Over the span of his acclaimed directing career Wong Kar Wai has developed a reputation of being one of the world’s most romantic filmmakers, but the interesting thing about Kar Wai is that even though he is considered one of the best storytellers in this genre he almost never uses its common devices like explicit sexuality or overdramatic style which often result in the bland, cliché kind of films that are typical of the romance genre. Instead of the usual fairy-tale, ‘against all odds’ approach, Kar Wai takes a different angle and strips down the idea of romance to its basic forms; need and want. He orchestrates virtually every element of his films to subtly enhance the eroticism, and through these next few pages I will look at two important elements he uses to create his unique depictions of sexuality and desire.
The three films I chose to look at for this topic were Chungking Express, 2046 and the short film The Hand from the three part film called Eros. The first aspect of Kar Wai’s films that I believe is the most responsible for their memorable love stories and portrayals of relationships is his nearly exclusive use of unrequited love in his storytelling. One reason I’m sure he prefers this method of portraying love is that it allows his films to be almost completely about the topic of love while also having a myriad of other complex emotions to explore, all of which make the romance itself more intense. In a traditional love story where two people simply fall in love or are on a path toward romance the romance itself tends to drive every other aspect of the character’s lives and life itself suddenly points towards this filmic relationship. Wong Kar Wai’s love stories are different however, since his films are usually driven by one or more characters who love someone they can’t have, who are kind of on the outside looking in, it provides him as a director to focus on the subtleties of human behavior. For Kar Wai the use of unrequited love gives us a glimpse into the character’s private world, it shows us what they are really like when they’re alone, as opposed to traditional love stories when we only see the important encounters between two would-be lovers. In a 2001 interview with Kar Wai, Interview Magazine’s film writer Graham Fuller asked him why he often shoots lovers in isolation, citing how many of the characters in his films are shown by themselves. Fuller asks, “It’s as if love manifests itself most powerfully in isolation. Why is that such an important idea for you?” Kar Wai responds by saying; “When I was a child, I was the only one who came to Hong Kong; my brother and sister stayed in Shanghai. I didn't have a lot of friends, so I know about loneliness. I always consider my characters to be in orbit. They are in a routine, but then something happens--maybe they fall in or out of love--and they try to break from that routine. So we see them in transit, and at the end they are usually headed in a new direction.”
Kar Wai depicts love as something that’s not only a verbal and physical interaction between two people but also something that is dream-like and only exists in a person’s private world. By showing the restlessness, longing and desire that accompanies loneliness Wong Kar Wai gives his films a kind of sexual anxiety that subtly raises the overall level of sensuality. Two great examples of this are from the second half of Chungking Express when we see Tony Leung’s character (Officer 663) at home, sulking and talking to various inanimate objects in his house, telling them not to be sad and then eventually noticing the subtle changes that Faye has made to his apartment throughout the day. What’s interesting is that there really isn’t much of a traditional love story here, Officer 663 is mainly focused on his girlfriend who’s left him and Faye is kind of ambiguously trying to clean the bad memories out of his apartment. There’s basically a limited amount of interaction between the two characters in terms of actually sparking a romance, but in an indirect manner Kar Wai shows us that perhaps these two people are somehow destined to be together, maybe its not the right time, maybe they’re incapable of telling each other how they may really feel, but there’s something there. Seeing Faye’s silly way of expressing her affection and the subtle changes it causes in the policeman’s life makes us as viewers dream about what might happen to them. There is a quiet, innocent quality about this romance. The two of them don’t share anything physical on screen and they don’t openly discuss the prospect of getting together but through his very insightful, simple look at quirky human behavior Kar Wai still manages to create an incredibly unique portrait of a brief moment in two people’s lives.
