings are Wongs way of paying tribute to a period and to a genre. The Chinese melodrama (known in Chinese as wenyi pian) is traditionally more akin to soap opera - a form that assumes classic expression in the 60s with the rise of Mandarin pictures from both Hong Kong and Taiwan (particularly adaptations from the literary works of the author Qiong Yao, often starring Brigitte Lin).

The terminology wenyi is an abbreviation of wenxue (literature) and yishu (art), thus conferring on the melodrama genre the distinctions of being a literary and civilized form (as distinct from the wuxia genre, which is a martial and chivalric tradition). Wong seizes on the literary or civilized antecedence of the genre to water down the soap opera tendencies that were characteristic of 60s melodramas. (4) Wongs interest in the genre is not so much narrative as associative. For instance, he equates the melodrama with the 60s, a period that for the director, yields manifold allusions to memory, time, and place. I was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong the year I was five (i.e. around 1963). .For me it was a very memorable time. In those days, the housing problems were such that youd have two or three families living under the same roof, and theyd have to share the kitchen and toilets, even their privacy. I wanted to make a film about those days and I wanted to go back to that period ., Wong says. (5)

The melodrama genre itself becomes an apt metaphor for the 60s, with many films of the period dealing with just such housing problems and families living under the same roof as Wong speaks of. The invocation of wenyi pian carries a sense of period and place. The Chinese title, Huayang Nianhua (translated in the subtitles as Full Bloom but more accurately meaning those wonderful varied years), is more suggestive of period nostalgia and the Shanghai association, pointing to an iridescent, kaleidoscopic age of bygone elegance and diversity (and it is actually the title of a Chinese pop song from the 40s which we hear played on the radio, sung by the late singer-actress Zhou Xuan who popularized the song in a 1947 Hong Kong Mandarin movie). In Wongs hands, the genre itself and the period of the 60s is a stage of transfigured time that isnt fixed diachronically. His 60s happens to coalesce around other synchronic recollections of the memorabilia of earlier periods (such as the 40s or the 50s), through the evocations of popular culture as a whole that largely recalls the glories of Shanghai in music (citing the songs of Zhou Xuan, for example), in fashion (the cheongsam), novels (the martial arts serials that Tony Leung writes with input from Maggie, that recall the methods of the old school writers of martial arts fiction in 30s and 40s Shanghai), and the cinema (the unstated allusion to Spring in a Small City).

In watching the film unfold, the audience itself is partaking in a ritual in transfigured time (to borrow the title of a 1946 Maya Deren film (6)), and each member of the audience, depending on their ages, could in theory go as far back in time as they wish to the moment that holds the most formative nostalgic significance for them. Of course, Wongs skill in recreating Hong Kong of the 60s seems so assured and so transfixed to those of us born in the post-war baby-boom years who grew up in the 60s that it is more than enough to recall nothing but the 60s (with the rise in our consciousness at the time of Western culture and accoutrements, plus the efforts to blend East and West, as evoked by the references to Nat King Coles Spanish tunes, Japan, electric cookers, the handbag, Tony Leungs Vaselined hair, eating steaks garnished by mustard, and eating noodles and congee in takeaway flasks).

So successful is Wongs recreation of the past that we tend to forget that he has only shown us the bare outlines of Hong Kong in 1962 (the year when the narrative begins). Wong has created an illusion so perfect that it seems hardly possible that the director has got away with really just the mere hints of a locality to evoke time and place (the film was shot in Bangkok rather than in Hong Kong with the feeling perhaps that the former could better convey the idea of transposed time, and not so much to capture authentic details of the seedy alley ways and sidestreets, through which the protagonists pass or meet each other, that have supposedly vanished from modern Hong Kong). In other words, Wong Kar-wai has successfully transfixed his audience in a dreamtime without the necessary big-budget frills so that it actually seems a bit too dissociative to think of In the Mood for Love as a dreamtime movie. It doesnt, for example, indulge in the kind of overt symbolism such as one may associate with Dalis famous painting The Persistence of Memory where we see time pieces melting in a desert-like landscape, symbolizing time lost. I mention Dalis painting because in Wongs films, we do see persistent shots of clocks in what has now become the characteristic style of Wong Kar-wai (being so persistent, they actually invoke a surreal sense of time melting away, as in the Dali painting) those scenes in In the Mood for Love where the camera dollies down from a giant Siemens clock hanging overhead in Maggie Cheungs workplace to catch Maggie in a pensive moment. In Wongs deliberative manner, this is exactly the moment that would conjure up the 60s in his body of work, with the same motif and the same actress (indeed, essentially the same character) from Wongs key work in the early phase of his career Days of Being Wild (1990), also set in the 60s.

A Literary Vision
Such visual motifs are the obvious affirmations of Wongs style, denoting his preoccupations with time and space. However, in keeping with his theme of moral restraint, Wong himself appears to show a much more restrained hand in delineating his visual style, which seems less semaphoric and more attuned to the purposes of a narrative, however slight that narrative may appear to be. The film may function basically as a mood piece, with much to wonder at in terms of visual splendours, but there is no visual motif that goes astray. In the Mood for Love is a virtual cheongsam show, for example, and who among the Chinese of the baby-boom generation could fail to be moved by the allusive and sensual properties of the body-hugging cheongsam (or qipao in Mandarin) The array of cheongsams worn by Maggie Cheung is Wongs cinematic way of indicating the passage of time, but Wong also milks it for its erogenous impact on the mind and soul. Maggie Cheung clad in the cheongsam is surely every Chinese persons idea of the eternal Chinese woman in the modern age, evoking memories of elegant Chinese mothers in the 50s and 60s (when the gown was still in fashion) as well as memories of the Chinese intellectual female still bonded to tradition (recalling the image of the writer Eileen Chang, or Zhou Yuwen, the character played by actress Wei Wei in Spring in a Small City).

