How Wong Kar-wai renewed his love for filmmaking with smaller dramas
While Wong Kar-wai might be best known for his Hong Kong drama films Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and In the Mood for Love, at one point, it looked as though his career was heading in a very different direction. In fact, it was precisely because of those very movies that Wong renewed his love for the medium of cinema and the profession of filmmaking.
At the end of the 1980s, Hong Kong cinema was hot property, particularly in the realms of the action and martial arts genres. By the time Wong came to make his directorial debut, having worked as a screenwriter for TV soap operas and a handful of smaller movie productions, he sought to follow on from the success of John Woo’s 1986 crime film A Better Tomorrow with the gangster drama As Tears Go By.
Inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, As Tears Go By, starring Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung and Jacky Cheung, announced Wong as a series talent in the world of Hong Kong action. However, it was a genre that he largely felt indifferent to, and he quickly sought to make films closer to his heart, once noting, “I could have continued making films like As Tears Go By for the rest of eternity, but I wanted to do something more personal after that. I wanted to break the structure of the average Hong Kong film.”
Wong’s response arrived through his next film, 1990’s Days of Being Wild, which tells of a young man’s journey of self-discovery when he tries to find out the identity of his birth mother after learning that he was adopted. At the same time, Yuddy becomes romantically involved with two women despite being unable to commit to either of them, with Wong diving into the themes of alienation and the oft-fruitless search for love.
Days of Being Wild indeed disrupted the narrative conventions of Hong Kong cinema, with the action elements of many of the country’s most acclaimed works being replaced by a story of emotional resonance and a focus on filmmaking as a genuine art form, one well-versed in mood creation and atmosphere. Wong, who worked with frequent collaborator Christopher Doyle for the first time on Days of Being Wild, suddenly had his love for filmmaking burn through his very being.
However, the film was not a box office success, and as such, Wong found his next projects difficult to fund. In response, he ended up making the wuxia film Ashes of Time in the hopes of further cementing his reputation as a gifted filmmaker. However, not only was Ashes of Time a nightmare to make – taking more than two years to complete – when it was released, audiences were baffled by its overall tone and aesthetic.
Clearly, Wong’s heart lay in making films similar to Days of Being Wild, and during the production of Ashes of Time, he set about creating one of the best Hong Kong movies ever made, even if only in response to his increasing frustration with the film industry at large. “I thought I should do something to make myself feel comfortable about making films again,” Wong had once said. “So I made Chungking Express, which I made like a student film.”
Also released in 1994, Chungking Express is one of Wong’s masterpieces, and it’s a film that certainly defines his overall contribution to the cinematic medium. Completed in just six weeks, again with the glorious cinematography of Christopher Doyle, Chungking tells two distinct stories of two lonely Hong Kong policemen falling for starkly differing women.
The film revealed Wong to be one of the greatest directors of his generation, but invigorated by its simplicity, he didn’t rest on his laurels whatsoever, setting about to create his next film, Fallen Angels, immediately. What resulted was a companion piece to Chungking Express that explored the darkness of Hong Kong, as opposed to the light of the prior movie.
Fallen Angels possesses some of the crime elements of Wong’s work on As Tears Goes By, but it largely taps into the emotional lives of its characters, including a hitman who longs to leave the criminal underworld and a mute ex-convict who falls for a recently-dumped young woman. Back-to-back, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels largely define Wong’s overarching thematic and aesthetic contribution to cinema and are easily amongst his best works.
While Wong had indeed been tasked with taking on larger productions and would again return to the martial arts movie with his Ip Man biopic The Grandmaster, his smaller dramas are the films that showed to him just what was that he cherished the most about filmmaking, namely, crafting emotional poignant narratives with stunning cinematography and eternally memorable, moving scores. Wong’s Hong Kong dramas simply capture “the vibe” of everything that is great about East Asian cinema, whatever that might be lexically reducible to.
Following up with Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and 2046, Wong clearly found the style of cinema that suited him the most, one that made him proud to be a director. Though his roots lie in the kind of crime movie that Hong Kong cinema would be defined by in the 1980s, Wong’s small drama movies are those that showcase not only his genius as a filmmaker but the fact that passion projects ought to be considered with more imperative than those only taken on in financial consideration.