The Subtle Sensitivity of the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai

When I think of Wong Kar-wai, I think of nighttime and neon lights, I think of the image of lonely people sitting in cafes or bars as the world passes behind them, mere flashes of movement; I think of love and quiet, sombre heartbreak, the sensuality that exists between people but is rarely fully or openly expressed. Mostly I think of the mood of melancholy, yet how this can be beautiful, colourful, inspiring even. A feeling of gloominess at the complexity of messy human relationships, though tinged with an unmitigated joy in the sensation of that feeling. And a warmth, generated by light and colour, that cuts through to the solitude of our very soul.

This isn’t a broadly definitive quality of Wong’s body of work -certainly it isn’t so much true of his martial arts films Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster. But those most affectionate movies on my memory: Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, 2046, of course In the Mood for Love, and even My Blueberry Nights (Wong’s single foray into English-language cinema), articulate at least in spurts these highly evocative, transcendent feelings attached to the particular atmosphere that Wong Kar-wai has definitively made his own. His own that is in the world cinema auteur sense -in actuality it’s an aesthetic and effect as dependent on him as it his editor and production designer William Chang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, not to mention the stupendous casts that fill out his movies, a roster of Hong Kong greats including Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Faye Wong, Leslie Cheung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, and Zhang Ziyi.

But Wong is the umbrella under which all of it flourishes –the creativity, the style, the tone, and the stories. Excepting perhaps the high-concept ballet-by-way-of-action stylings of John Woo, Wong Kar-wai is almost certainly the most important and influential filmmaker to come out of the Hong Kong industry –doing so by precisely avoiding in his early career that very action-oriented mainstream contemporaries like Woo and Johnnie To thrived in. His movies became more tender dramas by contrast, often crime and/or romance-themed, but without necessarily adhering to strict genre convention. For instance, several of his most iconic romantic pairings, as in Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, never end up sleeping together; his action scenes and use of violence (omitting for a moment, Ashes of Time) are blunt and grounded, lacking in any kind of formalism or elegance. 

Yet his movies weren’t meditative art films –he coming from the tradition of Hollywood-inspired Hong Kong crowd-pleasers. His movies had thoughtful characterization and nuanced performances, but they had momentum too, eye-popping visuals, and a rich sense of place. They also notably incorporated needle-drops of American pop music: Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” in As Tears Go By (his first movie, a charming if somewhat unsophisticated remake of Scorsese’s Mean Streets), The Cranberries’ “Dreams” (in Cantonese, covered by Faye Wong) in Chungking Express, The Flying Pickets’ “Only You” at the end of Fallen Angels, The Turtles’ “Happy Together” in the movie bearing its title, and of course The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin”, famously played repeatedly through Chungking Express.

From 1988 to 2013, Wong Kar-wai made ten movies, several of which have become venerated classics among cineastes everywhere. The seven most stylistically cohesive and well-received of these were packaged and restored in 4K in 2021 by the Criterion Collection as “The World of Wong Kar-wai” -most had already been independently released by Criterion- and are available to watch on that streaming platform. It is an apt descriptive, because these movies do constitute a kind of singular world -hell, Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 are even a loose trilogy, with Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung intended to be playing the same characters in each one. But what unites them all (and even to a lesser degree those three excluded from this collection), is the hypnotic spell they put you under -a spell of intense feeling and music and atmosphere entwined with their sense of place and the particular ways Wong colours his world. But always it is a world that moves and exists in relation to his characters and their stories.

Wong’s characters are drawn in very methodical romantic ways. They have purpose and interiority (whether acknowledged or not), and are rarely defined by the archetypes they might otherwise represent. Irresponsible playboy Yuddy, played by Leslie Cheung, in Days of Being Wild, has more of a Byronic streak to him than is initially apparent, in his consuming desire to find his mother and a missing sense of affirmation. Faye Wong’s Faye in Chungking Express, with her idiosyncratic personality and singular fixation on her police officer love interest (Tony Leung) might invite ‘manic pixie dream-girl’ accusations, but she proves a more thoughtful, even mature woman by story’s end. And Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Fai (Tony Leung) are not in any way the stable and healthy stereotype of a late-90s gay couple that Happy Together will occasionally show them as evoking -there’s significant angst and commitment trauma there. Wong utilizes well the tenors of his cast, letting actors like Leslie Cheung and Carina Lau play to high emotions, reserving Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung to low emotion spaces -particularly powerfully in In the Mood for Love. Choices like these help determine his approach to the characters’ moods, the poetry of their psychologies.