Much more significant, in my opinion, than all these visual configurations is Wong Kar-wais predilections for covering his ground with literary references. It is often forgotten that Wong is a highly literary director, and part of the magic that he wields in movies like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express (1994) and Ashes of Time (1994) is the consummate way with which he induces his audience to auscultate to his narratives. The monologues and voiceovers of those films are some of the most literary pieces to be heard in Hong Kong cinema. Of late, Wong has taken to inserting passages from books as inter-titles studding the course of the film, somewhat in the manner of silent movies, or in the manner of epigraphs in essays - a practice seen in Ashes of Time (where he quotes passages from the book by noted martial arts writer Jin Yong that was the source of his screenplay), and now in In the Mood for Love where he quotes lines from a 1972 novella, Intersection, by Liu Yichang, a Shanghainese expatriate writer living in Hong Kong. Gone is the voiceover narrative or the multiple monologues that he ascribes to each of his characters (finding classic expression in Days of Being Wild). The story of Intersection, the Chinese title of which is Duidao, tells of the way in which two characters lives - strangers to each other - appear to intersect in ways apparently determined by the nature of the city, and the structure of the novella provides a direct form of inspiration for Wongs use of the intersecting motif in In the Mood for Love.

The influence of Liu Yichangs story cannot be underestimated - so taken by the story has Wong been that he has actually put out an ancillary product in the wake of the films release in Hong Kong last year a book of photographs and stills from the film illustrating an abridged English translation of Liu Yichangs story. Its a curious kind of book, seemingly without any theme or focus, which actually contains a hidden title Tte-bche A Wong Kar-wai Project. Wong explains the significance of the title in a foreword

The first work by Liu Yichang I read was Duidao. The title is a Chinese translation of tte-bche, which describes stamps that are printed top to bottom facing each other. Duidao centres round the intersection of two parallel stories - of an old man and a young girl. One is about memories, the other anticipation. To me tte-bche is more than a term for stamps or intersection of stories. It can be the intersection of light and colour, silence and tears. Tte-bche can also be the intersection of time a novel published in 1972, a movie released in 2000, both intersecting to become a story of the 60s. (7)

Tte-bche - the intersecting motif that makes up Wongs narrative style in other films, notably Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Fallen Angels (1995), which are narratives of parallel stories, finally finds its mature expression in In the Mood for Love where the motif assumes a diacritical mode. The poetic nature of Wongs images and his style stems from this literary conceit, and the serial-like connotations of Chinese literature where the chapters intersect with one another (the zhang hui form) to build up the suspense of what happens next. Wongs literary sensibility makes him unique among modern-day directors who would probably not have conceived of an ending whose spirit is basically literary in nature, embedded in storytelling and myth. This ending, taking place among the ruins of Angkor Wat (subconsciously calling to mind the ruins of Spring in a Small City which similarly endow a sense of melancholic nobility to the chief protagonist), is one of Wong Kar-wais more conclusive and heart-stopping moments, filled with secrets that must never be revealed in a kind of compact between the director and the viewer, and finally infused with a sense of regret and Zen-like magnanimity.

Article 5 The Cinema of  Wong Kar-wai - A Writing Game, compiled by Fiona A. Villella
Reference Villella, Fiona A., The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai - A Writing Game, rchive.sensesofcinema 2001.  HYPERLINK httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113wong-symposium.html httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113wong-symposium.html (3 May, 2010).

Collaborating with stock company (Chris Doyle, William Chang, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung) and shooting haphazardly, in constant improvisational mode, Wong Kar-wai has brought to our cinema screens over the last ten years images of modern living, urban alienation, and forlorn love in a dazzlingly intimate, fluid, poetic and fragmented formal register.

A call was recently put out for impressionistic contributions on any aspect of Wongs career a single film, a particular character, a moment, a stylistic aspect, the way his work gets critically discussed, his key collaborators, his shooting style and so on. Each entry was required to centre upon, or use as a starting point, a one-word title. The final statements collected below range from the personal to the political, the deeply heartfelt to the bluntly critical.

WONG KAR-WAI filmography
As Tears Go By (1989), Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000)

Backside
Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love is a radiant homage to the neglected posterior. I dont mean to detract in any way from Maggie Cheungs overall highly nuanced and restrained performance when I say that she is almost deliberately, it seems, defined by the coy welcome offered by her lustrous buttocks in glorious retreat. The physicality of her acting and the phenomenal space she occupies on the screen is, for me, what makes this one of the great mime performances in film, equal to that of Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman (Joseph von Sternberg, 1935).

As Cheung sashays into the distance, one high-heeled foot sartorially censoring the other, she takes on the aspect of a dominatrix moulded in showers of light. Like Renoirs paintings of servant girls, her skin and garments attract the light as her director sheaths her in tight, high-necked dresses that deny the body, yet hint at the promise beneath. Placing her squarely in the battlefield of love, the director must then camouflage his star for combat. At his bidding she imitates wallpaper, curtains, jungles, tropical beaches, the promise of blue skies. At times her lower body blends so effectively with the background that she becomes a supernatural presence - nothing but a floating, disproportionately large, head out of a Chinese ghost story.

But inevitably, the eye is drawn down the length of her spine again to her backside, offering an enticement that can only be yearned for but never fully satisfied. The beauty of her performance is that, restricted by convention, and unable to openly express her desire, Cheung resorts to the subliminal use of body language. She freezes her face but liberates her tail, which speaks more eloquently of her inner yearnings and turmoil than does her dialogue. Watching this startling display, one is reminded of the way Garbo used her hands and body in her pre-sound days.

Maggie Cheung is a mime of extraordinary subtlety as she proffers her protuberant flesh to the nostalgic ardour of Tony Leung. Her bottom is a beauty of regal proportions, communicating her character to the spellbound audience. To her bewildered lover, she must seem a priestess of fecundity or an immodest Venus in retreat.
by Dmetri Kakmi                

Blue
Blue is the color of the rain soaked streets on a languorous summer night as the paths of Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and Tide (Andy Lau) cross in Days of Being Wild. But there is no spark in their passing encounter. Like the accursed ghosts of Greek tragedies wandering the earth without purpose or direction, they walk aimlessly to pass the lonely hours, to fill the void of unnerving silence. They speak dispassionately, as the saturating weight of sadness that ladens the atmosphere seems to exhaust even their deepest thoughts, and all that is left is the polite exchange.

