Winds of Desire
By Chris Wisniewski
Ashes of Time Redux
Dir. Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, Sony Pictures Classics
A directorial misstep or a fall from grace can sometimes have a retroactive effect. One poorly received film can seem to expose the flaws and failures of its predecessors, tainting an oeuvre or, at the very least, inviting its reappraisal. This can sometimes be for the good (even those of us who cheered Fernando Meirelles’s 2004 Oscar nomination have to admit that City of God and The Constant Gardener aren't looking so good now, huh?), but it can also be ungenerous, to say the least. Great art of any kind can never come without a certain amount of risk, and the price of taking those risks is leaving yourself open to the occasional failure and, correspondingly, the tired charge, “Maybe he isn’t as good as people say he is”—or worse, “Maybe he never was as good as people said he was.” Case in point: Wong Kar-wai, whose ooey-gooey road trip movie My Blueberry Nights was unmistakably “Wong,” with its lushly stylized visuals and wistful romantic philosophizing. It was also an unmitigated disappointment, a contrived, superficial, disposable mess. Was it the American setting? The close ups of gelatinous pies? Natalie Portman? Or was it that, transplanted to more familiar terrain and stripped of subtitles, Wong’s filmmaking became more transparent, his shortcomings as an artist and a storyteller simply easier for English-speaking critics and audiences to discern? Perhaps, some say, Wong was never quite as good as we all thought he was.
Rest assured, then, that there is no need for a systematic reappraisal. Wong has followed up his Blueberry mess by returning to one of his first films, 1994’s spottily available Ashes of Time, which has, since its initial release, floated around in various versions. Wong has excavated, reassembled, and revisited the film, piecing it together with raw material assembled from sources around the globe. The resulting Redux includes a few minutes of new footage, credit sequences, digital effects, and a re-arranged score, with some additional music (courtesy of Wu Tong). And though it may not differ as markedly from the original as Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux did, it is nevertheless an unqualified triumph, the kind of cinematic experience that will remind audiences why they fell in love with Wong in the first place, whether they’re rediscovering the film or seeing it for the first time.
A generic oddity in his oeuvre, Ashes of Time is the director’s only attempt to date at a wuxia picture. In writing the screenplay, Wong took his source material, Louis Cha’s The Eagle-Shooting Heroes, as his endpoint, fashioning a prologue that charts how Cha’s two protagonists came to be the Lord of the West and the Lord of the East. The former, Ouyang Feng (the late Leslie Cheung) begins Ashes of Time as a liaison between bounty-hunter swordsmen and the people commissioning them. Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), the future Lord of the East, visits Ouyang annually—for reasons that eventually become clear by film’s end—until he drinks a magic wine that causes him to forget his past. Ouyang narrates the story himself, which travels circularly, essentially beginning and ending with Huang drinking the lacuna-inducing wine.
Ashes of Time Redux has a few truly dazzling martial-arts sequences—most memorably, Tony Leung Chiu Wai’s fateful battle with a gang of bandits, which ends with blood gushing from a slit throat with a gaping, existential sigh, and Brigitte Lin’s extraordinary swordplay on a lake, the water dancing to the heavens. Nevertheless, despite its wuxia trappings, the movie may have more in common with Wong’s other films than with those of its genre. “The root of men’s problems,” Ouyang explains at the beginning of the film, sounding like a character plucked right out of 2046, “is memory.” Ashes is told in five parts, corresponding to five seasons of the Chinese almanac, and with each successive season, it becomes an increasingly dismal tale of unrequited loves—each character can’t seem to let go of somebody who loves somebody else, and each is running from their love, away from memory, instead towards blissful forgetting or self-annihilation. Ouyang and Huang occupy the nexus of the film’s various love triangles, and their skills as swordsmen seem comparatively incidental next to their various romantic yearnings. It’s your standard issue Wong romantic drama dressed up, not as a period piece or gangster picture, but instead as a martial-arts epic.
But the word “epic” hardly seems to fit Ashes of Time Redux. The film is told mostly in wide-angle close-up, giving it an intimate scale and a human focus. This is a film of faces and gestures, not of expansive terrain or large-scale battles. In a brisk hour and a half, Wong downplays incident, including a few extended sequences of pure mood (a few times, Wong's camera lingers on Carina Lau as she pets her horse . . . emphatically . . . at length). The film has neither the size nor the momentum of a traditional epic or action picture—martial arts or otherwise—and there’s a laxness to the storytelling. The film has at least four major romantic subplots, but they're underdramatized to the point of being a bit difficult to follow. Yet Ashes still manages to pack an emotional wallop through the cumulative effect of its various vignettes. Brigitte Lin’s descent into madness, in particular, is beautifully rendered by both the actress and the filmmaker; at one point, she seduces Cheung’s Ouyang in a hallucinatory sequence in which identity seems to become mutable and unstable, an effect established mostly through simple but superbly elegant editing. Maggie Cheung, meanwhile, brings gravity and focus to the final half hour of the film. Narratively, she serves as the linchpin between the Lord of the East and the Lord of the West, and her appearance makes sense of Wong’s tricky chronology. More importantly, she manages, with minimal screen time, to give the film an emotional center that it might otherwise lack. She brings the whole thing into focus, providing as lovely a portrait of longing and loneliness as Wong has ever captured.
If Ashes of Time is cut from the same thematic cloth as Wong's most recent work, including In the Mood for Love or 2046 or, yes, My Blueberry Nights, it also shares the distinctive visual sensibility that marks Wong’s finest collaborations with director of photography Christopher Doyle (Kwan Pun-leung is credited with the additional photography for Redux). The slow-motion that’s become the Wong-Doyle trademark seems in a few sequences to almost resemble pixilation, and the close-up/wide-angle photography is clearly of a piece with their other mid-Nineties output, including Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. The film’s heavily brown, green, and yellow color palette contributes to its generally earthy, washed out look. This is, from first frame to last, a fully realized work of cinema, a movie as visually arresting as it is emotionally stirring, one that could only be appreciated, in terms of its visual accomplishment, on a screen like the Ziegfield’s. And in that sense, it may end up being one of the most vital and important entries in this year’s New York Film Festival.