#very inarticulate but articulate im sorry this took so long

[scenics]

what's your favorite thing about wong kar wai's movies? why do you like his movies so much?

wrote this in the notes app at 3am. this got very long. wkw’s one of my fave directors of all time

first of all, i did not like wong kar wai’s movies growing up. my first introduction to wong kar wai was with in the mood for love, and i always hated how slow the movie was—i could not understand the value of two middle aged people walking circles around each other on when i was eight years old. my mother was particularly fascinated with the movie and every few years or so she’d borrow it from the local library just to rewatch it by herself, or with me as an unwilling audience. maybe she just really liked tony leung like everyone else did, or i didn’t understand what she was going through back then. now, she watches it a lot less, but ironically i’m the one who watches it on a regular basis. when i look back, i realize my hatred of in the mood for love stemmed from my rejection of my mother when i was younger, along with anything related to my culture/heritage. it was my way of reconciling the isolation i felt in my new home at a young age—i thought that rejecting any part of my past would allow me to assimilate better (and for the most part it worked until senior year of high school give or take). i can say now that my former hatred/rejection of wong kar wai’s greatest work—his magnum opus—makes me appreciate him a lot more. like my mother taught me, it is best not to hate if you can love one day.

my real love and fascination for wong kar wai started when i was 18. the week after my first week of college finals, i watched his entire filmography (excluding anything post 2046) in one long sitting. i was exhausted from an accumulation of things: college did not go the way i expected and i hated science with a passionate sincerity by the end of the year. that year, i had also not chosen to go home.  regretted not just going back to vietnam a lot and i spent the entire first year of college just missing it. i was mentally emotionally exhausted and homesick so i found immediate comfort and familiarity in wong kar wai’s films. all of wong kar wai’s films are based around the simple theme of connection, each character desires connection with another —whether through strangers like in chungking express or estranged lovers in a foreign city like in happy together. every character is lost in their own world of loneliness, but they’re not consumed by it as they constantly venture out to find a cure for their loneliness. there’s a sort of warm tenderness to their eternal loneliness. wong kar wai’s characters are all very simple, but that just makes them the more normal. he adds an amusing, yet charming aspect to a lot of his characters, which makes them all the more real. at the end of the day, they’re the most ordinary of people, but framed in wong kar wai’s romantic vision of the world. for me, i can see myself in a lot of his characters, especially as i’ve now settled myself into my twenties.

most of all, wong kar wai’s movies remind me of home a lot. more than anything. vietnamese cinema barely exists, and his films of hong kong are one of the only threads of my childhood memories captured in film. in his films, his characters loneliness stems from an urban isolation and a desire to find home. how can one constantly be surrounded by people, yet feel so lonely?  90s hong kong reminds me a lot of early 2000s saigon, right before true modern urbanization began to take foot. the saigon i return to now is not the place i grew up in, everything i once knew with familiarity has become foreign (you could argue the same for hong kong too). like both the main characters in happy together, i’m very much far away from home now, but what makes it worse is i don’t have a home to return to anymore despite it still being there. the isolation i feel here is much less comforting than the familiar isolation of asia, it’s an entirely distinct feeling i’ve come to differentiate. the night version of hong kong in fallen angels reminds me very much of saigon at night when i was little—when i would cling to my aunts back on the motorcycle. even more, hong kong at night is an unmistakable feeling—a true moment of limbo that you can experience nowhere else as the city seems to slow to a stop before starting up again (the dim sum scene in fallen angels reminds me of my uncle taking me with him to smalls shops buried deep in hong kong’s markets. in my opinion, the most crowded, dirty, loud places have the best food).

one of the things i also love the most about wong kar wais films are they are essentially “of an era.” context heavily influences his films, and watchers should understand that his best films are primarily made in the decade of hong kong’s handover from the uk to china.  looking back now, his films are representative of the end of hong kong pop culture culture. they’re the last threads of a former culture powerhouse in asia—hk cantopop, film, and tv throughout the late 70s to 90s had an immense influence on asian pop culture today. everybody knew and loved hong kong, because it was the only true source of quality pop culture in an age of barely any in asia. hong kong was the beginning of everything essentially. kpop even, i would argue, would not be what it is today without cantopop—many idols are modeled after the cantopop idols of the 80s along with western influence. it’s sad to see that hong kong’s impact has been increasingly erased over the past 20 or so years—hong kong is now a shell of it’s former self as it can never return to its former glory. wong kar wai’s greatest films are chungking express, fallen angels, happy together, and in the mood for love. they’re all made in the years predating or after the handover, and you can see the differences in feeling of each film as it nears 1997. happy together, aside from being a somewhat tragic love story, is also the tragedy of hong kong. the handover of 1997 seems to haunt that film as the characters are also far way from hong kong; they’re on the other side of the world. there’s a sense of fear and desperation that runs parallel to the main love story and i feel like people don’t see that the first time without an understanding of historical context. chungking express and fallen angels are two sides of hong kong—hong kong by day and by night—they’re wong kar wai’s love letter to hong kong itself before it disappears in the subsequent years (which it has sadly). both of those movies are time capsules of an era, they capture an atmosphere that is now gone in hong kong. 2046 is an extension of those four movies above—an imagining of how hong kong would be be 99 years after the “end” of hong kong as it is in 1997. and finally, wong kar wai’s greatest work is in the mood for love. it’s his magnum opus, and the true end of an era: for wong kar wai’s creative capacity, for hong kong pop culture, for the actors themselves. wong kar wai has been unable to follow in the mood for love successfully with other directorial features, it’s a masterpiece in itself in its inability for recreation. the movie speaks for itself, even maggie subsequently quit acting shortly afterwards because she felt she could never top that role—it was the end of her acting career in terms of era. everything that wong kar wai put out in the 90s is of an era, it cannot and never be repeated or recreated just as the old hong kong is gone (which is why his attempt to make sequels for those movies with blossoms and the chungking express sequel will be futile. wong kar wai does not realize that that era has indeed passed (and his his break up with christopher doyle has proved to be fatal for both of them).

finally, a small addition about wong kar wai as a director himself. he’s a cancer, very true to his nature, which explains how he can so fluidly translate and portray emotion in his films. they’re almost overflowing with tender emotion, but very much so in an implicit manner. i could never do that in anything i create, it’d end up being very much lynchian in manner, which makes me appreciate his films a lot more. moreover, wong kar wai has a certain way, an intimacy with all his actors. he brings out the best in them for only his movies, and that’s what makes him so special. also, i relate a lot to wong kar wai’s method of working ..the man is one of the worst procrastinators he’s worse than me. he almost never plans or writes scripts for his movies. most of his films especially in the 90s are very much “go with the flow” improvisation (u can see that the characters are very much the actors even it’s hard to distinguish). he was editing in the mood for love up to the last minute before final submission for cannes, that’s just how much of a procrastinator he was and why it’ll take him a million years to release the chungking express sequel. it’s amazing to think how all of these great movies from wong kar wai are technically equivalent to 2000 word essays submitted a minute past the deadline. what i imagine is how different would his work be if he’d planned ahead (how much better would my essays be if i didn’t write them at 3am?). but i guess we can all see how much he’s changed in the release of his criterion collection—-he’s not the person he once was and he can’t recreate the past.

if u read this far i love you thank u for reading my inarticulate nonsense thoughts. i hope u like wong kar wai a lot more than before