Blue is a sense of regret - of a chance encounter and missed opportunity that forms a closed, perpetual cycle of incompletion, loss, and want. It traces the shape of an imperfect circle - a hollow vessel, an oblate soul. It is a fragmented glimpse of infinite possibility from the omniscient windows of an unoccupied telephone booth a failed attempt at connection, stifled by inaction. Like a spiritual bremsstrahlung, their souls have passed through the influence of a greater life force, and have now lost their energy. Now weak and unnecessary, there is only the shell of existence, the fading memory. It is a truncated portrait of a drifter - a tale of hopelessness and despair - of the figurative blues. It is an inertia that will not yield against the potential of true love, but instead, contaminates like a virus, and each hopeless, unrequited lover inevitably succumbs to a lethargy of the will. It is an ache of passivity that hovers innocuously through the impersonal city, and only the restless who venture into the empty evening streets find themselves incurably infected, inducted into some reluctant, nocturnal fraternity, eternally condemned to perform this somnambulistic, melancholic waltz of the wounded heart.
by Acquarello                

Creation
Is it really possible for a commercial filmmaker to create his work in the same way as a novelist or a playwright In the Mood For Love may be the most luxuriant film because it seems that Wong Kar-wai had the luxury himself to endlessly recreate the work until a final version appeared.

He seems to have been able to film and refilm, think and rethink, and use a multitude of apparently interchangeable collaborators (most notably cinematographers), before he has pronounced the film, for the moment, at an end. Part of his process of elaboration has also been to remove and eliminate, most notably the physical love scene.

When it was finished he continued to elaborate by issuing the films visuals in a book, Duidao (a novella by Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang), which tells a different story. It exists like one of those little fish that live in the big fishs mouth. The In the Mood For Love website goes beyond the usual puffery and stills. Here, we can find, under the Kitchen link for instance, details of Maggies meals when dining alone, Maggies summer and winter meals for her home and her snacks and fruits home according to the seasons.

I wonder, do Wong Kar-wais films ever cease being created Chungking Express started life as a Chinese art-house noir and went on to become both a Tarantino video (that surely has negative implications) and the inspiration for a Tarantino movie. After Tarantino, it has dribbled into the consciousness of a thousand actual and would be filmmakers some not a million miles away.

Then (in rebellion) Wong Kar-wai turns everything upside down again and makes the coolest, most enigmatic love story in which so little actually happens that the audience spends its time wondering whether what they are seeing or have seen actually took place at all either on screen or off.
by Geoff Gardner                

Dali-esque Time
What do you do when you meet the spouse of the person your spouse is having an affair with Complicated Should the two pained souls succumb to their carnal desires and have an affair themselves We would clearly forgive them this infidelity. Or should they retard this dilemma and have it slowly grow into an emerging tacit love, and replay the painful love forever and ever They would gain our utmost admiration. But should we even be privy to what lies in their hearts Secrets, melancholia, and the passing chance at love not seized become the central emotions in Wong Kar-wais In the Mood For Love. Like an orchestral conductor, Wong Kar-wai plays these emotions by manipulating what Andrei Tarkovsky referred to as the time-pressure inherent in every shot. So that the rhythm of each succeeding image becomes bathed in a glorious hue of temporal indeterminacy. The images in In the Mood for Love do not narrate, they linger, describe, and emote. The time of the images does not slow down, it melts down from the burning passion of the two would-be-lovers, as they tease each other with hushed glances and sexually charged quotidian encounters. These chance moments of physical proximity on staircases and hallways become what if memory-images suspended in time and space and protracted to a level of pure character subjectivity, a consciousness of Time heightened by banal moments that attain monumentality through the temporal melt down of the filmic image.
by Donato

Desire
Wongs leads, from Faye in Chungking Express to Mr Chow in In The Mood For Love display a repressed desire. In several ways, Wongs films are all about submerged passion and hidden desires. Ironically, they are also fused with a saturated emotion that resonates in every scene. It is in the characters repression of desire that emotion can be felt most. It is about what is not said or acted upon on screen, that which the audience is aware of but not shown. There is a three dimensional depth that exists behind every character and every door. Loneliness, isolation and yearning consume protagonists Mrs Chan and Mr Chow in In The Mood For Love. Their characters status as outsider is constantly reiterated as they often choose to eat alone, and avoid human contact and interrogation.

Mrs Chan enjoys going to movies and both protagonists share a love for martial arts fiction, another form of escapism. Shots of narrow hallways, people slamming doors, and narrow staircases highlight the claustrophobia of apartment living. However, they also accentuate the alienation and distance that prevails regardless of physical proximity. In Chungking Express, a sense of detachment is generated by the mere fact that not all the characters are given names - the lady in the blonde wig and policemen whose most identifiable feature is their police number. There is a detachment of emotion, a sense of the characters being simply another set of elements amongst the visual array of urbanity. In The Mood For Loves main protagonists are often seen talking to other characters off screen, highlighting the separateness between individuals. Consequently, when characters share on-screen space, it is almost claustrophobic because of the heavy presence of repressed longings and unspoken desires. Intersecting paths and missed moments are the only key to the characters true intent. Dictating the arbitrary nature of romance, Wong creates a visual pastiche of eccentric visual rhymes and coincidences. Ultimately, the desires and yearnings of his characters ensure an ambiguity that denies closure. The relationship between Mrs Chan and Mr Chow retains ambiguity, continuing a thematic tradition that runs throughout Wongs previous films Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together.
by Elizabeth Wright                

Emotion
To write anything about Wong Kar-wai is like trying to focus clearly on an object seen through a mighty waterfall. To so much as think of his name is to unleash a mental cascade of the richest, most vibrantly emotional audiovisual material of the past twenty years. Wong penetrates the emotional centres of his lonely characters fantasies and feelings, that place in most people least likely ever to connect with the outside world, and sets up his camera there. From this vantage point he sends them spinning out past each other, at perpetual cross-purposes, never connecting, at best colliding for a few ecstatically freeze-framed seconds.