And this becomes especially poignant in consideration of how many of these characters are lonely souls. He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in Chungking Express, Fai in Happy Together, Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung) in In the Mood for Love, Elizabeth (Norah Jones) in My Blueberry Nights, and essentially the full casts of Days of Being Wild and Fallen Angels. 2046 is essentially about a man attempting to fill that hole of unimaginable loneliness and lost love. It may be the signature theme Wong is concerned with exploring, and certainly the one that has the deepest most widespread resonance. It’s a fundamental feeling yes, but Wong contextualizes it so well within stories that feature intersecting kinds of loneliness and isolation -only some of the time love-stricken, rendering it a beautiful and in some ways comforting sensation. Because his characters are never truly alone. At rock bottom, Yuddy is found by kindred spirit Tide (Andy Lau) -the pair connected by their mutual history with Su. He Qiwu momentarily encounters Faye as his love story is ending, hers just beginning. And recovering from the loss of his father at the end of Fallen Angels, who should Ho Chi-mo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) meet in an adjoining booth, but the enigmatic nameless agent, played by Michelle Reis, in mourning over her beloved hitman client. You never know just how similar these strangers are. And everyone is yearning to be loved and understood -it might as well be the ethos of Wong’s oeuvre.

Wong applies melodrama with care, it is tender and the circumstances facilitating it honest –at least emotionally so. Rarely are there any broad affirmations of feeling, but the subtext is drenched with it. In the Mood for Love is his masterpiece on subtlety, on big, broad emotions being expressed in small, inconspicuous ways. Su and Chow can barely acknowledge the legitimacy of their romance, all of it is coded in conversation, expression, minute moments of incidental intimacy –and it is all the more poignant for it. Neither Chungking Express nor Fallen Angels feature outright positive statements of romance or even a single kiss. And yet the endings of both films are deeply, romantically touching, sentimental you might say. Even movies that feature more overt sexuality like Happy Together and 2046 disengage it from the gentler, classically romantic emotional longing that drives the main characters. There’s a curious pattern too of sex in Wong’s movies meaning more to the women characters than the men. Mimi (Carina Lau) in Days of Being Wild, Blondie (Karen Mok), and the Agent in Fallen Angels, Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) in 2046 –all desiring a sexual closeness that their emotionally distracted partners, Yuddy, Wong (Leon Lai), and Chow respectively, can’t reciprocate. In the lattermost of these, Wong does thread an intentional theme, but this gendered image of the dynamics of sexual relationships, subversive in its way though it may be, has some baggage to it -implying more than another illustration of how closeness can still mean distance.

The chasms between characters, their isolation and emotional depth is coloured in Wong’s films by a carefully composed atmosphere. I referred to the image that springs to mind when I think of Wong Kar-wai, and it is achieved through several technical choices that set and enhance this deliberate mood. Where characters are framed in a space out of time, a potent symbol of solitude or else singular chemistry, effected by rendering all background motion in a haze of light, colour, and indistinct shapes, that beauty of loneliness is vivid and undeniable. It is evocative of the world passing by, literally, unconscious and unconcerned with the emotional states of these characters. Tony Leung’s police officer waiting in the “California” bar for Faye, who never comes. Fai visiting the Iguazu Falls alone. And yet, Ho Chi-mo and the Agent, the former giving the latter a ride home, are able to join in that restless pace in the end -becoming part of that moving world as a spark may be ignited between the two. Fallen Angels in particular is just rife with visual techniques that distort and contextualize its world -a lot of wide-angle photography, Dutch angles, and close-ups that serve to highlight that intimate isolation of each character against a world that seems small and distant from their problems. And it comes together beautifully in the end.

Wong’s atmosphere isn’t entirely about emphasizing bittersweet loneliness against a world in flux -in fact he’s quite capable of very romantic imagery, seen with an admittedly tragic undercurrent in 2046, In the Mood for Love, but with joy in Chungking Express, and even Happy Together -that lovely kitchen dance sequence that is one of the rare times the film evokes the notion of its title. There’s a sensuality that pervades a lot of Wong’s mood, greatly evident in the heat in which he often shoots Carina Lau in Days of Being Wild, Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung in Happy Together, and Zhang Ziyi in 2046. Sex features in Wong’s movies, even provocatively so in the love scenes between Chow and Bai Ling in 2046, that opening love scene of Happy Together between Fai and Po-Wing, and the suggestive shots of the Agent masturbating in her client’s bed in Fallen Angels. But rarely are these the primary sources of the movies’ sensual appeals. It’s also there in simply the colours, the geography of the spaces, the closeness and dimensions of the camera. 

