Trilogy of Wong Kar-Wai 1

Wikipedia characterized the style of the award-winning HK director, Wong Kar Wai, in this way, "elliptically plotted mood pieces, with lush visuals and music, about the burden of memory on melancholic, misfit characters." Indeed, his movies are rich with metaphorical tropes, visual contrasts, and emotional subtlety. He is a master of the graphic representation of modern solitude, the emotional outcry of urbanites, and above all the social ambiguity and cultural juxtaposition of a society in flux.

"Days of Being Wild" (1990) (阿飛正傳) tells the story of a playboy whose failure to commit to any women stems from his familial history. Played by Leslie Cheung, he mastered the art of stealing girls' hearts with his artful lies ("I will remember you forever because of this minute") and his grasp of female psychological weaknesses. His womanizing capacity draws upon his troubled relationship with his adoptive mother who was a prostitute. Speaking with fluent Shanghainess and a set of typified fashion code of 50s/60s Shanghai, his adoptive mother was paid by his biological mother––a Filipino aristocrat––not to reveal her identity, much to the resentment of Leslie. His adoptive mother was engaged in bad romances with young men who approached her for her money. There is an important parallel between Leslie's treatment of his girlfriends (played by Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau) and his distaste of his adoptive mother. He saw how blind and self-deluding his adoptive mother was in bad romances, and he reconstructed these abusive relationships with other women (when Carina was desperately looking for Leslie as he left her, she unabashedly barged in the apartment of Leslie's adoptive mother. Carina asked if she was pathetic, the mother said "No, I was just like you when I was your age.") No matter how conceited he seemed to be in this hedonistic lifestyle, I think there's a part of him that knows something is wrong. The most revealing scene is the last moment before he was shot in a train in the Philippines in which the allegory of the flying birds without legs appeared again. As the core metaphorical thread weaving across the fabric of the film, the fable narrates the myth of a certain type of birds who are born without legs; incessant flying is necessary to keep them alive and the only instance of landing is the time they die. Leslie glorified this fable in the beginning of the movie, implying that his frivolous personality is as innate as this type of birds; standing in sharp contrast to his reflection on the allegory in his final breathing second, "I was wrong. The bird was dead from the start." Depriving of the ability of love, life is inane and hollow.

To be continued with "Fall Angels" (1995) and "Happy Together" (1997) in the next two posts.