Indeed, it is worth our while to run through just what kinds of genres Wong’s films belong to. As Tears Goes By is a gangster movie in the mould of Scorsese and John Woo; it is also a romance melodrama. Days of Being Wild is an ‘Ah Fei’ movie-cum-romance (‘Ah Fei’ being a distinctive Cantonese genre, and slang for young ruffian or discontented punk). Chungking Express is a light romance with touches of noir intrigue (at least in the first part of the movie featuring Brigitte Lin, whose iconic presence evokes more the romantic melodramas of the 1970s with which she made her name). Ashes of Time is a wuxia (martial chivalry) movie with characters culled from a popular martial arts novel. Fallen Angels starts off as a movie about a profes- sional killer and changes direction into various strands of melodrama (including a father-and-son relationship movie). Happy Together is a gay road movie romance trailing a pre-1997 anomie theme. In the Mood for Love is a wenyi film in the classic style, indicating a melodrama with Chinese characteristics, fundamentally a love story about repressed desire.

From these descriptions, while it is true that all these films are essentially genre films that fall within the traditions of Hong Kong cinema, it is equally true that they are transformed by Wong’s iconoclastic approach, such that it is possible to insist that they are not genre films, although they may be implicit tributes to the forms and conventions of genre film-making in the Hong Kong cinema. [...]

The shape of the industry has changed from King Hu’s time, when an
artist of Hu’s calibre could not be accommodated by the system, to one
where an artist of Wong’s ability can call the shots and play the game adroitly
within the industry. The reality is that since Wong came into critical promi-
nence in the early 1990s, the film industry has been plagued by a shrinking
regional market that resulted from the financial meltdown in the economies
of the area. It is easy to dismiss Wong’s long shooting schedules and his
impromptu working style as irresponsible in the light of this economic cri-
sis, but he is a director who goes against the grain of slipshoddiness, seven-
day wonders (or the practice of shooting a film quickly, as fast as a week in
the old days) and a system dominated by producers and compromised by
powerful big-name stars. Aesthetically, Wong set the standards of painstak-
ing craftsmanship in mise en scène, production design, cinematography,
editing and music. He also sets another standard by blending literature and
cinema through the evocative use of voiceover monologues, giving each
character an interior voice and a point of view that makes them stakehold-
ers in the narrative – singling him out as a rare literary stylist as well as a
visual one.

It is perhaps best to see Wong’s slow and protracted production sched-
ules through the looking-glass of a style of film-making that has a time-
honoured line: one could cite Erich von Stroheim and the making of Greed
(1925), Orson Welles’s Othello (1952) and Don Quixote (1957), and King Hu’s
A Touch of Zen (1969), as well as the fastidious methods of Terrence Malick,
Martin Scorsese, Michael Powell and David Lean. One could also point to
the experimental avant-garde cinema: for example, Harry Smith’s
Mahagonny (1980), a massive visual translation of Weill and Brecht’s opera
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which was constructed from eleven
hours of footage shot over a period of ten years. On the intimate scale,
Wong’s style may be likened to the Dogme school without the dogma; the
minimalism of Suzuki, Antonioni, Godard, Bresson, Ruiz and Jarmusch;
and the free improvisatory style of independent film-makers like John
Cassavetes and Rob Nilsson.