The Style and Themes of Wong Kar-wai
Amongst the plethora of typical Hong Kong comedy, fantasy, and Jet Li-like action films, Wong Kar-wai emerged as a promising director in the late ’80s as part of the Second New Wave of Hong Kong filmmakers who studied the nation’s social and political issues. Averaging one film every two years, Wong is a prolific director, whose style has become frequently imitated in Hong Kong. As evidenced by Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, Wong’s films are slightly experimental character pieces that focus on the critical and recurring themes of time, detachment and isolation in spite of an aberrant and consistently inconsistent style.
Chungking Express tells the intersecting stories of two jilted policemen pining over their former girlfriends, one actively pursuing love, the other so blinded by his pain and isolation that he is oblivious to Faye, the quirky restaurant employee, and her obsession with him and the changes she makes to his apartment while he is gone; and a blonde-wig and sunglass-wearing drug smuggler and murderess desperately searching for the Indian cohorts that have run off with her money and drugs. In the Mood for Love is the story of two neighbors who discover that their spouses are having an affair together, and the relationship between them that ensues.
Even Wong’s most simple plotlines are complicated via editing with his manipulation of time and traversing plots. Almost immediately into Chungking Express, Wong introduces elements of his characteristic style. During the opening sequence, shot on a handheld camera, time is advanced and the picture blurred as a disguised woman walks past the city’s denizens. The film opens with a voiceover narrative from the nameless plainclothes officer #223 as he runs along crowded Hong Kong streets in pursuit of a criminal. “Everyday we brush past people, people we may never meet…or who may become close friends.” These two characters brush past each other, and the story begins by conveying the events of the next 57 hours of their lives. After a shot of a clock displaying the time and ate, officer #223 narrates, “This is the closest we ever got. Just a 0.01 of a centimeter between us. But 57 hours later…I fell in love with this woman.”
Thrust into the narrative with no significant establishing scenes, Wong presents a few of his recurring style choices and themes.
“Central to Wong Kar-wai’s work…is the theme of time. It appears in many guises—the mysteries of change, the ephemerality of the present, the secret affinities among simultaneous incidents, the longings created by memory and nostalgia. The characters are constantly watching the clock, laboring under due dates or meditating on missed chances and mistaken choices.”
Always an element in his films, time has a particular cultural value in Chungking Express. Presumably set in present-day 1994, Hong Kong was just three years away from its concession to China. Although no major changes were supposed to disturb everyday life, Hong Kong citizens were unsure of what to expect. Officer #223’s obsession with expiration dates speaks to this looming sense of uncertainty. The sense of time between these two intersecting tales is difficult to reconfigure, as characters from one subplot appear in the other. Wong also manipulates time at several points throughout the film, notably when officer #663 stands at the restaurant with Faye. Time seems to simultaneously slow down and fast forward as these two characters have very limited movement, while the rest of the world passes in a hurry. “The resulting visual effect conveys that while the rest of the world blurs by, they are in a stagnant state of existence, lost within their own nostalgic thoughts.” This visual treatment adds to the sense of detachment and isolation the characters experience, which is also one of Wong’s frequently revisited themes.
The theme plays out a bit differently in In the Mood for Love.
“…what we see on screen is less the depiction of an extramarital affair than of its remains as they are re-envisioned and fetishised in the mind’s eye. The images are simultaneously more intimate and more distanced than in Wong’s other films. The shots are brief and they often disappear from the screen before we can quite grasp the meaning of what we’ve seen. The connection between sequences of shots is elliptical in the extreme.”
One way that Wong illustrates the passing of time with the varying cheongsams Mrs. Chan wears. Her wardrobe also evokes the ’60s fashion, and juxtaposes with her solemnity.
The theme of isolation and detachment is very apparent in this film. Because people were fleeing Communist-ruled Shanghai for Hong Kong, there was a housing shortage, leading to people renting rooms and packing themselves into apartments. Wong shows the protagonists’ isolation by showing them in many shots by themselves, and by their choices to eat alone and avoid contact with others.
“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.”
Earlier in the film, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan speak to their spouses mainly off-camera, creating a feeling of isolation despite having a companion they live with. In Chungking Express, the idea of detachment is expressed by nameless characters: the woman with the blonde wig and the two police officers.
Throughout the duration of his films, Wong abandons the use of a consistent style, although there are elements characteristic of the style he has created. These techniques include using pop music to tap into popular history, or into the characters’ emotions, “voice-over commentary and nuanced shifts in filming speeds…interior monologues, grotesque angles, and scrambled time schemes.” Other recurring themes are memory, identity, space, urbanity, and mood.
This essay has only begun to touch the surface of Wong Kar-wai’s ever-evolving style. Because his films are created with so much spontaneity, starting with a rough outline and getting more specific each day, and due to the immense imitation of his style in Hong Kong, Wong is constantly experimenting with new ways to tell his stories and make social commentary. Even with such a short filmography, Wong has established himself as one of the most important directors in the world right now.
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