Wong’s features have not vitiated to the level of MTV because of the contexts they invoke: their historical nexus with past eras, their identification with the times, their interconnectedness of the local with the global, and, above all, their depth of meaning and feeling.

[...] 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.