Once again, In the Mood for Love is the nexus point of this, an incredibly erotic movie about two people who don’t have sex once; but it’s filled to the brim with longing tension, emanating not just from the characters themselves (though granted, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung were never more attractive than in this movie), but from the contours of the apartment building they occupy -forcing intimacy, from things like the glow of streetlamps, the gracefully formed smoke from Chow’s cigarette, and of course the hotel room (#2046), bathed in red where they go to write together. Red is of course of an inherently sensual hue, and so much of the movie is spent in its warmth. Days of Being Wild, which alternatively favours green, similarly uses colour as a compass of sensual mood -there more dingy, salacious in nature. And 2046 makes use of CGI and artificial environments, in its scenes of sci-fi imaginings -direct metaphors for Chow’s own feelings, in its own intoxicating way; with a golden sheen and sharp lighting, not to mention unique, evocative looks for both Faye Wong and Carina Lau.

The final ingredient to this whole package is of course the music. Unlike a lot of other filmmakers at his caliber, Wong doesn’t have a consistent composer –his only recurring partners in this field having been Frankie Chan and Roel A. Garcia, who worked on Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and Ashes of Time -likely due to their production closeness. But otherwise he’s utilized different talents: Danny Chung on Happy Together, Michael Galasso on In the Mood for Love, Peer Raben and Shigeru Umebayashi on 2046. But each time the score comes out wonderfully appropriate –soulful and inspired. Wong is highly attuned to music, it is very much a prominent inspiration for him. Happy Together was of course named for a pop song, and most of his frequent cast-members are celebrated singers as well as actors –for Leslie Cheung, Faye Wong, and Norah Jones it is their primary claim to fame. 

And while the scores of his movies are stupendously evocative, well worth listening to on their own, more fascinating and striking are his eclectic array of needle-drops, ranging from classical music pieces through to contemporary Hong Kong and American pop hits. Each choice is finely honed to its context, from a classical sampling of Zhou Xuan in In the Mood for Love to the melancholy effect of “The Christmas Song” of Nat King Cole in 2046, Shirley Kwan’s tremulous, thematically appropriate cover of “Forget Him” in Fallen Angels to the recurring motif of a lesser-known Frank Zappa piece called “Chunga’s Revenge” in Happy Together. His exclusively American choices for My Blueberry Nights are also fascinating: soul classics by Otis Redding, Ruth Brown, and modern folk by Cat Power and Amos Lee. Not all of these can be defined as “lush”, but Wong and his collaborators’ power of thematic and technical compositions often bring to the forefront the music’s sentiment. And the music itself gives those compositions a crucial jolt of life.

I suppose the point of all this is to articulate why Wong’s cinema is so gorgeously effective; by extent why it’s so precious and valuable. There’s a chemistry to his style that is incredibly precise, yet it’s execution seems so simple and obvious -the purest distillation of itself. Something like In the Mood for Love can feel as though it is a consolidation of the very first romantic instincts put to film; Chungking Express illustrating the elementary meet-cute. Somehow Wong pieced together a formula out of so many creative elements of casting, camerawork, colour grade, technical tricks, and music for expressing those most poignant of human sensations. Heartbreak, melancholy, listlessness, desire -but also an innate joy for the capacity to experience these things. There are few more fundamentally humane filmmakers than Wong Kar-wai.

Frustratingly, he hasn’t directed a single movie since his loose Ip Man biopic The Grandmaster in 2013 (a stylistic departure for him which I didn’t bring up here, but perfectly decent in its own right), with projects either falling through, being abandoned or being passed on -at one point he was going to direct House of Gucci- although he is purportedly making a much-anticipated miniseries called Blossoms Shanghai that should be finished sometime this year. He’s done work in other capacities, directed one-third of the anthology film Eros in 2004 called “The Hand” which is available in full on the Criterion Channel. And he’s directed several commercials over the years for high-end brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Mercedes Benz -I can certainly see how his style would be attractive to them. However there is something missing from world cinema without him and I hope Blossoms Shanghai is  a comeback in a big way for him. Because as I re-watch his movies, the more I yearn for that vivid aesthetic and soulful mood that perhaps most starkly epitomizes the kind of deep emotional connection cinema is capable of.

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