The lingering art of Wong Kar-wai

With ‘Blossoms Shanghai’, the master moves from cinema to web, even as he continues to explore his themes of love and longing, writes Nikhil Waiker

Towards the end of Wong Kar-wai’s beloved classic ‘Happy Together’, an overwhelmed Lai holds on to a tape recorder as he breaks down. The background crowd and diegetic noise stay apathetic to his plight.

In the fan favourite ‘In the Mood for Love’, Mr Chow and Mrs Chen, victims of adultery and neighbours who have discovered each other’s company, recreate scenes of their spouses falling in love. The camera follows this intimacy without flinching, without judgement, and without emotion. They eventually fall in love in the Hong Kong society of the 1960s, where such a relationship is sure to face hostility.

Hopeless romance, lost love, new love soothing old wounds, loneliness in a vibrant city are the characteristics of a Wong Kar-wai film. 

His characters form a loose cinematic universe, all seemingly driven by a process of searching. In ‘Happy Together’, Lai searches for a calming stability in his relationship, in ‘In the Mood for Love’, Chow and Chen search for answers as victims of infidelity, and in ‘Chunking Express’, Faye and the police seek love in a desperate world. 

Hong Kong was under British rule for over a century. Since its return to China, it is caught between the old and the new, and between maintaining its autonomy and integrating with mainland China. Wong Kar-wai and his contemporaries, who ushered in a new wave of filmmaking in Hong Kong, live away from China’s overly dramatised rom-coms and martial arts films 

Born in Shanghai in 1958, Wong Kar-wai’s family moved to Hong Kong when he was five — a dislocation that would subtly introduce ‘rootlessness’, ‘longing’ and  ‘nostalgia’ in his later work. 

His first film ‘As Tears Go By’ (1988), a crime drama, showed flashes of his cinematic maturity and his emerging style. And by ‘Days of Being Wild’ (1990), his cinematic language had begun to find its vocabulary. Chaos and the organic are the two dictums that drive his style.

Beginning his long time collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, ‘Days of Being Wild’ became the first of an informal trilogy. It is followed by ‘In The Mood for Love’ and ‘2046’.

Wong Kar-wai famously talks about films that leave an “aftertaste”. These are not designed to present a story, but rather to document the history of emotions. The characters develop through a despairing search for affection in a dreary city.

In the same spirit, and in a wildly monumental undertaking, Wong Kar-wai has launched a 30-episode TV series ‘Blossoms Shanghai’, released partly on the streaming platform Mubi. It traverses through the tumult of ’90s Shanghai.

He unravels the personal journey of Ah Bao who rises up the ranks in the stock market jungle. The chaotic beginning might feel uncoupled from the Wong Kar-wai we know and love. But, by the 10th episode, his new collaboration with Peter Pau and screenwriter Qin Wen feels like a beautiful accident. The series begins to fall into place, and the pacing and the tone feel inherently ‘Wong’ as the production yields a luxurious reconstruction of ’90s Shanghai. 

Wong Kar-wai’s films are united by a set of deep, philosophical preoccupations. Time may be his most persistent theme — not simply as a tool for linear progression, but as a series of moments to be captured, lost, and desperately revisited.

In ‘Days of Being Wild’, Yuddy tells a woman, “You will remember me for one minute. You will remember that you knew me for that one minute,” encapsulating both the definitiveness and the timelessness of the encounter. This exploration continues in the trilogy, where characters are haunted by the past and yearn for moments that only live as nostalgia. This obsession with the past leads to a pervasive sense of isolation from the current social landscape. Despite being set in densely populated cities like Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s films are populated by lonely souls who struggle to connect. 

Music is the soul of his films. In a conversation with Martin Scorsese, he explained that his soundtracks are eclectic and unforgettable, often borrowed from other films (Seijun Suzuki’s Yumeji’s theme in ‘In the Mood for Love’). They are carefully curated to create an immediate emotional response.

The recurring, languid violin phrase of Shigeru Umebayashi’s ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ perfectly captures the characters’ unspoken longing and their vacuous emptiness in ‘In the Mood for Love’. The mandopop and the cantopop in ‘Blossoms Shanghai’, tied to the rapidity of the series, capture not just the characters, but also the environment. 

Ultimately, the power of a Wong Kar-wai film lies in its resistance to easy interpretation. As Sofia Coppola said, “After watching a Wong Kar-wai film, you get the feeling you don’t quite know what you have watched but you do know it is something you haven’t seen before.” He doesn’t offer happy endings or clear-cut conclusions, but rather real, messy moments that reflect the beautiful uncertainties of life. 

(The author runs The Parallel Cinema Club based in Bengaluru and Hyderabad)