They say no man is an island, but in Wongs work everyone is a self-contained universe, governed by its own laws of desire and following its own eccentric path in search of that ever elusive state Happy Together. Rather than bewail this hopeless state of affairs from a distance, Wong chooses to celebrate the intensity of these great arcs of emotion through a visceral intimacy only he can achieve. Somehow this makes his films all the more heartbreaking. At their spontaneous best they show us film narrative melting away, leaving us with a cinema of pure feeling.
by Maximilian Le Cain                

Look
For In the Mood for Love especially, Wong Kar-wai has declared one of the decisive influences to be Jacques Demys Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) where impossible love plays itself out between the banality of everyday material concerns (life in a gas station) and a luxuriousness of look. As with Demys film, In the Mood for Love is a film with a lush visuality, one in which decor (all those flower patterns on curtains, wallpaper, and dresses) takes off from story and even takes it over (insofar as whatever the free will of characters in the narrative, they will serve most as pieces in the overall visual design). Time slows down repetition of situations robs actions of their uniqueness a languorousness enters into the image through slow, lingering pauses, looks, and the meandering ephemerality of steam and smoke that waft lazily through the scenes. By these means, the film impels the spectator to look, to see the film immediately and predominantly as a formal experience. And yet like Demys film (where what really makes love impossible is the fact that Nino Castelnuovo has to go away to fight the Algerian war), In the Mood for Love reiterates that beyond form, there is the inescapable presence of the historical and the social. There is intense nostalgia in the film - for example, Nat King Cole on the soundtrack - but it is a nostalgia set against the impositions and transitions of modernity. From the initial premise that a tight housing market brings strangers into proximity to the references at the end of the film to inter-nation migrations and to the Cambodian war, In the Mood for Love reminds us that post-modernity is not only a style but a way of living concrete issues of our contemporaneity.
by Dana Polan                

Love - Things Wong Kar-wai Taught Me About Love
Requited love is an impossibility.

You will fall in love only once. Obstacles will prevail. The rest of your life is spent recovering.
Eroticising their possessions will be the pinnacle of your sexual fulfilment.
Anything that distracts you from the pain of your loss is good. Some people are more successful in this regard than others.

Hook up with someone. Live with them. Sleep with them. Tag along. Dont be fooled. You are only a transitory distraction. Ask for commitment. Declare your love. Watch the set up evaporate.
The most potent way to exist is to occupy someone elses imagination.
Desire is kept eternally alive by the impossibility of contact.
Modern communication enabling technologies will only heighten your sense of desolation by making you more keenly aware of the fact that no one is trying to call.
by Alice Dallow                

Possibility
The city is an engine of possibility. There are chance encounters lurking in every intersection. No amount of effort on the part of the city dweller can avoid the possibility of possibility. Just being in the city and of the city is enough. Wong Kar-wais cinema is the cinema of the city as a machine for possibility. His characters may be loveable or unloveable, plausible or implausible, but they are all expressions of the space of the city itself. The city, which is the real object of love in all Wong Kar-wai films. It is not always love that his characters find. It is not the lover they find or the kind of love they seek. What they find are the possibilities opened up by the city. Characters meet, or rather, collide on this screen of the city. They mingle their affects, create a zone between their bodies in which something happens. Something that is neither the one nor the others, but a third creation. His characters are always making something, with someone, other than what they expected. But making something, affirming their powers, enhancing their attributes. That is how it is, in the city, if you are of the city. The city of possibility. The city as possibility. The city of cinema. The cinema of Wong Kar-wai. The love affair of Wong Kar-wai.
by McKenzie Wark                

Repetition
An echo of pain through time, David Thomas (1)
When Tony Leung looks into the mirror in In The Mood for Love, it is ten years after Days Of Being Wild you can see that hes aged. Whether hes matured, I dont know (Im not complicated, he insists). He doesnt need the youthful gesture of combing his hair any longer, but hes still smoking those filterless cigarettes, over and over, thinking about Maggie Cheung, presumably, as he sits behind the glass office door. In another office, is a big clock that echoes the clock from Days Of Being Wild. The woman under it is no longer the young, tender being that seemed to sit at the office box of the stadium forever.

She doesnt dress casually anymore instead shes wearing those uncomfortable, classy gowns as if to cover up her fragility. Shes Maggie Cheung and shes as beautiful as ever, but on occasion she cant suppress the pain of disappointment any longer. Shes aged, whether shes matured, I dont know. Theyre both going through an endless series of repetitions, always the same, always slightly different, still trapped in a past that obsesses its chronicler, Wong Kar-wai, to such a degree that he has turned the somber, damp green hues of the older film into a hothouse of colors. Theyre both In The Mood For Love and the unidentified quotation at the end seems to be about the filmmaker rather than any of the two. It talks about seeing memories through glass and hoping the glass will break. In one of their rituals, as much about their absent partners as about themselves, Maggie Cheung runs out of frames, as if she could produce the vibrations to shatter the glass. In the repetition her inner turmoil bursts into tears, while Leungs voiceover says that its not real. The feelings on the screen are never real and theyre produced by the repetition of real acts, in different contexts, trapped forever in the material of the film, looking the same, looking different everytime, coalescing past, present and future into a projection. In The Mood For Love may be a projection Wong had in mind when he shot Days Of Being Wild or a repetition of a longing, a mood, a vibrant dream state, condemned to make its eternal loop in the protagonists of Wongs films. Like them, hes aged. Whether hes matured I dont know. But I think he has and I pray that Im right, everyday.
by Christoph Huber            

Space
A clich of Hollywood romances, parodied innumerable times is the scene in which two lovers run towards each other on a white beach or across a sunlit meadow, arms outstretched embracingly. Their physical trajectory across the relative vastness dividing them represents their emotional coming together, the space they traverse a special place beyond the daily to-and-fro.