Another example of Kar Wai’s use of unrequited love is from the film 2046. This film is pretty much packed with lost souls, nearly every character in it seems to be longing for something they can’t have. But the example I’ve chosen from this movie is similar to the previous one in that the two characters here, played once again by Tony Leung and Faye Wong, don’t seem to recognize the feelings that are between them. In this film Tony Leung’s character, a writer named Chow, begins to write a book based on the memories of women he has or hasn’t met in his life, we don’t really know though because the line between reality and fiction is blurred. But at one point the film, in between his many casual, sparkless encounters, he makes friends with his landlord’s daughter named Wang Jing Wen who we find out is dating a Japanese man against her father’s wishes. Chow decides to help her hide the relationship by having her boyfriend’s letters sent to his address instead. Later on she learns that Chow is a writer and tells him that she too is interested in writing, after showing him some of her work he lets her write parts of his short stories which he gets paid to write in quantity. Through a few brief scenes, as if some memory mixed with wishful thinking, he remembers “the best summer of my life” that they spent together. The final shot of this portion of the film shows the two of them standing on the apartment’s rooftop where Wang Jing Wen stares off into the distance as Chow just watches her. Nothing results from their brief time spent together and it’s only a small part of 2046 but it’s still one of the more touching moments and is a good example of Kar Wai’s talent for using the space that exists between two characters to give his films a special kind of sexual mystery. In an essay about Wong Kar Wai for the website Mediacircus, Anthony Leong describes “doomed” nature of relationships in Kar Wai films when he says “very few of the relationships found in Wong's films are based on emotional connection, and the struggle that his characters face is to cultivate deeper forms of association. Unfortunately, many of his characters do not form these emotional connections, out of fear of rejection, and find it much easier to have transaction-based affinities.” The “transaction” in this particular scene of 2046 being the job of writing that brings the two together for a short time, they seem incapable of relating on a greater level than that.
The final example of unrequited love comes from Kar Wai’s short film The Hand, which is considerably darker than the other two films. In this movie a tailor’s apprentice named Zhang falls in love with a customer who happens to be a prostitute or escort of some kind named Ms. Hua . Throughout the film he faithfully makes her clothes and secretly longs to be with her, all the while she never seems to notice his interest. At the end of the film, a few years have passed and she has grown sick and loses most of her money because she can no longer work. Still though, Zhang stays by her side by paying her rent and continuing to make clothes for her. Here, Kar Wai uses another one of his common variations on the unrequited love formula by making one character the hopeless pursuer of someone they’re in love with. As is true with all three of these movies the person who doesn’t return the love never explains or are asked to explain why they can’t love. Kar Wai presents these characters as almost ghostly figures who exist only in the mind of the person trying to win their heart, people who almost look like they’re under a spell, like they haven’t yet come to the moment of realization that they are actually in love with the person who loves them. In The Hand Zhang keeps his feelings to himself for most of the film, only toward the end truly showing love by taking care of her in her darkest hour. Over the course of most of the movie there is a very slow buildup until the end when twice the woman says “you are so good to me, Zhang”. It seems like so little but by the time we’ve reached that point in the movie you feel happy for Zhang and it’s a sweet moment when she finally realizes how much he loves her. One of the things I love about Wong Kar Wai is that he can take seemingly insignificant declarations of love and turn them into something beautiful and deep. As we can see by these examples unrequited love is probably Kar Wai’s most effective tool in making simple but sexy films. The storytelling device lets him create the needed tension that results from the desire for the forbidden fruit.
The other prominent feature of each of these Kar Wai films is how the worlds depicted in them are almost exclusively private spaces where the main characters have limited interaction with their immediate surroundings. They seem to exist in environments that are visually appealing but cramped and worn. As is true with most movies, everything we see and hear is a conscious choice made by the director and everyone on his artistic team, so the question is what is Wong Kar Wai trying to make the audience feel by placing his main characters in relatively confined, highly stylized and stimulating atmospheres? Like most every detail of his films I believe he’s chosen this specific style of environment in order to make the concept of unrequited love, which he’s famous for, even more tense and heart wrenching for us as viewers. What I mean is that when Kar Wai shows us characters who are separated by some invisible force and incapable of giving or receiving love from another their physical environment (in this case confined and visually busy spaces) has a kind of subtle, psychological affect on the viewer. The close proximity of interior spaces seem to squeeze the two lovers together but the detail and beauty of the space almost sucks the characters in like they could get lost in the background. So there’s this dual effect going on where the two would-be lovers are pulsating to and from each other, creating a more dramatic sense of longing and desire of wanting to know how the two will end up. Chungking Express has two parts that I think are interesting example of this. The first, which I really like, is the scene between woman in the blonde wig (Brigitte Lin) and He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) at the bar. In this shot Kar Wai places the two next to each other at the bar and fixes the camera at a medium close-up encompassing both from about their chest to top of head. The two could basically turn and be right in each other’s faces, so there is that tension, but what Kar Wai to also distance them is how he puts a puts a harsh red glow on the two. In the background of the shot we have dark, blurry images muddied by darkness and neon light, all framed by two thick, red curtains on either side of the frame. The red glow saturates the room and since these two characters have an exaggerated amount of light on their faces they almost begin to fade into the surroundings. Another interesting thing about this shot is that the woman still wears her sunglasses, by never taking them off she remains a mystery, we can’t see into her eyes, can’t see who she “really” is and neither can He Zhiwu. At this point in the movie we want to see him find someone so he can start to get over his old girlfriend May, and in this scene when he meets the woman, as viewers we almost expect that the two will get together but Kar Wai places visual roadblocks that make even small encounters seem like uphill battles.
