Wong Kar Wai takes 'Ashes' to 'Ashes'
Jeff Yang
Thursday, October 9, 2008
It's not a stretch to say that "Ashes of Time," which opens Oct. 17 in a lustrous, lovingly remastered new edition, is Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai's most polarizing film. Those who love it, myself included, call it one of the classics of contemporary cinema. Those who don't dismiss it as confusing and soporific - and it's easy to see their perspective.
Its narrative is opaque; characters drift through its story line on skewed trajectories, intersecting briefly before sailing out of the camera's span of attention. It is the most languidly paced martial arts film ever made; the entirety of Sammo Hung's action choreography adds up to perhaps a dozen out of the film's 93 minutes.
Most frustrating of all, at least for audiences weaned on Hollywood formula, it has neither a real ending nor a true beginning: The film's main characters, martial artists by the name of Ou-yang Feng the Poison West (played with a hustler's grace by the late, great Leslie Cheung) and Huang Yaoshi the Evil East (a debauched Tony Leung Ka Fai), arrive unintroduced and leave almost unillustrated, as if the richest part of their stories lie still ahead.
But all of this is intentional on Wong's part. He conceived "Ashes" as a prequel to one of China's great pulp classics, Jin Yong's epic swordsman novel "Eagle Shooting Heroes." For Chinese viewers, Ou-yang Feng and Huang Yaoshi are like Superman and Batman, figures who hardly need introduction. "These are characters from the second-best-selling Chinese-language text in the world," says Wong, "second only to Mao Zedong's 'Little Red Book.' "
This alone would make "Ashes" interesting, even if it wasn't a must-see on its own merits, and it is - a work full of haunting dialogue and indelible imagery that demands repeated viewing. But there's more going on here than dazzles the eye. Made in 1994, the first film Wong shot under the auspices of his production company, Jet Tone Films, "Ashes" is a movie about transitions, capturing a set of legends in the frozen moment before they became legendary.
"The characters in 'Ashes' are all facing a series of dilemmas," says Wong. "They're at a decision point. They can choose to go forward or go back. But until they choose, they're stuck with nothing but memories. And memories" - Wong grins beneath his omnipresent sunglasses - "are a *****."
Hong Kong is burning
Wong's works are more epochal, more resonant with the cultural moment, than those of virtually any other filmmaker, in part because of a creative process that draws heavily from his surroundings: improvised dialogue, spontaneous staging and narratives assembled in the editing room. So it isn't surprising that "Ashes" thematically reflects its environment - a society and industry poised at the brink of enormous change.
"Film to me has always been a way of showing where we are and where we can go," says Wong. "And when I look back at 'Ashes,' I feel it says a lot about Hong Kong cinema at that time."
In the early '90s, Hong Kong film was at its peak of popularity, its stars and creators at the height of their careers. But this burgeoning success contained the seeds of self-destruction. "In the '90s, we set the trends, we wrote the rules," says Wong. "But even then, it was clear to me that we had to be bolder and more aggressive - to not be afraid to not follow those rules."
And so with "Ashes," Wong embraced Hong Kong's most populist genre and then upended it, shattering its conventions. He took the era's best loved stars and pushed their personas to the point of distortion - for example, brilliantly reinventing the androgynous hero(ine) character Brigitte Lin made famous in movies like "Swordsman II" as a self-hating schizoid with dueling multiple personalities. The result was a work with its own dual personality - simultaneously an homage and a rebuke to an industry in danger of succumbing to complacency.
Shifting seasons
The veiled admonition in "Ashes" proved prescient. By the 1997 reunification of Hong Kong with China, the cinema industry in the former British holding was waning, victim of its own creative bankruptcy. Many of its best and brightest had left to seek out new opportunities in the West or, like Lin, retired from showbiz.
One of the casualties of Hong Kong's cinematic decline was "Ashes" itself. "We didn't know how to properly preserve things then, and now, no original film version exists," says Wong, who calls "Ashes" his "abused child." "We had to revisit this film if we wanted to save it."
So Wong has spent two years seeking out copies of "Ashes," weaving together fragmentary pieces of celluloid memory into a document that preserves the past, but also out of necessity reframes it. "We couldn't do a 100 percent restoration," he says. "There are pieces missing, there are parts beyond repair; we were forced to make certain editorial decisions."
One of the decisions was to refocus the narrative into five chapters, each named after a phase in the Chinese almanac. "Chinese people have a very different sense of time from Westerners," says Wong. "In the West, time is a straight line; in China, time is a series of cycles that continue to repeat" - like the changing of seasons and the great wheel of incarnation.
The restored film begins and ends in Jingzhe, a season of blooming and rebirth, a cycle of renewal that matches Wong's own mind-set a decade and a half after the film's original release. It's his belief, after all, that the release of "Ashes," in its sleekly resurrected form, comes during another transition point for Wong and the industry that made him.
"We are at another historical moment for Hong Kong cinema," he says. "We now have access to the enormous audience of the mainland, 1.3 billion people, where three new theaters are being built every day. Our canvas is now much, much bigger. And I think our best days are still ahead."
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