In the West these images portray love to viewers in terms of immediately comprehensible realities. But what happens if you inhabit a space where there are no meadows or beaches, where the light is artificial, and you live so close to your neighbour as to be little more than a changing shape on his or her retina. Then you need to create distance, desire needs space to breathe, to detach itself from the frenzy of familiar stimuli, in order to develop into romance. Here, space is calculated in centimetres, not metres, and romance grows not in leaps and bounds but tiny increments, through the smallest of gestures, and the pauses between gestures.

In the cramped world of In The Mood for Love, physical space - the foundation of personal space - is a much-valued element. That is why mirrors, which feature prominently throughout the film, are so prized. Where there is no space, they at least give an illusion of it. Wongs protagonists live in single rooms, work in congested offices and travel the corridors that connect the two, encountering each other on stairs and in alleyways so narrow that they must turn sideways to pass, acutely aware of each other, intimate strangers, deeply connected in their thoughts yet superficially separate. Wong makes many visual references to their dualistic condition by simultaneously juxtaposing and separating Mr Chan and Mrs Chow, as we see one or the other through a screen, in a mirror or bounded by rectilinear lines of walls and doorways of their shared space. When they finally find a place of their own it is a Western-style caf, where they sit in a cubicle divided by the bench table between them. The camera pans back and forth tracking their (gastronomic) dialogue, here as throughout, physical space structuring their relationship.

In Wongs film, confinement is both a sociological and psychological condition. In The Mood For Love is a study of love in small spaces, not a miniature world, however, but a prison. Love grows under the watchful eyes of the prison-keepers, and is communicated not with the largesse, even excess of the West, but in its inhabitants subtle code, one so muted and circumscribed as to fail them, whose love will finally remain enclosed forever in a tiny sub-let room.
by Bernard Hemingway            

Third-World
Wong Kar-wais Happy Together might be seen as a turning point in cinematic negotiations of where Hong Kong and Taiwan figure in the global popular imagination. Hong Kong and Taiwan (and also China and Singapore) are still often cinematically represented to Western audiences (especially by American filmmakers) as exotic locales, places where the foreign, the ancient, the mysterious and superstitious (martial arts, fengshui, triads, and so on), the black market, and ubiquitous chaotic street markets are shown to be coexisting with the modern, Westernized world of urban high-rises, international finance, Starbucks and McDonalds, international terrorism and intrigue, military technology, yachts, jets, and so on. (for example, see especially action and fantasy films, such as the continuing wildly popular James Bond series). This state of coexistence between the ancient and the modern emphasizes the sense that Asian places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, though thoroughly internationalized in many aspects, are however not cosmopolitan in the Western sense, but are still in some ways part of the developingThird world. However, the appearance of a movie like Happy Together signals a moment when Hong Kong film has now taken to imagining its own Third-World other representing Argentina as an underdevelopedexotic place for Chinese to visit, where Chinese fantasies and experiences can be explored in a non-Chinese subaltern space (Note Wongs main characters are temporary visitors from Hong Kong and Taiwan, clearly not illegal immigrants forced out of their home countries for economic or political reasons). Argentina, in Wongs film, is the end of the world, the place where his characters can go slumming - to escape their own families, society, and geography, to work, and to have exotic and erotic experiences in cheap, spacious, affordable surroundings. This has up until recently been the kind of thing that (North) Americans and (Western) Europeans can be seen doing in some films, but rarely are Chinese represented this way. As such, this film represents a new shared imaginary world where America, Europe, Hong Kong and Taiwan are now more alike than different, at least in terms of development and modernization.

For such a story as we see in this film can only take place if less wealthy and less developed countries are simply there, waiting to be narrative backdrops for the more important events of our own more modernized globe-hopping lives, culture, economy, and society. This takes place at the cinematographic level as well - Wong takes this space that is only a temporary on-location background, distorts it through various lighting and camera techniques, and cuts it up as he pleases during editing process.
by Nick Kaldis                

Nick Kaldis is Assistant Professor of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he teaches Chinese Language, Literature, and Film. He has published articles on Lu Xuns poetry, and on PRC and Taiwan cinema.

Time
In the Mood for Love, a mysterious, elliptical film, is a modern-day Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), that is to say a middle-class tale of repression and restraint transformed into a fable of longing and stoicism by the directors command of potent images.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are caught in loveless marriages. Through a series chance encounters, which could have been enacted against Abbas The Day Before You Came, they meet and over time come to rely on each other for the company and affection withheld them by their respective, absent partners. However, circumstances, entrenched behaviour, and perhaps even a touch of habitual monkish denial, prevent them from embracing the new joy that has quietly entered their lives. Rather than regular furtive collisions scheduled between noodles and a cup of coffee, they settle for languid looks, loaded conversations and small, touching, intimacies that sear the soul. Not since Peter Greenaways The Pillow Book (1995) has such delicate eroticism suffused the very fabric of a film. Its the kind of impossible romance one dreams into being in the dead of night. Cut adrift and restless, floating somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, life is transformed into a series of fleeting, impressionistic moments to be played with as one wishes.

Scenes are replayed and given a different accent, interpretation, and even totally new outcome. Ghostlike, one drifts in slow motion down corridors and up stairways, past curtains billowing with the sighs of love as Nat King Cole croons in Spanish. The world shimmers. The inner eye, transfixed by an irrecoverable and distant past, transforms a tawdry alley, a cramped apartment, a shabby basement eatery, into an exotic, loaded-with-meaning movie set against which the heart can be pierced by tumultuous love.

But movie set is perhaps not accurate. It may be more correct to say that this is a glossy high-fashion magazine spread dreamt up by Diana Vreeland, full of ennui and obsessive, hypnotic attention to detail. See the fabric drape and reveal the curve and flow of the body beneath. Be mesmerised by the stylised hand gestures that metamorphose a flesh and blood human being into a liquid mannequin of desire. Admire the adherence to ritualised space. If this suggests superficiality to some, I remind them of Oscar Wildes maxim that it is only the superficial that believe looks are not important.

