My Wong Kar Wai Experience

In The Mood For Love
Wong Kar Wai
Hong Kong
2001

 

During my sophomore year at the film school, I used to ask my fellow film students about their favorite films ever. Asking them to list at least 10 of their favorite movies, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was the most common entry among the lists I’ve gathered. Aside from that surprise for I thought that Jim Carrey-Kate Winslet movie is nothing really special than a little above average break-up film of science and romance fiction, Wong Kar Wai films were also present in most of the list. It is right to say that Wong Kar Wai was, at least at that time, our batch’s favorite director.  Out of shame for not seeing any of his films, I started to have a Wong Kar Wai expedition. And I wish I could say it in a nice way but I have really been generally dissatisfied with my Wong Kar Wai experience. My fellow film students claim that it is not hard to fall in love with the director’s steamy visuals and romantic insights and I could never disagree. Yes, Wong Kar Wai has an ostentatious sense of vision and in fact they are most of the time spectacular, and I commend the Chinese director for that. However, I have always been uncomfortable with films that are overly fluid which are exactly his films. At times, you would feel so lost in his movies. It’s as if it has no backbone that would be the major support to have its structure conceivable by the audience. I understand his sentiments about lovers losing sense of times and it might have worked for many people including my classmates though I would prefer to see such films still with solid structure and clearer direction. I find his “2046” the hardest film to watch and understand because it is too cerebral, and consciously obscures fantasy and reality. Together with “Chungking Express”, Wong Kar Wai stipulates the life of a human soul in love in randomly affecting spheres of repressed feelings, misunderstood infatuation, and tainted impulse. Including “In the Mood for Love”, I’ve seen more of his technical inclinations. The director always employs tight editing. This philosophy never worked for me in “2046”, it feels so suffocating and isolating. There has been so much the film wants to shout out loud, its saturated red-orange-gold lighting and mise-en-scene could not be contained by the medium shot to close up shots in the entirety of the movie. In “In the Mood for Love” however, I found more room to breath in its tight cinematography. The two films have similar reasons of the applying such camera theme, I guess what pushed the latter film to more understanding is the fact that it doesn’t bloodily shout anything inside. In fact, “In the Mood for Love” has a gentle treatment of a love affair that is usually treated ungently. Among Wong Kar Wai’s films, “Happy Together” is the most endearing and heartbreakingly compelling. One thing I really like about this Chinese director is his courageous interpretation of unfulfilled love and it has been maximized in “Happy Together”. An aspect about the film that worked for me is that this one feels more a part of the world, it feels more attracted toward other people in the planet, whether a stranger, a fellow race, or a familiar face. This gay film has intense amount of romance, charming enough to love and conservative enough to keep its equation to notional carnal requirements. Above all else, in terms of spatial cinematography this is the most generous. Wong Kar Wai employs long distance shots to extreme long shots giving the film more relevance to the diversity of life.

 Shadows on the wall mimic a jail railing connoting the idea that these two lovers are prisoners of their love.

Focusing on “In the Mood for Love”, its self-contained gorgeousness and his use of metaphor are the film’s most triumphant weapon in the director’s arsenal. Aside from his recurring and parallel love stories, this is the director’s first direct employment of the time that has passed. This film doesn’t provide an accurate point of when the feelings between these characters started. They realized it without expecting it, and without the anticipation, and without the appropriate circumstances in their lives at that point of time, their ending would foretell a fate more indistinct than how they started. An unfulfilled love is where Wong Kar Wai finds artistic and dramatic sanctuary, and he has mastered it overtime. Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” also gave an affirmation about this—that only an unfulfilled love can be romantic. An anti love story can never get wrong. The main reason about the quest for anti love story is because of its revolutionary spirit against the happy ended love stories proliferating commercial cinema. Most of the films which involve a man and a woman that you can classify as quality, art, or award-winning are anti-love stories. What is it about humans that inclines art more to the pain, sorrow, and agony than the joy, happiness, and satisfaction? Is art an apparatus of skepticism and cynicism? Well I guess, being happy, joyful, and satisfied is too easy to bear and doesn’t need much interpretation about it or at least doesn’t find the need to interpret it, and being sad and in pain is too unbearable that we need to deeply express it. Life as we all know is a combination of the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, the happy and the sad, and understanding the negative ones needs more effort and seeks different media to communicate, and one medium is film.

This shot is reminiscent of the director's 1997 gay film "Happy Together.

What has also been magnified in the film is the director’s bittersweet observance of the time passed. There is a scene where after several years the main characters go back to the place where they used to be tenants and learn that most of their friends are no longer living there and even the landlady is about to move in America. After that scene, a text reads—that era has passed, nothing that belonged to it exists any more. It’s not a childhood nostalgia, but a longing that occurred in the adulthood—an adult nostalgia that is maturely bitter and serious.

Visually the film is really fantastic, as what I mentioned above “gorgeous” is the best word to describe it. I also love the smoothness of the music employed it, especially with the Spanish accompaniment of “Perhaps”. The film is not bad at all, as any Wong Kar Wai films can be. This is just a matter of personal definition of what is beautiful, significant, and competitive as a whole unit and not by parts. The last part is really heartrending. The story about the old time when they use to whisper a secret at a tree and cover it with mud will be mentioned 4 years after in “2046”. At the ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) whispers in a ruined wall to tell his love for his neighbor (Maggie Cheung). With an ancient tradition, their love story ends. 

