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A rebel with a cause
A free spirit, Wong Kar-wai follows none of the rules and makes films at his own pace and without the aid of finished scripts, writes Saibal Chatterjee.
Think Hong Kong cinema and the name of Wong Kar-wai immediately springs to mind. But if he is indeed one of the finest filmmakers in the world today, that enviable status has little to do with where he belongs. Wong is an innovator par excellence. A free spirit, he follows none of the rules of the Hong Kong movie industry, making films at his own pace and without the aid of finished scripts. He lets the echoes of the past, both cinematic and cultural, infiltrate his celluloid canvas, and yet he invariably succeeds in bestowing on them the power of raw primary emotions.
Wong almost always relies on his instinct. It allows him access to the innermost recesses of the imagination unrestricted by the written word. The final shape of a film that he makes emerges in his mind even as he shoots, following a process of trial and error, of constant evolution. That explains why Wong Kar-wai's cinema never fails to take viewers by surprise. Over the past decade, it has spawned many imitators but nobody has quite replicated the impact that Wong has made.
His distinctive style of filmmaking presupposes complete creative freedom. Hence Wong was one of the first Hong Kong filmmakers to float his own independent production company, Jet Tone. Being his own producer helps him develop his projects in splendid isolation and then pre-selling them on the strength of his own name, especially in markets where he is as big and as respected a star as the actors on whom Hollywood blockbusters ride.
The Hong Kong film industry has been beset by a cash-flow crisis in recent years but that has left Wong relatively untouched. He still manages to find takers for unmade projects a tad more easily than his contemporaries. His audience is global and they are loyal and discerning. Funding agencies know for a fact that a Wong Kar-wai film does not cost too much to make (well, Happy Together did go over-budget and triggered a minor career crisis) and yet has the potential of recovering much more than what is invested in it.
Wong's clout stems from this salutary combination of audience fidelity and financial assurance. In this respect, he is really unlike anybody else of his ilk: he is uncompromising in his approach to filmmaking and yet manages to draw enough by way of cash to keep the wheels trundling at a healthy pace. Things have got worse around the world, with foreign investors demanding more than just a title and the name of the director as prerequisites for funding. They seek a peep into scripts before they decide to commit their millions to a film project. But Wong, as is well known, does not believe in writing a script before he embarks upon a film. He instead writes an elaborate concept note flexible enough to undergo drastic changes as when better ideas present themselves.
Trained as a graphic designer, Wong served as a production assistant on serial dramas at the profit-driven television station TVB for two years. His 1982 film industry debut was as a writer in the script department of another out-and-out commercial set-up, Cinema City. But Wong then took to more focussed writing, a switch that led to scripts for a gangster trilogy for his director friend, Patrick Tam. While Tam filmed only the final part of the trilogy (Final Victory, 1987), the first part evolved into Wong's own directorial debut (As Tears Go By, 1988). That was the first and the last time he based a film of his on a pre-written screenplay.
As Tears Go By was a lively first feature, which clearly drew inspiration from Mean Streets for its plot and protagonists. But Andrew Lau's energetic handheld camerawork with its stop-motion action climaxes lent the film a feel of originality. As Tears Go By was dismissed in Cannes as overly violent.
The Wong Kar-wai as the world knows him today emerged more clearly in Days of Being Wild (1990), a film that marked a complete break from all that he had learnt during his days as an apprentice. Eschewing conventional scripting and genre filmmaking, Wong's second feature offered a deliberately paced, evocative account of a young playboy's profligacy in 1960s Hong Kong and Manila. Days, tangentially, revived memories of James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause, but yet again, thanks to Wong's ability to think laterally, Days never looks derivative.
The low-budget Chungking Express (1994), which made it from the shoot to the premiere in three months flat, and Fallen Angels (1995) form a loose diptych, both films narrating parallel love stories in an urban setting. The two tales in Chungking Express are about beat policemen, both of them nursing heartburns after being ditched by their girlfriends. Wong informs Chungking Express with vitality and eccentric wit. Fallen Angels is far darker in its weaving of its dual narrative tracks, one a moody coalescence of sexual frustrations and unbridled violence, the other a bitter farce about two dead-end creatures. Fallen Angels is not an easy film to watch and absorb, but for those who relate to Wong's virtuosity as a cinematic artist cannot miss the sheer audacity and cerebral force of the exercise.
Wong's Palme d'Or winner, Happy Together (1997), tapped into his fondness for Manuel Puig and other Latin American novelists and blended that with an urge to interpret Hong Kong's identity in the year of the territory's handover to China. From Puig come the Argentinian backdrop and the spotlight on a homosexual rebounding from a negative dalliance. The domestic angle is presented in the form of the metaphor of the simultaneous togetherness and disconnect that exist between China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
In the Mood for Love stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as people who meet when they discover that their respective spouses are having an affair. His latest film, 2046, which will be the fiftieth year of the Hong Kong handover to China, was completed just in time for the last Cannes Film Festival, where it garnered rave reviews.
Wong is still in the process of evolving and, therefore, the last word cannot be written on his cinema yet. Suffice it to say he is one of the few exponents left in the world who treats cinema with the kind of respect that a painter reserves for his canvas. No wonder he is a constant source of inspiration and exhilaration the world over.