In Wong Kar-wai, physical reality, if not altogether obsolete, is malleable clay. It can melt, change colour, or vanish to allow the players to stand against a universe of varying shades representative of their complete and utter surrender to the act of yearning. Time exists only in so far as when the loved one will call or depart. As for the flesh and blood human beings suffering for our delectation, they become gods and goddesses, able to transmute the base metal of their anguish into the embodiment of a lost time, of what might have been had fate been on their side.
by Dmetri Kakmi                

Dmetri Kakmi is an essayist and a critic. He works for Penguin Books Australia as an editor.

Wrongheaded
If I offend, it is better at a distance. Byron
The framework tends, I think, to inhibit rational analysis and encourages precisely the self-indulgent and self-serving attitude of film critics toward Wong Kar-wai to which I referred in my comment on In the Mood for Love. Im not terribly interested in films that may or may not conjure up a stream of vaguely linked nouns and adjectives. It will be discovered that nearly any work of a certain type will do that. (For example, remove Hong Kong, of course, and perhaps Pop and Voice-over, and see how many films fit the bill. Thousands.)

Whats really needed is a critique that begins to link the fondness for such films and filmmakers to the conditions of the booming entertainment industry and stock market of the late 1990s, i.e., an understanding that there are a good many people around with a good deal of time on their hands and without much social or historical knowledge, who are getting rich (or at least quite comfortable) by means they dont comprehend and who instinctively fear any concrete, probing, urgent look at social life. The Wong Kar-wai infatuation will, Im convinced, appear absurd in a few years time to large numbers of people. It should to more now.
by David Walsh

Article 5 Wong Kar-wai (Wang Jiawei)b. 1958, Shanghai, China.by Elizabeth Wright
Wright, Elizabeth., Wong Kar-wai, archive.sensesofcinema May. 2002.  HYPERLINK httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontentsdirectors02wong.html httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontentsdirectors02wong.html (3 May, 2010).

Elizabeth Wright recently completed her honours year in film studies at Monash University (Melbourne). Her thesis focused on the film aesthetic of Wong Kar-wai.

Wong Kar-wai is undeniably an auteur of striking and salient cinema, standing apart from much mainstream Hong Kong cinema. Wong belongs to the mid-1980s Second New Wave of Hong Kong filmmakers who continued to develop the innovative and fresh aesthetic initiated by the original New Wave. The Second Wave, which includes directors such as Eddie Fong, Stanley Kwan and Clara Law, is often seen as a continuation of the first as many of these directors worked as assistants to First Wave directors such as Tsui Hark, Ann Hui and Patrick Tam (with whom Wong worked and collaborated). The innovation of this group of filmmakers was linked to the social and political issues facing Hong Kong as well as an artistic impetus. The uncertainty with which Hong Kong citizens faced the 1984 Sino-British Agreement outlining the handover of Hong Kong to China forced Hong Kong residents and filmmakers alike to confront and examine their relationship with China. This issue was translated into film by the Second Wave of cinema but done so with introspection rather than outright cynicism that brought Hong Kong cinema to a new level of maturity. (2) Consequently, the themes connected to identity and Hong Kongs relation to China were broadened and modernised. The identity of Hong Kong is perpetually marked by its closeness to the motherland China and its Western link as a British colony. Yet in the face of its history, Hong Kong has duly created its own culturally specific identity, one that inevitably combines both elements of the West and Mainland China. The cinema of Hong Kong reflects this notion of a dual identity, combining to create a third, localised identity. Significant in this respect is Hong Kong cinemas New Wave movement, which rose to prominence in 1979.

Varying from his New Wave counterparts preoccupation with the 1997 handover, Patrick Tams contribution to the New Wave movement came via his interest in the influence of the West and Japan on Hong Kong. His exploration of a society rapidly consuming Western and Japanese popular culture led him to reveal the no mans land of Hong Kongs cultural, spiritual and geographical dislocation. Tams interest in themes of dislocation and alienation can be identified in the work of his protg Wong Kar-wai. Notably, Wong was the scriptwriter of Tams 1987 Final Victory and Tam supervised the editing on Wongs 1991 Days of Being Wild. (5) Both directors combined their preoccupation with themes of isolation and dislocation with a striking visual aesthetic. It is this exact visual and thematic amalgamation that signifies Wongs mode of filmmaking. He works outside of the usual representational approaches that underpin classical narrative cinema and transcends artistic boundaries. Moments, questions and answers are infinite for Wong as he attempts to charter the terrain of his lovelorn outsiders. Wongs status as a postmodern auteur sees him delve into moments that are linked to both history and the personal, whether directly or indirectly. Notions of identity and the ever-present fusion between East and West find context in the themes of love, loneliness and alienation that pervade his protagonists. Tension between the past and present is linked to memory, desire, time, space and environment. Hong Kong cinemas complex status as both a national and transnational cinema as well as its relation to mainland China are distinct issues in the quest to define Hong Kong cinema. Wongs art of filmmaking is crucial in discussing an innovative and inimitable cinema that is at once collective and exclusive. His focus on detail over totality consolidates his talent for creating a distinct mood and atmosphere, a visual pastiche of colours and emotions.

