by
Stephen Teo
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The film, therefore, is effectively the first of Wong’s mood pieces where character prevails over story. The mood casts the characters adrift in a sea of melancholia and spiritual ennui. The film takes place mostly at night. The landscape is one of vacant stairways, doorways and alleyways, where streetlights cast sharp shadows. So Lai-chen and the cop who befriends her wan- der, Antonioni-like, through this lonely landscape, their faces reflecting the lights of traffic passing by; an empty telephone kiosk shining like a beacon in the night assumes poignant significance (Lau waits for Lai-chen’s call by this kiosk). Time is spent waiting for lovers who never come. Yuddy’s rudderless existence shows itself by his favoured body postures: either reclining in chairs or on the bed. Even in the love scenes with So Lai-chen and Lulu, he is not shown actively making love, but always post-coitus, lying prone on the bed. But there is a violence that lurks behind this placid exterior: witness the scene where he attacks the gigolo for stealing Auntie’s earrings. [...]
The film portrays human life as one of limited possibilities. We can imagine So Lai-chen spending the rest of her days collecting Coke bottles and stamping admission tickets, and sympathetically wish better things for her. It is as if by giving up on her lover and the imagined possibilities of a richer inner life that he might provide, she has surrendered to her life of shrunken horizons and sunk back into its depths. Similarly imprisoned in a life of small possibilities is Lulu. In the scene where she confronts Lai-chen in the canteen, she grips the wire fence in anguish, and it is clear to the viewer that the two girls are in some sort of mental prison, as stifling and confining as the real one.
Yet, for all its elegance in re-creating the past and in capturing nostalgia, the idea of change over time is marked with an iron brand that makes the film somewhat cool and distant. The key in unlocking the secret that Tony Leung whispers into the hole in the wall lies, I believe, with the Maggie Cheung character. So Lai-chen is simply too uncertain of herself, overcome by anxiety and fear of gossip that she betrays not only Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan but herself. Fear of gossip is the overarching conceit that justifies the sense of repression hovering over the whole affair: it prevails not only in the home environment (necessitating her hiding inside Chow Mo-wan’s apartment when her landlady unexpectedly returns home, where she spends the whole night playing mahjong) but also in her workplace (her boss tries to keep his own affair with a mistress hidden, but Maggie is perceptive enough so that it becomes an open secret between them).
[...] it is this faculty of keeping secrets which, the heroine believes, sets man apart from animals. The ‘secret’ of Chow’s affair becomes a sort of metaphysical back story in 2046 which is evoked by the hole; but the hole raises a persisting enigma. As Chow muses later in his own monologue: ‘I once fell in love with a woman and wondered whether she loved me or not.’ Tak himself voices this same line in his own affair with Faye Wong’s character.
[...] It is taken for granted that Wong’s films provide a substitute to the crass commercial fare of most of Hong Kong cinema and to the Hollywood blockbusters that dominate the cinemas of the world, but they also give us alternative ways of looking at art cinema. Wong’s cinema may be defined as asymmetric art in a way that makes it distinctive in both Eastern and Western contexts. It is much too romantic, much too emotional and ultimately much too Hong Kong to be located in the same topography of European-style high art cinema; and it is much too cool, much too genteel and ultimately much too other-worldly to be simply recognised as Hong Kong.
The best take on this paradox is to concede that Wong’s cinema belongs to Hong Kong and the world. Wong’s art can be said to be both local and global at the same time, his accomplishments all the more extraordinary because they are examples of contemporary localism that manifest the ‘global in the local’, to borrow the title of an essay by Arif Dirlik. In this essay, Dirlik is concerned with the spread of global capitalism and the means of resistance to it. To Dirlik, localism spells resistance, the outcome of a historical and political struggle by groups suppressed or marginalised by modernisation. He defines contemporary localism as ‘a postmodern consciousness, embedded in new forms of empowerment’.10 I believe Dirlik’s thesis affords us the most perceptive way of looking at Wong Karwai as a post-modern figure. In this view, Wong is really a film-maker marginalised by Hong Kong’s film capitalistic forces but who has so far managed to avoid being overpowered by them. His cinema embodies variations of genre and art cinema, making his films populist and cerebral at the same time.
The decline of Hong Kong cinema is the symptom of a larger malaise with economic and political dimensions, which befell Hong Kong in the final decade of the last century. Wong is the child of the depression, not its father, and if his films are carefully designed manifestations of the depression, or of millennial disillusionment, they are nevertheless transcending works whose objective is not to alienate the audience with inertia; rather, they are a therapeutic course of treatment, making a point to entertain the audience with sensations of colour, design, movement, action and drama.
Like every attempt to construct a scale model of the world, this one is bound to be partial in both senses of the word. To present the whole story, it would have to be as vast as history. There's no way to be unbiased, either: our positions and values inevitably influence what we include and what we leave out. What we offer here is simply one perspective from our side of the counter and our side of the barricades. If it lines up with yours, let's do something about it.
good disclaimer
Work doesn't simply create wealth where there was only poverty before. On the contrary, so long as it enriches some at others' expense, work creates poverty, too, in direct proportion to profit.
Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There's no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything. There may be scarcity, but no one is subjected to the indignity of having to go without while others have more than they know what to do with. [...]
think about this more--it's interesting because it's almost the opposite of what PG thinks of as poverty vs inequality. this POV makes a lot of sense.
the real question is: can you have poverty without inequality? and can you have inequality without poverty? where poverty is defined as something "bad". my embyronic theory here is that if everyone is content with what they have, then even if someone has something extra (e.g., more land, or art, or whatever) then, as long as as no one else really feels they like they need, it's not really inequality. that it's a psychological state more than it is something that can be objectively defined. look into this more tho
You could say capitalism puts power in the worst hands, but that misses the point. It's not that the ones rewarded by the economy tend to be the worst people, but that--however selfish or generous they are--their positions are contingent on certain kinds of behavior. The moment an executive deprioritizes profit-making, he or his company is instantly replaced with a more ruthless contender. [...]
aligns nicely with my thoughts (echoed by a ton of books i've read recently) on the systemic forces of capitalism. something to think about: how much room is there for individual differences? because there is definitely some room. how do you analyse the effectiveness of individual action, when individual-collective is a spectrum not a binary?
[...] Relying on small businesses to solve the problems generated by capitalism is less realistic than attempting to bring about the end of capitalism itself.
preach