Yet Wong’s work is more locally specific than it may first appear-all his major films are in a sense about the emotional impasse represented by Hong Kong in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is a world we know, heightened and chaotic, sped up and slowed down, with the line between past and future, between what’s inside and outside us, blurred and fractured.įaye Wong is a woman obsessed in “Chungking Express,” Wong Kar-wai’s most energetic vision of a Hong Kong on the brink of change.
The result, though full of startling and sensational pleasures, can have an eerie familiarity for urban viewers under late capitalism. Wong’s alienated romances travel easily across languages and cultures: While they’re concerned with existential questions of loss and freedom, their frenetic visual experimentalism and fragmentary structures give them a postmodern sensibility that puts melodrama, noir, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave through an MTV blender. The drama is all visual and emotional, as in a silent film: A scene where the tailor, alone, puts his hands inside a dress he’s altering for her conveys the whole arc of the affair.
Many of Wong’s feature films have been built from two or three shorter stories of this kind, in which the people and their relationships are immediately recognizable, you don’t need much fleshing out of their individual histories, and even the dialogue is barely required. Though The Hand is by no means his best work, its qualities are instructive. retrospective, The World of Wong Kar Wai. In fact, it’s that of Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand, the only erotic section of Eros (2004), an otherwise unredeemed anthology film with contributions by Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh, now rereleased by itself in an extended cut as part of the Hong Kong auteur’s U.S. This ought to be the plot of an operetta.
He even pays her rent after her fortunes decline, which they do in spectacular nineteenth-century fashion-her looks begin to slip, the fancier suitors drop away, degradation and penury follow, and she develops a mysterious illness we gather will be fatal. That’s a good investment on her part: He makes her exquisite dresses and is so devoted that he eventually stops charging for them. Their encounter lasts a few minutes, but his ensuing fixation on her is permanent. A green young tailor’s assistant is summoned to see a high-flying prostitute.