DVD Review: Wong Kar Wai Box Set review
Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai has provoked movie lovers worldwide with his very individualistic style of cinema. His is a kind of cinema that has as many defenders as detractors, and one cannot remain an impassive viewer when it comes to his creations. That he is one of the most original voices in contemporary world cinema is a fact that does not demand reiteration, but to viewers in India, his films have remained largely inaccessible outside the film festival / film society circuit.
So, when one gets the access to four of his most celebrated movies at one go, along with his favourite cinematographer Christopher Doyle's first directorial venture, it's celebration time for film lovers. This box set of five films does exactly that - bringing together Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, and Doyle's Away With Words.
1997 Cannes best director award-winning Happy Together is a film that brought gay love to centre stage of Hong Kong cinema much before Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain did in Hollywood. With an incomplete journey to the famous Iguazu waterfalls in Argentina symbolizing unattainable happiness, the film takes the viewer through the journey of a failing affair between Ho Po-Wing (played by Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). To Ho's living-on-the-edge behaviour, Lai's commitment to their relationship acts as a perfect foil, taking the film through its roller coaster emotional journey. It's a film that firmly established Wong Kar Wai as a filmmaker of international repute, and also as a master teller of stories about lonely souls and alienation of individuals from their surroundings. Doyle's brilliant cinematography captures the melancholic mood of the film with a grip that remains unwavering.
In the Mood for Love, which in 2000 won the Best Actor prize for Tony Leung Chiu-wai and the Technical Grand Prize for Christopher Doyle, Lee Ping-bing, William Chang at the Cannes Film Festival, continues with the director's passion for lonely souls, though it has no thematic link with Happy Together from any other point of view. Rather, is is considered the middle of a trilogy that comprises Days of Being Wild (1991) and 2046 (2004). Set in Hong Kong of early 1960s, it is the story of journalist Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung), who moves into a apartment room the same day as So Lai-zhen (Maggie Cheung) does to the room next door. Chow gradually becomes friendly with So, a secretary in a firm, and they realise that their respective spouses are almost always on official tour. As they become close, they suspect that their spouses are having extramarital affairs. Even as prying eyes in the neighbourhood begin to suspect that the two are having an affair, they themselves are firm in their belief that theirs is nothing beyond friendship. Or is it? A film that questions the notion of relationships and desire, In the Mood for Love is as much loved for its intricate storytelling as its haunting background score. A must watch from a year that also saw the global success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The third film in the set, Chungking Express, is again about relationships, this time between a plainclothes detective, a uniformed policeman, a drug-peddling femme fatale and a silent lover. Unlike the usual cop stories, this film is only occasionally action-filled, otherwise going into the director's penchant for study of the human mind. More about loss, alienation and longing for company, it is about individual whims and fancies that connect with the viewer at many levels. And Wong's masterly control of the medium is evident in the way he weaves together to completely unrelated stories through a series of fleeing images.
In fact, he had written a third segment of the same story, but that finally resulted in another film, the 1995 creation Fallen Angels, that also forms this set. It is about three individuals - a hitman, his partner and a petty criminal. The last one meets a woman who is searching for the woman who stole her man, while the other two are going about their job professionally. Again a story about relationships, the film questions the notion itself, wondering whether a real relationship is possible in the modern times when everything is market driven. In a way, it also exhibits how the definition of relationships has taken a new meaning altogether in the fast-paced world of ours. Fallen Angles is a film that showcases Wong Kar Wai as a brilliant technician and an even more brilliant storyteller. And like all of his movies, this one also boasts of some uniformly brilliant acting, whether by Takeshi Kaneshiro or by Karen Mok Man-Wai.
The last film in the set is Doyle's Away with Words, which, expectedly, boasts of brilliant cinematography. A very personal film, Doyle does not rely much on his cinematography expertise here, instead relying on weaving an intricate tale of human emotions. Said to have autobiographical streaks, the film's protagonists love extreme positions of living just like Doyle. It tells us the story of a Japanese man whose memory comes in the way of many of his current thought process. The film does not have a straightforward narrative structure, which makes it quite interesting.
The set comes with added attractions, with one Indian short film included in each DVD:
Jill Misquitta's Joyce, Madan Bavaria's Suman, Rajula Shah's Do Hafte Guzarte Do Hafte Nahin Lagte, Sriram Raghavan's The Eight Column Affair and Rajat Kapoor's Hypnothesis. This alone makes it a collector's edition.
Palador-Moser Baer; Rs 1,995Â
