Ashes of Time (Dung che sai duk, 1994)
Wong Kar Wai
Hong Kong
99 min, color, Cantonese (English subtitles)
This is one of the most surrealistic (read "confusing") films I have ever seen. Although the story did eventually come together, it was not until half an hour after the film ended that the disconnected vignettes started making sense together. Being unfamiliar with Louis Cha's novel on which the screenplay is based, I attribute most of my utter loss of comprehension to insufficient preparation. However, my patience was rewarded and even though strictly speaking the plot is not a necessary condition for enjoying the film (the lush cinematography and the post-modernist approach should be sufficient), Wai's masterpiece is certainly better that way, while still impinging on my linear disposition.
The disjointed narrative is hard to follow, it being just a sequence of vignettes that are both spatially and temporally distorted. The story is not circular, despite the essentially equivalent monologue delivered by the protagonist at both ends of the film. ASHES OF TIME is a study of personalities and as such follows the convoluted logic of human relationships, except the motivation of the characters, obliquely hinted at during their on-screen time, is revealed only gradually, maddeningly slowly, and with some perverse satisfaction in torturing our need for explanation. For the first half of the film characters come and go in seemingly pointless chaos. Yet, the travelers at the inn are connected, and their fates intertwined by the simplest passions.
Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) lives on the edge of the desert, pimping for young, but penniless, swordsmen, whom he hires to do various murderous things. His inn is the center of the action, as the stories are told by and about the visitors in the great Chaucerian tradition. Feng is morally bankrupt, yet manages to come up with some of the most poetic observations of human nature in his ruthless monologues. Every year, around the time the peaches blossom, he is visited by his friend Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), although he (and we) know not why. During one of his visits, he brings with him a bottle of magical wine, given to him by some mysterious woman. Everyone who drinks this wine will lose his memory. Memory being the root of all suffering.
Strangely enough, the more he drinks, the more everyone else remembers. Huang is a burnt-out womanizer and the first person(s) to appear at Feng's place is Murong Yin/Yang (Brigitte Lin). At first it appears as if Yin and Yang are brother and sister, the brother wanting to kill Huang for rejecting his sister, and the sister wanting to kill her brother for interfering with her relationship. As it turns out, however, Yin-Yang are one and the same physical person, who has developed a severe split personality disorder because of Huang's rejection of Murong's love. The Blind Swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) also suffers from rejected love, his wife having been seduced by said Huang on their wedding night. The two women hopelessly in love with the man who pines away for the woman who will never be his (and whom we do not learn about until the very end). In a bizarre twist, said woman is the reason for Feng's self-imposed hermitage, for she rejected him to marry his older brother even though they had both been in love. Hence the complicated pentagon.
The other two strangers, Hung Chi (Jacky Cheung) and the Young Girl (Charlie Yeung), arrive separately only to influence each other's lives profoundly. She wants to hire Feng to arrange the murder of some men, who have killed her brother. She has nothing to offer except eggs and her mule and Feng refuses to help, but suggests that her body is more marketable than her pitiful eggs. She refuses to yield and waits for someone to agree to help her. The young Hung is a master swordsman, but also a bit of an idealist. He works for Feng for a while but eventually takes pity on the girl and goes on a murderous rampage, slaughtering all those who had participated in the killing of her brother. In the brawl he loses his finger and thus the ability to wield a sword. He is undeterred, however, and when Feng refuses to send for a doctor hinting to the Girl again that she might have to prostitute herself for the sake of Hung, he forbids her to do so.
Again, this capsule summary fails to do justice to the complex interactions of the characters. The philosophical meanderings of the script earned Wei tons of accolades, included several very prestigious awards. Hence, the film must be seen, not retold. The mesmerizing tale of lost chances, fear of abandoning oneself to another, and pain of betrayal comes to a screetching halt when Oyuand returns to White Camel Mountain after finding out that his beloved has died. Where in the youth he saw mountains only as obstacles that concealed a wonderful world behind them, where he would climb them, leaving his love to seek this world, where once there he would find that there's nothing worth seeing; he now no longer wondered what hid behind the mountains. Only it is too late: the one love that comes once in life had withered away on the lonely beach.
The performers. Maggie Cheung's five minute cameo is the undisputed centerpiece of the film both in terms of story (she is the one link between most of the characters) and acting. Wai's camera stares intently at her while she gazes beyond time and relives the past full of regret. Maggie is an accomplished actress, but this performance was beyond description. Her subtle agony is expressed obliquely and the one has to look into her eyes to touch the intensity of her feeling. Charlie Yeung, who plays the innocent young Girl intent on revenging her brother's death, not only holds her own amidst the cast of veterans but actually runs circles around some of them. Leslie Cheung's goateed and morally bankrupt character actually manages to evoke ambivalence from the audience, and so much the better. And finally, Tony Leung Chiu Wai (the Blind Swordsman) delivers what has to be one of the shortest but most dramatic roles I have seen him in.
The rest of the stellar cast is mostly forgettable. Brigitte Lin, usually THE commanding presence of the film, is flat, one-dimensional and, quite frankly, boring despite wreathing seductively in every other scene. Carina Lau, portraying the distraught, but ravishing, unfaithful wife is wasted, having spent most of her screen time in an intimate tête-à-tête with her horse. Tony Leung kA Fai is too brooding to be believable as the ultimate womanizer he was supposed to be, and his wooden performance did not improve matters much.
The cinematography is out of this world. There is so much imagery that repeated viewing is a must (and my head still spins). Complicated tracking shots, abrupt editing, impressionistic pastel-like blurred images, and static scenes, all mix together in a veritable whirlpool of technique and ideas. Christopher Doyle is perhaps one of the best, most imaginative, and daring cinematographers out there. Seeing is believing.
June 24, 2001.