Before “The Grandmaster 2046” and “In The Mood for Love”, Wong Kar-wai was already an immense filmmaker with a well-honed style. Rediscover four of his films in cinemas from December 20th .
The stories in Wong Kar-wai’s films sometimes seem to resemble each other: a little violence and a few guns, the traditional heritage of Hong Kong cinema, and above all a lot of love, passion and regret. Sadness, then, but always saved by humour. As we sometimes forget, Wong Kar-wai’s films also make us smile, as in “Chungking Express” (1994), when the character Takeshi Kaneshiro, bored after being dumped by his girlfriend, starts calling all his former conquests one after the other, in the vain hope of finding someone to share his night with.
But what we remember most about Wong Kar-wai’s films is his unique style. Each film has its own signature: there’s the slow motion of “In The Mood for Love”, of course, but you have to rediscover the almost frame-by-frame sequences of “Chungking Express” (2000), the wide-angle shots of “Fallen Angels” (1995) or the black-and-white passages of “Happy Together” (1997). And what would a Wong Kar-wai film be without its soundtrack? The filmmaker loves American music and old Wurlizter jukeboxes, which he often films.
We hear Argentine tango in “Happy Together” or Dennis Brown’s reggae standard “Things in Life”, not forgetting the hit “California Dreamin'” that Faye Wong’s character listens to over and over again in “Chungking Express”. Faye is a young woman with short hair, touching and eccentric, a little crazy, who served as the main inspiration for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s character Amélie Poulain, and today we like to compare the similarities. They also stem from the acute sense of costume and allure that give Wong Kar-wai’s heroes absolute class. This is particularly true of his favourite actor Tony Leung, elegant in all circumstances, whether he’s a uniformed cop or a nightclub bouncer in Buenos Aires.
These elements aside, Wong Kar-wai’s style seems easily reproducible, and by the turn of the 2000s, many filmmakers were attempting to imitate it – not to mention the advertising industry, which drew heavily on it. It would be easy to reduce the filmmaker to his aesthetic. But style would be nothing if it weren’t combined with an incredible talent for directing, paradoxically never flashy, but which places cinema at the level of poetry. It’s hard not to be moved when this young couple speed through Hong Kong’s Cross-Harbour Tunnel by night, on motorcycles, while the polyphonic music of “The Flying Pickets'” “Only You” echoes at the end of “Les Anges Déchus”. The director is a master of the powerful art of melancholy, and when it overwhelms us, we all wish we were sad like in a Wong Kar-wai film.
“Chungking Express,” “Les Anges Déchus”, “Happy Together” and “The Hand” of Wong Kar-wai.
In cinema from December 20th