The Screengrab : happy together

Take Five: Wong Kar-Wai

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:45:00 GMT

With My Blueberry Nights getting a limited-release opening in major cities across the country this weekend, Hong Kong legend Wong Kar-Wai will finally make his English-language feature film debut, and, after twenty years of building his reputation as a filmmaker, get a shot at the cherished American audience that can make or break a director. The only question is, will My Blueberry Nights be his Fritz Lang moment or his John Woo moment? Early reviews indicate that it might be the latter; the movie wasn't especially well-received when it opened Cannes last year, and producer Harvey Weinstein's drastic cut is said not to have helped matters any. The jury, likewise, is still out on whether or not Norah Jones can act, but the testimony onscreen is said to be pretty damning. If it turns out that it's a stiff, it might be all to the good and he can return to the environment in which he did his greatest work; and regardless of its quality, we're all geeked about his upcoming remake of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. We'll have to wait and see, but even if it turns out that My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-Wai's first major dud, he's still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film. Here's five movies that prove it.

CHUNG KING EXPRESS (1994)

Although he'd shown flickers of brilliance before (and already begun his tradition of naming his films after pop songs with his 1988 directorial debut, As Tears Go By), Chung King Express is the movie that established Wong Kar-Wai as a director capable of legitimate greatness. The highly stylized film, about a heartbroken Hong Kong cop on the prowl who falls in with a gorgeous and mysterious young woman in a drug gang, so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he invested a chunk of his own money to get this and Wong Kar-Wai's other films released in the United States. Even now, after he's stretched substantially, this is still a stunning film, chock full of quirky moments, philosophical speculation on the mediated life, and his ability to coax stellar performances out of his actors. A Godardian triumph.

ASHES OF TIME (1994)

Years in the making, and based on a highly popular Asian epic novel, it would have been easy for Ashes of Time to be a major step back in the career of Wong Kar-Wai. (Some critics, indeed, think it was.) After having established that he was a director of skill, ambition and daring, it seemed unusual for him to take on that classic Hong Kong trope, the martial arts epic — but as it happened, there was nothing to fear. He approached it with his typical attitude, sacrificing not a whit of artistic integrity, and the result is one of the most thoughtful, surreal, philosophical action epics ever put on screen. Wong Kar-Wai takes what could be a by-the-numbers swordplay drama and turns it into something bizarre, achronal, and transcendental — a wonderful movie that's hard to follow, but impossible to forget.

HAPPY TOGETHER (1997)

Althought it wasn't quite as well received as his previous spate of films — at least partly because of the controversial nature of its subject matter in his homeland of Hong Kong — Happy Together is still a highly rewarding addition to Wong Kar-Wai's body of work, and the first movie in which he begins to seriously mine the themes of thwarted passion and self-nullifying ennui that would shape his finest work to come. Bouyed by two fantastic performances in the lead roles by Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, Happy Together follows the unconventional relationship between two expatriates from Hong Kong as they take a typically surreal and eventful road trip through Argentina. It's a passionate, sexy, and sometimes ridiculous movie, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Doyle, and a taste of greatness to come.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000)

Finally putting to bed his penchant for hip-pocket surrealism, Wong-Kar Wei finally plays it straight with this utterly beautiful, incredibly heartbreaking story of doomed romance set in the Hong Kong of the 1960s. Everything about it is pitch-perfect, from the stunning cinematography to the breathtaking costumes to the quiet, naturalistic screenplay, which makes its points with subtlety and grace rather than noise and distraction. The lead performances by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung — some of the most controlled, precise, and yet emotionally engaging screen acting in decades — help further elevate the story of two unrequited lovers who, alone in a city of millions, reenact a sort of sham shadowplay of the illicit affair their spouses are having with one another, from good to great.

2046 (2004)

It was a risky move to create a sequel to a movie as distinct and delicately perfect as In the Mood for Love. It was an even riskier move to create a sequel that returned the more avant-garde elements of Wong Kar-Wai's filmmaking style — chronological jumps, elements of surrealism, non-linear storytelling, and bits and pieces of science fiction and fantasy — to the mix. But if anyone could pull it off, he could, and he did, with a sequel that may not precisely follow the tone of the previous film, but captures its mood and spirit exactly. In 2046, we follow Tony Leung's character from In the Mood for Love after Maggie Cheung has left his life — he's a more bitter figure than before, but still filled with romantic longing, which he now attempts to sublimate into a science fiction novel he's writing. While it's not quite the instant classic that its predecessor was, it's still a very worthy film that shows how adept Wong-Kar Wei is at blending his ruling passions as a filmmaker.

