Daniel Laverick traces the career of the director heading the Jury
at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The Cannes film festival has had a wide range of established international directors at the helm of its judging panel in its long and varied history. From the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino to respected individuals such as Luc Besson, David Cronenberg and David Lynch, the president of the jury panel is always a big name, usually with an established footing in Hollywood. This year’s choice has raised a few eyebrows and will no doubt make for an interesting Palme D’Or winner come the end of May. Wong Kar Wai will lead the 2006 panel, a director whose work can be described as an acquired taste and who is revered and criticised in equal measure.
A Hong Kong auteur - perhaps the island’s only auteur - with a penchant for themes of loss, time and love, Wong is a filmmaker with a distinct visual style that stands out in a national cinema obsessed with speed, action and fantasy. Although his work has a strong following among the Western art house crowd, his films are rarely box office successes in his homeland. This doesn’t prevent the likes of Hong Kong stars such as Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi from working with him, a film auteur working within a movie industry where martial arts and comedy rule.
Born in Shanghai in 1958, Wong Kar Wai moved to Hong Kong as a five year old. His early career included a period of script writing for television at HKTVB before he was given the chance to direct his first feature length film, As Tears Go By (1988), which was made in the era of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986). Starring Jacky Cheung and Andy Lau, As Tears Go By is perhaps the least ‘Wong’ film in his repertoire, falling neatly into the popular gangster melodrama genre that identified 1980s Hong Kong cinema. It’s with his second film as director, Days of Being Wild (1991), where we see the beginnings of Wong’s cinematic obsession with love, loss and time. The film was experimental at the time, with a deliberately paced narrative that was a huge step away from his previous generic effort. A star-studded cast, including Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Jacky Cheung and Maggie Cheung, provide suitably restrained performances alongside Leslie Cheung’s brooding lothario Yuddy. The characters think and talk about love throughout the film, failing to truly connect with other despite their emotional entanglements and intense desires. This was to be an indication for Wong’s future direction and his continual reluctance to ever let his characters fall in love and live happily ever after. Days of Being Wild was a complete failure at the Hong Kong box office but did well elsewhere in Asia and gained numerous awards and nominations at various film festivals.
Wong’s 1994 foray into the wuxia genre did not follow the standard conventions of the usual ‘swords and sorcery’ film. Once again Leslie Cheung stars, this time as an assassin who lives in an isolated desert shack that seems to attract travelling swordsmen. Quite frankly, the plot is almost incomprehensible without repeated viewings and extensive note taking and analysis, and it drew criticism from many for being ‘self-indulgent’. Wong rejects the generic conventions of the wuxia film, refusing to adhere to the expectations of his audience, and simply makes the film in the way he wanted to. Ashes of Time had a lengthy production time and ultimately did Wong no favours with the critics. His next film, made during a two-month break in the shooting of Ashes of Time, became one of his most loved films.
Chungking Express (1994), stars Tony Leung, Brigitte Lin, Faye Wong and Japanese star Takeshi Kaneshiro. A film set in modern Hong Kong with a resonating theme of time, love, loss and the desire to have someone who is seemingly unattainable, this was the film that brought significant attention to Wong Kar Wai’s work. Split into two halves, Chungking Express follows two policemen who are identified through their numbers rather than their names. Officer 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) obsesses over the date he broke up with his girlfriend, buying tins of pineapple with the same expiry date on them and reflecting on how everything, including love, has an expiry date. He vows to fall in love with the next woman he meets who happens to be a mysterious character sporting a blonde wig (played by Brigitte Lin). They share a night together in a hotel room that ends with the woman falling asleep, leaving officer 223 alone again, failing to quell his feelings of isolation. The second half of the film concentrates on Tony Leung’s officer 633 and his lengthy courting of Faye, a girl who works at the food market he frequents. Faye (Faye Wong) dreams of escaping to California and constantly listens to the Mama and the Papas song California Dreaming. The song acts as a musical representation of her character who, in turn, identifies a common feeling within Hong Kong at the time. Many Hong Kong films from this period were marked by a thematic shift towards a desire to escape, a yearning to be elsewhere, and a fear of the future. This was due to the impending handover of Hong Kong from Britain to mainland China in 1997, an event which had a significant impact on the narrative themes used by Hong Kong’s directors, none more so than Wong Kar Wai.