After obtaining a diploma in graphic design from the Hong Kong Polytechnic School in 1980, Wong become a television production assistant. Following work on several television drama series, he began working as a scriptwriter for television and then later for films. Wongs directorial debut As Tears Go By (1988) marked his unique visual style and was screened as part of the Critics Week at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival. Wongs next film Days of Being Wild, which featured several of Hong Kongs beautiful and popular young stars, won five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. His following effort, Ashes of Time (1994), varied greatly in genre, successfully subverting the conventions of the period martial-arts drama. During a break in the post-production of Ashes of Time, Wong made Chungking Express (1994), which later became a cult hit. Following this came Fallen Angels, which received considerable critical success when it was premiered at the 1995 Toronto Film Festival. In 1997, Happy Together premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it garnered a Best Director Award for Wong. In 2000, Wongs In The Mood For Love was also awarded Cannes accolades, including Best Actor for Tony Leung Chiu-wai and the Technical Prize. Wong is currently completing his latest film entitled 2046, his first science fiction film to date.
 As with Wongs other films such as Chungking Express, Days of Being Wild, Happy Together and Fallen Angels, In the Mood for Love dictates the arbitrary nature of romance and the notion of the missed moment. In fact, the permeating concept of the moment is a crucial component of Wongs oeuvre. He consistently employs a signature parallelling and intersecting rhetoric in which his characters arbitrarily cross paths. Wongs protagonists are most often revealed to be a set of individuals existing within the visual array of urbanity. As in Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, Hong Kong provides the ideal setting for this exposition of human contact within a buzzing cosmopolitan city that is both vibrant and brash. Wong successfully grants introspective gazes at his characters (usually in sets of twos), exploring their insecurities, personal motives and ultimately the random nature of relationships. With In the Mood for Love, the focus centres on the jilted figures of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk). Their isolation and longing is transformed into a melange of intersecting paths and poignantly shared moments in which the possibility of a soulful connection is entertained. Again, Wongs arbitrary rhetoric finds expression in the poetic and brightly drenched tones of his unique filmic aesthetic, and his much-loved themes of loneliness, isolation, and longing rise to the surface. However, whilst In the Mood for Love incorporates all of his usual stylistic and thematic traits, it also ascends to a new level where the cultural significance of Wongs setting is explored in greater detail.

A title card at the beginning of In the Mood for Love reads It is a restless moment. Hong Kong 1962. This verse immediately triggers the mood of both the protagonists and the wider, social environment. At this time in 1962, 13 years after Mao and the Communist partys rise to power in Mainland China, Hong Kong remained a British Colony. However, during the 1960s there was considerable unrest as a result of the wider social and political situation that was existing in the world. The threat of the spread of Communism inspired the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States that was to centre heavily on Southeast Asia as a focal point for the competition between the global powers. In addition, the Vietnam War and Chinas support for the North Vietnamese Communist regime made the threat of Communism genuine. Naturally, Hong Kongs proximity to Southeast Asia made it a serious candidate for the Domino theory of a looming Red presence ready to advance upon any territory. Chinas hostile opposition of capitalism and imperialism also increased Hong Kong citizens fears that China would not wait for the end of Britains lease in 1997 to regain control of the territory. Many Hong Kong residents saw it in their best interests to leave Hong Kong and find homes elsewhere.

In both Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love, Wong recreates a 60s Hong Kong that is both nostalgic and contemporary, evoking both tradition and modernity. Significantly, the 60s era represents the childhood period of the directors of the Second Wave. Wong himself was five years old when he moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Thus, the recreation of this period is deeply nostalgic and sentimental in its theme of Hong Kong as home. Wongs portrait of 1960s Hong Kong is both retro and commodity conscious, with clear influences from the West and Japan. The restless moment and mood of uncertainty that defines both the protagonists and the era is significant within In the Mood for Love. Indeed, Wongs films may not be directly or overtly political, however there is often an indirect relation to the political via Wongs conveying of a particularly intense experience of the period as an experience of the negative an experience of some elusive and ambivalent cultural space that lies always just beyond our grasp.

The sense of history and nostalgia that pervades In the Mood for Love is a signature of Wongs style and reminiscent of filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski. With history and nostalgia, however, come change and the notion of before and after. The protagonists are caught in a constantly evolving space where time can stand still or be momentarily captured, but will eventually succumb to expiration. The inevitability of change brings with it a nostalgia and reminiscence that often evoke melancholy. Following Chow and Su Li-zhens return to their former home, a title card reads That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore. The characters whose identities are inexorably shaped by the past express Wongs nostalgia for an era passed. Su Li-zhens Shanghainese landlady cant bear to throw things away and Chow must physically unburden himself of the past by burying his memory in an ancient monument. Reminiscent of the female leads in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, Su Li-zhen (unbeknownst to Chow) visits his apartment in Singapore and fetishes over his belongings, lying on the bed and taking a solitary drag from one of his cigarettes.

The notion of time is a pervading concept in all of Wongs films. His preoccupation with capturing time is constantly evident, his camera doting on specific moments and intent on finding difference in repetition. In both Chow and Su Li-zhens offices, there are clocks that oversee them. Particularly reminiscent of the clock in Days of Being Wild is the large Siemens clock that is prominent in Su Li-zhens office interior. Time and again the camera studies the stark black and white face of the clock as it attempts to capture the time that is constantly advancing. In the first part of Chungking Express, Cop 233 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) obsessively eats cans of pineapple with the expiry date of the 1st of May, convinced that everything has an expiry date, including love. In Fallen Angels, the hit man Wong (Leon Lai-ming) says I do not know who these people are and I do not care, soon they will be history and in Happy Together, Wong effectively captures the period of Hong Kongs return to China. Time and memory are inexorably linked, and these notions are in turn linked to both the personal and the historical. Wong depicts the transience of life and reveals that nothing is permanent in the worlds he creates. However, he also conceives characters that despite living in the present moment are maimed by their desperate attempt to find something stable. His characters lack of roots or painful personal history means they are forced to create their own history. Consequently, Wong acknowledges the significance and pervasiveness of history, especially for Hong Kong citizens who are constantly in transition. He also observes modernity and technology as discourses that must be worked with and not against. The result is often characters with fragmented identities whose inner struggle and quests for clarity in a dynamic social world ensure their validity.

In the Mood for Love continues Wongs tradition of capturing moments within a potentially isolating and disconnected environment and bears resemblance to his other 1960s homage Days of Being Wild, which is believed (through Wongs own statements on both films and popular perception) to be the first instalment to In the Mood for Love. Set in the 60s, Days of Being Wild presents young adults who are both lost and vulnerable. The films protagonist is an A Fei named Yuddy (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing), A Fei being a euphemism for vaseline-haired and rock-loving delinquents and unsavoury teenagers with gangland connections.  The characters within this film are connected to other individuals, even if arbitrarily, yet unable to initiate lasting relationships. Their sense of desolation and perceived lack of identity pervades every aspect of their lives. Yuddy is both macho and vulnerable, sensitive and insensitive, representing the undefined soul of Hong Kong who seeks to find himself an identity he can respect. Days of Being Wild is a chamber film that evokes the utmost of personal emotions through unspoken words, desire, the notion of possibility and the melancholy of detachment. The films constant reference to time, via repeated shots of ticking clocks, alludes to the 1997 issue as well as the sheer intangibility and fleetingness of time. When Yuddy meets Maggie Cheungs character, he charismatically exclaims, lets be friends for one minute.  This same sentimentality and awareness of time permeates In the Mood for Love. Wong creates an internal world in which time is homogenous and ephemeral. His protagonists are caught in a quasi-dreamscape where time and memory cannot be secured.

