Hong Kong Films That Appeal to Everyone
By Monika Kochhar

Fragmented stories about moody love, mysterious vamps and unconsummated passion, accentuated with haunting soundtracks and exquisite cinematography are the playing ground of Wong Kar-Wai, the iconic Hong Kong director of contemporary cinema. Quintessentially hip and always in dark sunglasses, Wong is a commercially and critically successful director whose movies include the masterpieces Happy Together and In the Mood for Love. He has single-handedly introduced Hong Kong and its surrounding regions to a new kind of urban cult cinema, and the world to a new poignant texture of romance, lighting, and camera work that resonates with the romantic side of each movie-goer.

Wong Kar-Wai was born in Shanghai in 1958 and moved with his family to Hong Kong five years later. After studying Graphic Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic, he found his way into television and then films. In 1988, Wong made his directorial debut with As Tears Go By, a contemplative portrait of disconnection and unrequited longing that stood out amongst the familiar non-stop action films in Hong Kong. The movie was both a critical and commercial success; it was the first Hong Kong movie to be presented at the film festival in Cannes in 1989 and won audiences at the box office. His next few movies, however, did not do so well.

	Trailer of 2046
	Stills from Wong Kar-Wai's films

Stylized, melancholic and long, Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time were both commercial flops. While Hong Kong audiences found it difficult to accept anything but the standard, Jackie Chan style action movies, the critics continued to stand by Wong’s rich aesthetics and breath taking cinematography. Meanwhile, Wong also began to develop a reputation for making unthinkably expensive movies, soliciting the region’s most famous actors and taking an unprecedented long time to finish the final edits.

In fact, Ashes of Time took so long to finish in post-production that Wong made another movie called Chungking Express in the meantime. The low-budget Chungking Express went from start of shooting to premiere in just three months and was released through Quentin Tarantino's company in 1994, earning Wong his first Western audience. Chungking Express cemented Wong’s reputation as an internationally successful Chinese director and producer. The “auteur theory” is a view of filmmaking in which the director is considered the primary creative force in a motion picture and Wong began to be consistently referred to as “auteur Wong Kar-Wai” in the press. Deemed by critics as an “an emotionally cool, post-modern romantic comedy,” Chungking Express follows two quirky, offbeat stories with mysterious women and colorful cops against the backdrop of a Chinese fast-food restaurant in urban Hong Kong.

Buoyed by the success of Chungking Express, Wong went on to make 1995's Fallen Angels which was another huge success for both Wong and his Australian-born cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. With Doyle’s moody neon lights, fast motor cycles, rain-slicked streets, and sadly luminous hotel rooms, Wong was able to draw the complete experience of an urban drama filled with loneliness, alienation and huge dreams. According to Doyle, colors are the key to creating a mood that transcends the spoken word. "Color is like sex,” he explained in a recent interview, “the qi, or 'glow', or 'presence', with which an actor engages you.” Wong’s next film, Happy Together, took Doyle to a whole new visual palette: Argentina. Essentially a film about being out of love and being out of place, the film follows two gay ex-pat lovers from Hong Kong, stranded in Argentina, as they take on a variety of jobs after their break-up. The film won Wong the award for Best Director at Cannes in 1997. The Wong-Doyle collaboration earned kudos for “a visual feast of an ever dazzling variety of film stocks and shooting speeds that serve as a jazzy and stimulating accompaniment to another tale of Wongean ache.”

Wong found himself at Cannes again in 2000 with his intimate and poignant film, In the Mood for Love. The film tells the story of two married people living in neighboring apartments, who fall in love with each other while grappling with the infidelities of their respective spouses. They find themselves in an uneasy love affair, rich with sexual desire that is never consummated, perhaps due to ethical or moral constraints. Magnificently directed and shot, the film immortalizes everything from cigarette smoke to droplets of rain to whispers in doorways, lending a deep melancholic longing to every frame. Wong acknowledged that his actors, Hong Kong's most famous stars, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, were often exasperated during the grueling 15-month shoot. But the result took Wong and his team to a new level of international stardom.

For the last four years, Wong has been primarily working on the futuristic film 2046. Again, it is essentially a love story with a melancholic romantic hero. The film is a sequel of sorts to In the Mood for Love, the film that many consider to be Wong Kar-Wai’s masterpiece. Tony Leung reprises his role as Chow Mo-wan. In 2046, he is a writer who lives in a low-rent hotel, writes trashy columns for a newspaper, and engages in a string of seedy love affairs. His next door neighbor, in room 2046, is a beautiful Chinese girl named Miss Bai (Ziyi Zhang). Their relationship evokes haunting memories, and drives him to write a sci-fi story about people who take an endless train ride to a mysterious destination, in order to recapture their lost memories. The film takes the viewer on a journey about love, the pain of nostalgia and the emptiness of unrequited, unfulfilled desires. Again touted by critics as a stunning visual treat, the film won the European Academy Non-European Film 2004 this December and further established Wong as a genius of cinema and his team as experts in making stylized films.