In 1995, Wong directed Fallen Angels which, thematically, is a rehashing of the story in Chungking Express. Once again, Wong adopts a dual narrative in order to tell the tale of two different sets of lovers. Starring (once again) Takeshi Kaneshiro with Michelle Reis, Fallen Angels was heavily criticised (once again) for its self-indulgence and for existing merely as a testament to Wong’s own previous work. Those who enjoyed the spark of brilliance exhibited in his last film came out armed with barbed comments for his latest work. His recognisable use of themes and distinct visual style, coupled with his repeated use of the same actors and crew, perhaps worked against him in some respects, something Wong himself commented on when reflecting on the aftermath of the film’s release.
After the critical negativity that greeted Fallen Angels, it seems Wong Kar Wai deliberately set out to defend his talents with 1997’s Happy Together. Shot in Argentina, Happy Together follows the destructive relationship of gay lovers Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung) and Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung), two Hong Kong men travelling and working in Argentina. In true Wong Kar Wai style, the narrative is somewhat disjointed and unclear, forcing the spectator to rely on the image in order to decipher emotion and character intent. This is a testament to the acting skills of both Leung and Cheung who perform their roles superbly in a film that brought the critics back onto Wong’s side. Experimental work with the image and sound in various parts of the film, coupled with excellent camera work from long time collaborator Christopher Doyle, enrich a film that was to be the start of Wong’s uninterrupted rise up the directorial ladder to the respected position he holds today.
Following Happy Together, Wong directed his most successful and well-loved film to date. In The Mood For Love (2001) is set in a 1960s Hong Kong that has a tremendous amount of intricate detail going into its recreation. The narrative concentrates on the unconsummated love affair between central characters Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung….again!) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung). Both characters move into neighbouring apartments in a cramped Hong Kong building and begin a lengthy, yet unspoken, flirtation with each other. Their desire for each other is once again played out through looks, facial expressions and subtle acting on the part of Leung and Cheung. This is a slow-paced film, deliberately timed to build up the intense passion between the two protagonists that in the end is never allowed to unfold. Once again, Wong obsesses over desire and the power that love has over one’s actions and thoughts. The setting also plays a significant role here, as it does in all of his films. The Argentinean backdrop of Happy Together served to accentuate the cultural isolation felt by the Hong Kong characters, the side streets of modern Hong Kong gave Chungking Express a definite sense of place and time, while Ashes of Time sets its entire story in the middle of a barren desert, placing its wuxia warriors in a harsh and unforgiving environment. In In The Mood For Love, the 1960s Hong Kong landscape is also significant, not just for the film’s stylisation, but also in regards to its social setting. The highly sexual, yet highly repressed characters, exude their frustrations and desires through clothing (Maggie Cheung’s tight-fitting dresses) and colour, which represents change in both time and mood. In The Mood For Love exemplifies the best of Wong Kar Wai’s filmmaking traits and stands as the best example so far of his directorial skills and his ability to manipulate the medium into the art form that many strive for.
Wong Kar Wai’s last film to date was 2046 (2005), which operates as a companion piece to In The Mood For Love. Tony Leung reprises his role as Chow Mo-wan, though the character has altered dramatically from the lovelorn individual of the previous film. Embittered by the loss of the love of his life, he is now a predatory womaniser who takes sexual gratification from his women and refuses any possibility of commitment. Chow has relationships with prostitute Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) and Su Li-zhen (Gong Li) while he works as a writer of sci-fi stories. His literary role facilitates segments of the film which are set in the future - in 2046, to be precise. In essence, Chow’s role as a writer is unimportant, as the futuristic sequences relate instead to the seemingly cryptic title of the film. 2046 is the year in which Hong Kong is due to be fully integrated back into mainland China’s rule and culture. The handover in 1997 included a stipulation that Hong Kong would be left to stay ‘the same’ for a period of fifty years. Wong questions this notion, asking “how can anyone or anything stay the same for fifty years?”. This resonates throughout 2046 as Wong questions the extreme highs and lows that come with feelings of love and once again delves into the sphere of loss, time and memory. Wong’s last film was a critical success and reaffirmed his status as a modern auteur director with an intense concern for the unlimited potential of the visual image in film. Coupled with his commitment to exploring the themes that have now become synonymous with his work, Wong Kar Wai continues to excel.
2046 premiered at Cannes 2004 and was one of the films in competition that lost out to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. As this year’s president of the Jury, it might not be the expected favourite that comes away with the coveted Palme D’or but perhaps something from out of left field. Wong Kar Wai is a director with an eye for the visually stunning and a love for narrative themes that explore emotion and the human state of being, which shows in his work and I’m sure will show in his choice as Jury president.
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