The Screengrab : leslie cheung

Movie Review: "Ashes of Time Redux"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A few years ago, a glitteringly restored version of Wong Kar-wai's second feature, Days of Being Wild (1991) was released in the U.S. to general ecstasy from American Wong fans who had only been able to catch the movie on videotape or Chinatown showings of well-worn prints. Now, inspired by the discovery that many prints of his Ashes of Time had been deteriorating, Wong has gone to great pains to buff that movie up and re-release it as Ashes of Time Redux. An odd, distinctively dreamy martial arts/swordplay film set in the desert, Ashes was Wong's third production but his fourth film released to theaters; he spent some two years working on it, taking time to dash off his masterpiece, Chungking Express, in quick order and having it ready for release while Ashes was still in post-production. Ashes never got much play in this country, either, though it's been seen just enough to be widely regarded as beautiful but bewildering. Looesly based on a novel, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, by Louis Cha--Wong' script is said to be along the lines of a prequel, using some of the book's characters--Ashes technically belongs to an historical action genre called wuxia, and some of its strangeness to Western eyes may relate to necessary adherence to genre conventions--though when Ashes was seen by Hong Kong audiences, they were reportedly scandalized by the degree to which Wong had bent the rules of the form to accommodate his personal vision.

The movie is episodic, with a series of vignettes linked by the character of Feng (Leslie Cheung), an embittered former swordsman who works as a kind of manager to other swordsmen working as assassins or bounty hunters. For much of the film, Feng is heard on the soundtrack sharing his insights into the transient nature of love and happiness and the self-destructive effects of pride and blindness--most metaphorical and, in the case of a fighter who is losing his sight (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), literal--while flashbacks relate stories of his encounters with various clients and hirelings. Ashes was an all-star affair--others in the cast include Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Jacky Cheung, and Tony Leung Ka Fai--and with the importance of these figures in the busy, star-conscious Hong Kong film industry, Wong's tying up so many of them with a location shoot that went on for six months was something of a scandal in itself. (The shooting schedule became a juggling act, with different actors coming and going to keep up with their other commitments.) A recent piece in The New York Times described a moment from the "round-the-clock" production: "One day the shooting in a grotto stretched into evening, and a scene with Ms. Lin, delivering lines of an intense dialogue while staring into a spinning bird cage, headed into 40-plus takes. More than a dozen crew members were crammed into the small space, made stuffier when smoke was fanned in for atmosphere. Mr. Wong was in a corner watching on a monitor. Every so often, in his measured way, he made a suggestion to Ms. Lin or called out to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, 'Is that all you can do?' Mr. Doyle, now a longtime collaborator of Mr. Wong’s, said in a recent telephone interview that he heard that question as a constant challenge. 'It should be the mantra for all people in the arts.' ”

In the Times piece, Lin acknowledges that when she saw the finished film she didn't understand it, but "Now, 14 years later, I do. Each image is like a painting. The camera is his brush, and it’s only when he picks up the camera that he knows what the film’s about.” Which is true, and is both the movie's glory and its limitation. The movie's fast cutting and use of slow motion so slow that it breaks the action down into a series of frames streaking by now look like a dress rehearsal for some of the effects that Wong, shooting fast and dirty, brought off in Chungking Express, but that movie's humor and urban energy are missing from Ashes, which mostly settles into one languorous, broken-hearted mood. What's remarkable is the way that Wong and Doyle caught that mood in the movie's look and sustained it to feature length, but without any conflicting tones or a strong storyline, it can see like an awful lot of one thing. Still, if any movie deserved to be judged on the basis of how it looks at its best, it's Ashes of Time. The digital remastering is sumptuous, and it's been augmented by a superb new score by Yo-Yo Ma, who does as much as Wong ever did to tie the movie's images together. After a busy first ten years as a director, Wong's production has fallen way off in this past decade, and recently his reputation has taken a few dents to go with it; after getting perhaps the best reviews of his career with 2000's In the Mood for Love--like Ashes of Time, a title that could fit neatly onto just about any of his movies--his follow-up, 2046, played to mixed reactions, and this year's English-language My Blueberry Nights has shaped up as his biggest bomb since, well, Ashes of Time. The movie will always be a little baffling and too intensely personal to be fully satisfying to a mass audience, but Ashes of Time Redux makes it clearer than ever that it's an amazing achievement and an important step in the development of a major filmmaker. A movie about the pain of pleasures lost and reduced to shards of memory has been rescued from turning into an example of it.

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.