Rep Report Follow-Up: Recent Hong Kong Cinema at Lincoln Center

Peter Smith — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

As noted in our Rep Report last week, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a week-long series dedicated to recent Hong Kong Cinema. This is a diverse series as evidenced by the two films I was able to catch — Wong Kar-Wai’s criminally underseen Happy Together and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Confession of Pain. Both feature Tony Leung in a lead role but are otherwise polar opposites.

Happy Together is an exploration of the dissolving relationship between two gay Chinese men who came to Buenos Aries as vacationers and now find themselves stranded without enough money to return home. The film is more raw and intimate than any of the master director’s other work, but explores similar themes of loneliness, displacement and the inability to find happiness. Christopher Doyle’s incredible camera work switches from black and white to pastels to faded color, and creates a sense of stylized reality that is not only beautiful but helps propel the film’s story with its immediacy. Throwing traditional narrative structure out the window, this film is unflinching in its honesty and craftsmanship.

Confession of Pain is an ultra-modern, big-budget thriller from the same creative team behind Infernal Affairs, the film from which The Departed was adapted. This is popcorn fare, simply too glossy to ever feel authentic. The story also goes through a predictable series of twists and turns. But where the audience for Happy Together is surely limited by both its subject matter and challenging presentation, Confession of Pain has a much broader appeal. Not un-tasty, but it's empty calories. — Bryan Whitefield

The Rep Report (October 17 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Now, here's what I'm talking about: the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates the successful completion of the New York Film Festival by firing its guns in the air with 10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema (October 17 - 25). The program ranges from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together and 2046 to a very welcome helping of action master Johnnie To, whose steady refining of his technique and stubborn reluctance to bolt for Hollywood give his recent work a last-man-standing quality. (He is represented here by the The Mission, the 1999 brothers-in-arms shoot-em-up that was of no small help to its star, Anthony Wong, in his quest to be crowned World's Coolest Actor, and the more recent Election and its companion piece, Triad Election.) The newer offerings include Triangle, a caper flick co-directed by the three Hong Kong amigos, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, and films by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, whose Infernal Affairs is perhaps (if unjustly) best known in the U.S. as the original version of Scorsese's The Departed.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents its sixth annual selection of highlights from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (October 18 - 21). The program, which plunders the vaults of the Danish studio Nordisk, includes documentary footage of the German front lines during World War I, as well as fanciful adventures involving trips to Mars, runaway meteors and the ever-present fight against the white slave trade. Film preservationist Serge Bromberg will also be on hand with yet another of his personal selections of precious silent rarities. Most screenings will feature live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of War and Peace, which is playing the Film Forum in a seven-hour cut (shown in two parts, with a separate admission for each) from October 19 through November 1, is somewhere between a great lost film and a towering curiosity. As much an example of technological competition between the Cold War powers as the space race, it was in production for seven years and cost $100,000,000 in 1968, which makes it still the most expensive movie ever made. Yet it's not just an historical oddity. Bondarchuk, who first gained celebrity as an actor (he plays Pierre in the film), was a greatly gifted director clearly drunk on the possibilities of filmmaking. There are many stunning moments and a striking, dynamic use of the camera that take the film out of the Masterpiece Theater/Merchant-Ivory category of embalmed classics; despite the impossibility of fully capturing the novel on film, it's not a negligible achievement. This was only Bondarchuk's second movie, and he never got to follow it up; after it won him an international acclaim and an Academy Award, he blew his reputation on the 1970 English-language bomb Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon, then came crawling back to Mother Russia, only to spend the rest of his career snarled up in the compromises and political confusion of the post-Khrushchev, pre-glasnost era. He died in 1994. To now see the one film that forms the bulk of his career is to marvel at what driven and talented people are capable of putting on the screen, and what the strain of doing it, and the desire to do it again, can sometimes do to their lives.

BOSTON: When Martin Scorsese's great concert film The Last Waltz came out in 1978, one of the most talked about moments in it was the single, unbroken shot for most of Muddy Waters' performance of "Mannish Boy." On the DVD commentary, we learned it's a wonder that Muddy got into the movie at all. Scorsese had gotten his song list mixed up and given the camera crew a break, and then when the blues legend strolled out onstage, the director, thinking that no one was recording the moment, had a fit collosal even by his standards. The reason that one sustained shot exists is that one of the star cinematographers working on the project, Laszlo Kovacs, didn't know that he was supposed to be on a break; he had taken his headset off because he had somehow grown weary of the sweet music of Martin Scorsese screaming in his ear. Kovacs died last July, and the Brattle pays tribute to the work he did in his career prime with Seventies Shooter: A Tribute To Laszlo Kovacs, running through the 25th. And since the series begins with such films as Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider and then winds down with one of the earliest requiems for the 1960s, Shampoo, and the rough-housing, "un-P.C." cop comedy Freebie and the Bean, it doubles as a rare chance to see the counterculture rise and fall in the space of a week's worth of films.

— Phil Nugent