Round Two Resurrection Reviews Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar Wai, 1990) Won over Fight Back to School - sdedalus Lost to A Petal - tinyholidays | Fallen Angels (Wong Kar Wai, 1995) Won over Xiu Xiu - jbissell Lost to Blues Harp - BlueVoid | Happy Together (Wong Kar Wai, 1997) Won over Happy End - Clovis8 Lost to Supermarket Woman - Bondo |
Having watched all three of these films in the past week, I really have to hand it to mañana's
review of
Happy Together, wherein he dares to admit the unadmittable: "There’s a stylish coolness to Wong Kar-wai that I find kind of corny." Haha, there's really something to that. Wong is a total cornball. He litters his films with the mechanisms of romantic comedies — payphones, video cameras, tape recorders — and then gives them a tragiocomic twist that's equally romantic and corny, in an emo kind of way. The romantic gestures are almost all ill-timed or misunderstood or appreciated but acknowledged. Wong is a postmodern cinematic romantic, a teenage kid imitiating Belmondo imitating Bogart. Halfway through the second film, all the secondhand smoke started to make me cough. By the end of the third film, I remembered the fine-line between auteurism and self-plagiarism, between consistency and redundancy. I was smiling at the time.
I can't quite imagine what it must have been like to walk into a theater in Hong Kong in 1990 and watch
Days of Being Wild. How surprised those few audience members in attendance must have been to learn that Hong Kong films were allowed to have good music in them. And how awed they must have been at just how very assured Wong's filmmaking was — visually, stylistically, even thematically. I haven't seen anything else quite as striking from 1990s Hong Kong since Peter Chan's
Comrades, Almost a Love Story, and that was made six years later. The opening ten minutes of
Days of Being Wild have the feel of statement cinema, redefining what movies can do and what audiences should expect from them. It's a great vingette between Leslie Cheung and Maggie Cheung, one which probably inspired a whole generation of short thesis films. Wong is so good at these meet-cutes that I wish he'd just give into his alleged corniness and make his own
Love Actually or whatever. But romantic comedies aren't cool, duh, so it's the nihilism of Leslie Cheung's character that overtakes the picture, and that's interesting too, I suppose. I can totally relate to the criticisms outlined by tinyholidays in her verdict ("crazypants"!!!), but most of it worked for me. In fact, in time I think it could my favorite of these three films. It's already the most aesthetically pleasing, I think, especially with that consistently great color palette and the absence of too much jarring craziness. I'm surprised everybody in this
marathon thread was so enthusiastic about the ending — I'm much more mixed on it myself — but we at least seem to agree that, on the whole, it's a very good film.
Fallen Angels, on the other hand, is my least favorite of these three movies and the one I find the least visually appealing (I am not a fish). The main thread about the killer (Leon Lai) and the agent (Michelle Reis) is borderline great, but the secondary story focusing on Takeshi Kaneshiro's willfully mute anarchist was, for me, an annoying diversion. The conceit of his breaking into random small business and operating them after hours is a good one, but it fails to develop into anything interesting and mostly just takes time away from Lai/Reis. Scott Tobias, in the
New Canon review linked to by jbissell in his verdict, devotes disproportionately few sentences to this storyline (just three), which I think is telling, and declares that "later scenes about his complicated and ultimately touching relationship with his father give the role unexpected emotional depth." I agree with that to a point, but that emotional depth is brought about cheaply and represents Wong at his corniest. His reliance on multiple threads and narrators works against him here, resulting in a film that feels like an incomplete collection of moments, moments which, however cool in isolation, frustrate in aggregate. IMDb has a bit of trivia for
Children of Men that says that Clive Owen's character never gets to finish a cigarette. That's a near perfect metaphor for Wong's storytelling in
Fallen Angels. Not that I didn't like the movie.
One great appeal of revisiting
Happy Together in the wake of the previous film was the promise of a more focused narrative, however elliptical it might be. And while the film does briefly follow a supporting character (Chang) in typical Wong fashion, the story did deliver on that promise. That turned out to be a negative, though, showcasing what seem to be Wong's weaknesses as a screenwriter. The disintegrated relationship between Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung) and Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) just isn't that interesting — or, rather, it isn't presented in an interesting fashion. Instead, their scenes together are like a caricature of a Cassavetes film — two people being sort of repetitively nasty to each other. It made me long to watch
Two for the Road again instead. There are a few strong moments between them (I especially liked the lighting of the cigarette shot through the door, for example), but there are long stretches when the film relies on its masterful audiovisual technique to maintain any sort of engagement. Wong excels at dramatizing the making and missing of personal connections, but Ho and Lai are stuck in limbo between those ends, and the script seems a bit stuck, too. When Tony Leung's character is on his own, the film really soars, evoking wonderfully his sense of isolation and the near connection he has with Chang. The cumulative effect of the sustained mood affected me even more strongly than that in
Days of Being Wild, and the film ended on its highest note, which really helps its lasting impression with me.
I'm not sure everything I wrote above reflects what I actually meant to say. I really struggled with these reviews, and it didn't help matters that I wrote them piecemeal over the course of two days. Just to summarize: These are three good films, though I can very much understand the reasons each of them lost its second round matchup. Still, I suspect at least two of them will be back in the third round, possibly all three.
Resurrection Standings (the top twelve films will earn resurrection)Up next:
Minbo - or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion.
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