The Language of Love and Loneliness of Wong Kar-wai
credit: criterion“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty windowpane, the past is something he could see but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”
In the Mood for Love
In Wong Kar-wai’s films, the future, the past and the present interchange and flow forward and backward like an emotional circuit. His films take the spatial structure utterly seriously to invoke multiple temporalities while concurrently dwelling in the past, pondering the present and restlessly anticipating the possibilities of the unknown future. That said, Wong’s characters rarely seem to exist in the present moment, as they continually find themselves dislodged from their surroundings – made blurred and indistinct. Some part of them is either looking forward or backwards, yearning for something that may never come or remembering the fleeting emotion that was never acted upon. By now, after a four-decade span of filmmaking, Wong Kar-wai has proved to the world that he is a daydreamer, a hopeless romantic, a master of restrained passion. He treats love as an ephemeral vapour of aborted chances and sees the world spin with incandescent streaks of light and unfamiliar rhythms.
A Wong Kar-wai’s film is identifiable the moment the audience sees it: from the vivid neon-drenched aesthetic of Hong Kong’s city life to the cigarette smoke and furtive glances of lovelorn characters that fill the emptiness of spaces, followed by romances that go nowhere. However, in amongst the fragmental imageries and swirling, swoon-worthy moods that come to be synonymous with his hopeless romantic persona, Wong is also known for looking at love with a perspective of a skeptic. For instance, In Days of Being Wild, the viewer sees Leslie Cheung’s character, Yuddy, flit from one woman to another due to his fear of abandonment after being neglected by a woman who he thought was his mother. Due to the fear of future rejection, Wong’s character(s) forever find themselves pre-emptively leave or hurt each other as they treat love as nothing but a game. Moreover, in Happy Together, Leslie Cheung plays an equally promiscuous character who travels to Argentina with his boyfriend (Tony Leung) with an attempt to keep their relationship alive, only to leave the person who truly loves him for the frivolous excitement in the foreign land. In these films, although the plot revolves around a couple’s relationship, it is apparent that love neither offers a solution to these characters’ problems nor exonerates them from their loneliness. Furthermore, their dalliances only further highlight the internal and external factors that prevent people from truly connecting.
The contradictory nature of physical proximity and emotional distance foregrounds the notion of love being a rare connection amidst urban isolation in Chungking Express. In the first line of dialogue, the character of Cop 223 narrates through voiceover, “Every day we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet, or people who may become close friends.” The pain of urban solitude is materialized through this statement, expressing that we are all strangers to each other despite swarming around together in the same shared space. However, this may change with just the brush of the shoulders. People who were once strangers can eventually get to know each other through mere physical contact, and anything can happen from there. Chance encounters can turn friendship into romance in no time. In the second portion of the film, a character named Faye goes to Cop 663’s apartment while he’s not there and performs a wide variety of tasks, from organizing his abode to feeding his fish. Through the lens of Wong Kar-wai, the apartment is an embodiment of Hong Kong or, to an extent, the world. This signifies that while Faye and Cop 663 both inhabit in the same space on their own, meaning they live together independently – the same way everyone in the world all lives together but separately. The imagery of Wong’s concrete jungle resonates with the nature of Hong Kong itself and therefore provides ephemeral and often ambiguous narratives. Very few filmmakers can capture the swooning romanticism in the same effortless manner as Wong Kar-wai. He creates characters desperately and spontaneously, then throws them into an urbanized environment that both caresses and entombs them. The scenery in Wong Kar-wai’s films act more or less as mirrors reflecting the characters inner turmoil, solitude and grief. There is no plot to speak of but fragments of memories scattering across terrains and cities, along with the lyrical use of voiceover, create a singular linkage between protagonist and viewer.
It is not possible to talk about Wong Kar-wai’s portrayal of love and loneliness without mentioning his most celebrated work In the Mood for Love. In In the Mood for Love, a man and a woman seek comfort in each other while their marriages fall apart but find themselves unable to pursue their passion due to their own conscience and social stigmas. Following a journalist Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), who moves into an apartment in the same building as Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung), the film captures love as a kind of mood, or an emotion that is brought into existence solely by chance and circumstance. Or, in other words, through the characters’ mutual loneliness and connection. Everything about the film looks gorgeous, too. The blocking of half-empty spaces with faces half-seen in mirrors and doorways, in addition to the sensuous mixture of saturated hues, is as intimate and claustrophobic as the central illicit romance. The love story in In the Mood for Love is as transient as it is intense. It exists as an accumulation of moments and emotions that was never acted upon, something that is always remembered but remains inaccessible. Thus, it eventually becomes a memory buried by time and slowly grows into grass and mud.
Wong Kar-wai investigates how his characters’ bodies in space are subject to the emptiness of their surroundings and how under great tensions, due to the characters’ implacable desire to connect, their bodies are forced to collide, compensate and feed off one another. Despite the dissimilarities, the films of Wong Kar-wai set in the 1960s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s do share some common features. In particular, they highlight a pervasive sense of impermanence coupled with the dominant theme of the “moment”, which often accompanies a character’s loneliness and desire to belong to someone or somewhere. The characters who populate Wong’s world are ordinary people who find themselves traversing Hong Kong cityscape, alone, and do not have meaningful interactions with anyone. They habitually chain smoke and talk to themselves in lengthy monologues or to inanimate objects that do not amount to much. These characters’ frustration with the quotidian present invariably seems to be the reason for their longing, but in some way, they always fritter away the chance to love and be loved.
Through stories about lost souls trapped in the concrete jungle destined never to meet, what is Wong Kar-wai trying to convey to his audience? Whatever it is, the viewer cannot help but fall in love with the auteurs beautiful, albeit sad and alienating, world made of neon lights, vibrant colours, cigarette smoke, contemporary pop songs and people who are fated to meet but for some reason, cannot.