This is the fourth Wong Kar-Wai film I've seen, but it might as well have been the first... which is to say that it's pretty much the same thing as the other three Wong Kar-Wai films I've seen, so it's like watching them again. This is not actually a bad thing, it's more of a style thing, like how Ozu's films are largely the same concepts, themes, imagery, characters, etc., repeatedly. Wong Kar-Wai remakes himself a lot, I've noticed.
In this film, the idea is the tango, as opposed to the other musical structures of his other films. A womanizer in 60s Hong Kong obsessively destroys two women until he must leave, at which point he meets an ex-cop/first woman's confidant who actually seems to understand him a bit better than the women ever did, being as it were that all the women can do is try to get over him. The man is led, in theory, by his anxiety over his true mother and his need to control women based off of his lack of control over them: his true mother abandoned him, his adoptive mother entraps him, and he can't get over his frustration of either.
The thing about Wong Kar-Wai's films I don't understand, though, is that though all of them have unique plots, great imagery, and good performance (the things that typically add up to "a good film"), for some reason I always get the sense that the overall value of anything in them is the same. Christopher Doyle's cinematography and Kar-Wai's directing loves blocking, framing, reframing, framing within frames, and especially vibrant color, but the overall effect is remarkably undramatic. His stoic characters and their bubbling aggression are sometimes pretty apathetic despite their emotion. He follows characters, and then leaves them, and then sometimes brings them back, and sometimes doesn't, and sometimes the story is done before the movie ends, and sometimes the movie ends before the story is done, and overall I notice that the effect is pretty much the same. The ultimate effect is a glossed over, smooth surface, which is pretty to look at but honestly not very tactile to touch.
Basically, this is a good movie. It's just not very interesting. Which is exactly what can be said of everything of Kar-Wai's I've seen. The more of his work I watch, the less I understand its popularity.
--PolarisDiB
In this film, the idea is the tango, as opposed to the other musical structures of his other films. A womanizer in 60s Hong Kong obsessively destroys two women until he must leave, at which point he meets an ex-cop/first woman's confidant who actually seems to understand him a bit better than the women ever did, being as it were that all the women can do is try to get over him. The man is led, in theory, by his anxiety over his true mother and his need to control women based off of his lack of control over them: his true mother abandoned him, his adoptive mother entraps him, and he can't get over his frustration of either.
The thing about Wong Kar-Wai's films I don't understand, though, is that though all of them have unique plots, great imagery, and good performance (the things that typically add up to "a good film"), for some reason I always get the sense that the overall value of anything in them is the same. Christopher Doyle's cinematography and Kar-Wai's directing loves blocking, framing, reframing, framing within frames, and especially vibrant color, but the overall effect is remarkably undramatic. His stoic characters and their bubbling aggression are sometimes pretty apathetic despite their emotion. He follows characters, and then leaves them, and then sometimes brings them back, and sometimes doesn't, and sometimes the story is done before the movie ends, and sometimes the movie ends before the story is done, and overall I notice that the effect is pretty much the same. The ultimate effect is a glossed over, smooth surface, which is pretty to look at but honestly not very tactile to touch.
Basically, this is a good movie. It's just not very interesting. Which is exactly what can be said of everything of Kar-Wai's I've seen. The more of his work I watch, the less I understand its popularity.
--PolarisDiB