The other scenes in Chungking that illustrates both togetherness and distance existing simultaneously are the recurring marketplace scenes between Officer 663 and Faye. Once again Kar Wai places the two in extremely close proximity in a crowded market where they are forced to get close, but again he does a few things to visually tear them apart. One quality of these sequences is the shaky camera movement that is fairly uncommon for the rest of the scenes between men and women. The movement is meant to convey a sense of chaos, to exaggerate the crowdedness of the marketplace, like this is worst possible place for these two people to try and get to know each other. It’s frustrating and charming at the same time, every day she comes down the same street carrying her basket just so she can see the officer eat lunch, and it seems as though he might enjoy seeing there but there’s also a little bit of frustration at the time and place of the meeting. It’s loud, it’s tight, it’s probably hot, but ok, he’ll still help her carry the basket, it’s cute. Also in one of the shots when the two are walking down the street through the market you can see the use of a color scheme once again. This time Faye and the officer are wearing almost solid yellow and blue. As she walks on the left side of the shot in her yellow shirt you can see other yellow objects appearing behind her catching the eye. For instance there is a large umbrella, some fruits and vegetables and a couple other people wearing the color. The same goes for the officer on his side of the shot, wearing blue.
In his short film Eros Wong Kar Wai creates this style of “close but separate” through a combination both visuals and storytelling. In this particular film, like I mentioned earlier, the sexual tension is created by showing Zhang as coming from a completely different world than Ms. Hua. He is shown working hard on her new clothes in a dark and dreary shop far away from her well kept, upscale apartment. In the scenes when he arrives at her home to fit her for the new garments he is always silent, like he knows he’s intruding and she is always busy doing something that distracts her from really acknowledging his presence; talking on the phone, arguing with a “client” or simply doesn’t have time to see him at all. But there they are, standing close together in an ambient lit apartment, waiting for a spark between them. Sometimes its hard to even see that there’s supposed to be anything between them at all but what Kar Wai does to hint at Zhang’s feelings are little acts of patience towards her lack of patience. Kind of like in Princess Bride when Wesley always says “as you wish” every time Buttercup bosses him around. In one particular scene Zhang is measuring Ms. Hua’s waistline and she says how she’s gained so much weight recently, Zhang looks at the measuring tape which confirms it but he replies that it’s only a couple of inches.
As we can see through these various visual and storytelling techniques Wong Kar Wai consistently and uniquely plays with the concept of what it means to connect with another person. Whether it be on a romantic level or just chance encounter that has potential, Kar Wai is still able to grab the viewers attention through subtle indicators that point to a possible love between two strangers. He creates these characters that seem so impenetrable and shut off from an uncaring world that we as viewers are compelled to focus harder, look for subtle clues about who these people are, what they’re looking for and we desire for them to find somebody special and break out of the cycle that seems to have them bound.
CitationsFuller, Graham. “Wong Kar-Wai.” Interview February 2001: 15-17
Leong, Anthony. “Meditations on Loss: A Framework for the Films of Wong Kar Wai.” Mediacircus.net. 1998. Mediacircus.net. 20 April 1998
Wright, Elizabeth. “Wong Kar-wai.” Sensesofcinema.com. 2002. Sensesofcinema.com. 8 May 2002