The German Treasure

DOWNFALL

Oliver Hirschbiegel

Germany

2004

There are a hundred and perhaps even a thousand of films about the Second World War, holocaust, and anything that has something to do with probably the world’s most notorious and hated human being ever—Adolf Hitler. This film however doesn’t have its focus on the Fuhrer’s tormenting quest for world domination. It concentrates itself with Germans alone and its featured enemy, the Russians, is conceived distantly and only visually present in few necessary scenes. The usual second world war films in international arena are about the French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, American British, and Germany’s interconnected military maneuvers and tactics or about the soldier’s harrowing experiences, pain, endurance, and importantly the essence that the real heroes and at the same time victims of wars are the soldiers. Never had I really watched a film about the principal culprit of perhaps the most shattering event to occur in the history of the world. Choosing to present the collapse of his mission until his suicide instead of his advent and all the promising auspices of his German supremacy is a groundbreaking statement. Opposed strongly to Leni Reifenstahl’s documentaries such as “Birth of a Nation” and “Olympia”, this is a film that deflates all of the success and greatness Hitler may had have at those films, though Hirschbiegel is prudent enough to give elements of respect for the man who drastically shaped history in this incredible and compelling film.

Aside form the actual downfall of the nation, looking at who Adolf Hitler really was, is the most reasonable aspect to look forward to. As a person who is not a German, who is born in the relatively peaceful times 43 years after Hitler’s death, who is interested enough in history, I think of him as definitely a visionary, but his indulgence to being a German while discriminating all the rest, and the time he was born in history when other countries are as politically operational are both reasons why he can never be the world conqueror he was dreaming of. In the film, he is portrayed as someone plagued with superiority complex, lacking with compassion, especially with the civilians, the common German people outside his direct command who he even mentioned as weak. He is desperate, and in the midst of the toughest and most dire situations he seems insane. While his generals make sense about the real danger of the enemies circling Berlin, he keeps on insisting impossible tactics and order. This is not to accuse he is insane at all, his madness is not impossible to expect in anxious times but in the film itself it, all of the lunacy targets his character like a dagger. His epileptic left hand is not simply cast in Bruno Ganz acting, it also a metaphor of his unsuitability of his grand ambition. The rattling hand is a cataclysmic doom of mankind, and that same hand is his own curse, his own inevitable quagmire.

The horrendous cost of his aspiration may be enough to despise Hitler but it is undeniable that for a time, in his nation, he is the most respected. Looking at Reifenstahl’s “Birth of a Nation” he is a half-God, half-man, and as a German and even any German (If I were a German) Hirschbiegel, can’t deny it. That for a time in Germany’s most significant history, there was someone they believed, adored, and trusted, and that should be enough to give due respects to Hitler even in the most sublime way. In the film, before Hitler dies, he asks that his enemies should never see him dead. Hitler and his wife enter the door with the poison capsule and the gun, the door is shut closed, gun shots are heard. His men enter the room. Camera shows his men carrying covered body of the Fuhrer and his wife. They bring the corpses outside the bunker and place them in a 6 feet deep burrow and burn them. The brutality of their death is never existent on the film at least visually. This is the respect that the director can mostly do particularly following historical accuracies.

The film is brilliant in many ways. The subject matter itself is enough to be riveting, and with its appropriate cinematography of black to gray to olive green, its decent editing, convincing sound and music, I just couldn’t ask for more about its technicalities. I appreciate the gloomy atmosphere the film tries to keep consistent in the bunker and even outside. The manipulation shows as if sun has never risen in the soon to fall city. The scenes where Hitler’s closest and most loyal people are deciding on how to commit suicide are so moving, and when they commit the suicide just like their Fuhrer are so striking. These people would rather die than to surrender their ideologies, and there’s one thing I have realized--there is nothing like being forced to accept your death in the circumstance of losing. The only thing I wish to have been changed in the film is its claim of the secretary’s point of view. It is not true at all, the POV is everywhere. I am not a fan of POV scattering around the place but in this film, I think the unrestricted POV works. This is because these multi-possessed POVs represent the many number of people involved in that downfall. It may be as many as the real number of war victims but this is enough to know that this is not just between Hitler and his ambition. The secretary’s POV is actually useless. Even though he has some scenes where he gets to know the Fuhrer and his surprising goodness, these scenes are hardly contributing to the film’s vastness to be captured into one. The opening and closing documentary footage of the grown-old secretary are by themselves spectacular but they are either not needed or too overrated. Thus, the secretary’s role has been stretched in the promotion of the film and at the mentioned beginning and closing when in fact they become irrelevant when you watch the whole film. I would have chosen to position the POV of this film in a more omnipresent status since an enormous subject matter justifies it.

I find the film haunting and I find myself loving it. Aside from few scenes in “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, this is the film which I have deeply felt the world in its most painful, frightening, and darkest time. The irony of the downfall of Berlin and the triumph of the rest of the world, of people’s desperate survival and their poignant suicides, and of Adolf Hitler’s death and the stolen lives of millions are so effectively translated in this sweeping and terrific film. “Downfall” is a German treasure.