#763
Post
by barbarella satyricon » Fri Apr 02, 2021 11:01 pm
I guess it was more or less my finalized, personal summation of WKW’s filmography all along, but the release of this boxset is confirming for me that Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are the two works that I care about with any ardency (a lot, actually), and that the others have always been take-it-or-leave-it deals, more so than I would have thought when the old Kino dvd set was holding prIde of place shelf space during college years, and when In the Mood for Love was, in my impressionistic recollections, on near-constant dvd rotation, almost like background music, cinematographic wallpaper on the tube.
It’s funny because that last one’s always felt, from the very first viewing in the theater, dramatically inert at heart, a suspended drama (almost Marienbad-like in its atmosphere of isolation and stasis) that just kind of unspools to an end, with only that provisional, symbolic release/catharsis at the ruins – an act of release that is simultaneously a final burial, another elaborated repression.
Which might be the point of the whole thing, got it. But considering that I still haven’t been roused to pick up the Criterion blu after all these years, I’m thinking it was always the atmosphere – the mood – that compelled me to another “viewing” all those times, but then the go-nowhere story that lost me to other tasks and chores around the house while the gorgeous thing played on.
(But who knows how our individual stances and posturings in regard to films will change and change again with the years? If we’re all alive to be at some 25, 35, or 50th anniversary screening of what will no doubt still be “Wong’s timeless romantic masterpiece”, I may be the one with tears falling like big fat jewels by projection light.)
Continuing this desultory post (in this truly unpredictable thread), a condensed WKW viewing history, with comments:
Days of Being Wild, from a rewatch some seasons back, starts off so strong, with that “pop” in the editing that I think anticipates some of the rhythms of Chungking Express (e.g. the series of shots wherein Carina Lau has the violent meet-cute with Leslie Cheung and ends up scoring the earrings), but then bogs down in sequences of long takes, distended conversation scenes that I don’t think ever play to Wong’s strengths, in this or other of his films (e.g. Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau’s nighttime walks and talks).
Typing out the above, I find the same holds true for me with Ashes of Time. In the original release version, love the editing in the faster-paced scenes and sequences, the rush and the cacophony of that crazy soundtrack music. And even within that preferred version of the film, I tend to tune out when the monologues turn all slow and lugubrious and the shot durations start sapping the mise-en-scéne and cinematography of their interest. The Redux version, when I got around to it, had me tuning out like that a lot more.
Happy Together, I don’t think I’ve ever properly watched from beginning to end, but it’s one I’ve always meant to get to, and its compromised treatment in this set, with the excised dialogue, is curiously what irks me more than the other changes – that is, not a matter of some “new vision” or what have you, but just seeming thoughtlessness and abdicated diligence in showing the film, in its complete and original form, even a modicum of respect and care.
Watched As Tears Go By only recently, couldn’t get into it.
Is this post just me working through a sour-lemons relinquishing of this boxset? Maybe. But 2046 has always meant little to me, keeping me at more than arm’s length each time I’ve tried to warm up to it. It just isn’t a warming-up kind of flick, I guess. And I’m finding now, with just a little surprise, that that’s what I’d say about a lot of Wong’s films, from Days to Ashes, even In the Mood.
In that sense, I’d probably find a place for (gulp) My Blueberry Nights in my own private WKW top five. An untenable position, maybe, and I’ve only seen it once or twice. But except for some very obviously clunky and badly staged scenes (I think Wong genuinely doesn’t know how to set up a shot in wide open spaces; the American desert-town locales here really are a world away from the extreme cramp and compression of Hong Kong tenements and underground concourses), this one left a pretty sweet aftertaste, a nice sugar-buzz, and I think it really would find its place on a short list of favorites, a list with loosely interchangeable positions after Chungking and Angels.
That’s it, that’s me rambling for a bit about these films I’ve long lived with, moved with from place to place. I’m finding I can, if not happily, then also not at all painfully, let go of the idea of some perfectly ideal configuration of Wong Kar-Wai films in one big beautiful box. See ya for the next round of restorations and redos, whenever that may be.