Music is also a prominent and strategic element in all of Wongs films. Musical repetition is often employed to articulate that which is unsaid or that which cannot be expressed via words and dialogue. Moreover, Wongs destructuring and modernisation of genres involves re-interpreting codes, a process in which music is central.  The notion of re-interpretation is particularly evident in two of Wongs earlier films. David Martinez asserts that 40s and 50s music is used to re-create the 60s era in Days of Being Wild and a score by composer Frankie Chan and inspired by Ennio Morricones spaghetti western music is used for the martial arts epic Ashes of Time.  In Chungking Express music is used to evoke emotion and create atmosphere but also as an identification tool for the character of Faye (Faye Wong). The Mamas and Papas 1960s track California Dreamin plays continuously throughout the second half of the film, and becomes a trademark of Fayes presence within a scene. The song not only allows her to transcend her spatial and temporal boundaries and represents her state of mind but also emphasizes her as a subject who prefers music to words as a way of expression and communication.  Notably, the Cantonese translation of Western pop songs is a favourite cultural traverse of Wongs, as evident in the Cantonese version of The Cranberries Dreams in Chungking Express, Berlins Take My Breath Away in As Tears Go By and the re-orchestration of Massive Attacks Karma Koma in Fallen Angels. It is this willingness to borrow and reformulate influences and reference popular culture that contributes to Wongs status as a postmodern auteur and makes his films both local and transnational in execution. The rhythmic presence in the construction of shots and the pastiche of eccentric audio-visual rhymes and coincidences also allude to Wongs musical sensibility.

Wongs MTV aesthetic that finds an equilibrium between sound and image retains a sentimentality that does not succumb to an empty spectacle, or allow it to be subsumed by a postmodern ethos. Wong effectively highlights the fact that people (who make up part of the postmodern pastiche) are in close physical proximity, but can be so far apart, and indeed are so very far apart, at the same time. The literary nature of Wongs films is often ignored in favour of readings that focus on the visual splendour of his film aesthetic. Nevertheless, his penchant for voiceover monologues and written captions are also part of his signature compositions. The isolation of his characters often gives way to voiceover monologues in which his characters status as outsiders is constantly reiterated. The alienating space of the city is often the backdrop for inhabitants who struggle to mentally articulate their own sense of place and identity within the urban landscape. This translates to a visual pastiche of deeply drenched colours and stylised camera shots. Chungking Express adopts this rhetoric using MTV editing vocabulary and by constantly manipulating visuals. Wong finds creativity in the astute articulation of the pause and rewind modes, another postmodern emblem of the late 20th century.  He effectively employs the functions of fast-forward and pause into his aesthetic repertoire, illustrating the various modes of remote control technology. Chungking Express articulates this mode with the accelerated passing of clouds and Cop 633s (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) hastened running. The film also proposes a dual gaze through the visual juxtaposition of action versus immobility, as when a long take films the protagonists stationary whilst indistinguishable bodies hurriedly move past the camera, creating flashes of movement.
 
Spectators must suspend their beliefs in chronology, time and in many cases, their memories too, in order to fully experience the depth of Wongs evocative filmic creations. Wongs story is continual and the narrative as dependent on the context of the present as of the past. The geography, history and unique cultural identity of Hong Kong inhabitants have inevitably shaped the territorys cinema. Hong Kongs adaptability to change, cultural diversity and cosmopolitan lifestyle has led to a dynamic output of films that portray a distinct Hong Kong psyche. The films of Wong Kar-wai attest to this manner of filmmaking, articulating the nebulous space of Hong Kong and the in-betweeness and possible dislocation felt by Hong Kong citizens in the face of cultural and political diversity and advances in modernity. Through Wongs oeuvre, Hong Kong becomes a metaphor for the characters and their varied existence. It represents an urban pastiche in which individuals struggle to come to terms with a sense of detachment and loneliness despite the territorys high-density population. Wongs endless array of possible scenarios and the navigation of his protagonists internal and external journeys in turn constitute an unravelling and reconfiguring of spatio-temporal constrictions.

Hong Kongs identity cannot always be summated via its east and west sensibilities. Rather, in portraying Hong Kongs culturally diverse existence, Hong Kong cinema is effectively constructing and revealing its own identity. Wongs empirical aesthetic creates a cosmopolitan filmmaking practice that transcends cultural boundaries. His taste for popular culture, global influences and incorporation of several different music genres is explicit within his films. The origin of Wongs filmmaking may be Hong Kong but his films cannot be categorically contained or strictly confined to a culturally specific consumer. Ultimately, Wong Kar-wai is a filmmaking poet, concerned with issues as varied as memory, identity, time and space, urbanity, mood, isolation and absence. He is also dedicated to the location of Hong Kong as an urban landscape in which his thematic concerns find expression. Hong Kongs unique identity with its fusion of Chinese and Western culture and complex history provides a culturally diverse space in which technology and tradition co-exist in various forms. Wongs avant-garde filmic aesthetic is composed of elliptical storytelling through the use of deeply drenched tones, slow motion, jump cuts and fragmented images. Although the notion of auteur is not entirely customary in Hong Kong where films are often shot quickly and marketed via their accessibility as popular entertainment, Wongs status as auteur marks his position within Hong Kong cinemas industrial environment and signifies his complete creative freedom and control of every facet of his films production. In Wongs own words, his films represent explorations in which Wong Kar-wai, the director, managed to add something into the work.