ASHES OF TIME - Wong Kar Wai (1994)

With a five hour bus ride to Madrid last weekend, I needed some serious reading, podcasting, and at least one good movie to accompany me during that endless trip. Browsing through Netflix, I found "Ashes of Time", by Wong Kar-Wai - the first movie of his I ever saw, and which almost put me immediately off his work for good.

And that's very easy to understand: when you are a teenager and you are promised a chinese movie with swordfights, you can be terribly disappointed to find that the movie you just rent is about a handful of brooding figures who long for their lost loves. Because that's what is Ashes of Time: a remarkably heartbreaking song to lost loves and broken promises.

Wong Kar-Wai took his source material from the martial arts novels of Jin Yong (1924-...) where abound the hired swordsmen, evil henchmen, heroic riders and damsels in distress in ancient China, and then WKW just gave everything a good kicking and tore through those characters to make them - in spite of their irreprochable skills with a sword - completely defenseless in regard to love and feelings.

The movie has been heavily critized for its cryptic plot. Don't worry, you'll have difficulties too at the beginning, but once you get to the end, everything actually makes sense - and it's even better at the second watching. It is actually worth remembering that the main narrator is Ouyang Feng (played by Leslie Cheung below) whose job is to serve as an intermediary for killers in search for some job.

Actually, Ouyang Feng ended up in this job because he left the girl who loved him. He does his best to forget, but if there is one thing that his job does best, is to prevent him from forgetting, because all the assassins in search for a quick dollar/yen he meets, they have almost all of them stories about a lost love and how they have made a mess of their opportunities and are now condemned men who can only mourn... the ashes of time.

For example, there is his friend - Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) - who visits him every year. These visits, as we will know at the end, are not as innocent or as friendly as they seem, but for the first quarter of the movie they serve to introduce the story of Huang Yaoshi and Murong Yang. Huang Yaoshi has seduced a young woman and promised a wedding, but of course... He abandons her. The young woman so completely loses it that she wants to hire a killer to kill Huang Yaoshi... So, she comes to ask Ouyang Feng for help...

Then there is the Blind Swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai below) who needs money to see the "cherry blossom" one last time - because he is getting blind and has few times left. Ouyang Feng directs him against a troop of bandit which provides the heaviest and most impressive fighting scenes of the movie - in spite of his blindness getting the better of him...

And then we have Hong Qigong (Jacky Cheung below), a dirty vagabond, shoeless but very good with a sword, who seeks adventure and tries to avoid and leave his wife behind. However, he is obviously the only one to have a true sense of justice (and humour) among all those killing machines - and the only one who will come out of this story alive and happy.

As I said, if you are looking for a pure martial art movie - perfectly choreographed and perfectly filmed - go your own way because sometimes it feels like WKW is more interested in filming the grains of sand blown by the wind than the actual fights (probably influenced by his long time collaborator Christopher Doyle behind the camera). The fighting scenes, though they are directed by Samo Hung, are elliptical, almost reduced to shadows of themselves. There are no doubts that they have been seriously designed and trained and rehearsed, but WKW simply does not care about them as much as the faces of his actors and the intricacy of the feelings at play in his plot. 

There is a case for a remake there though... If there exists some director able to fuse together those lacrymose stories, and intersperse them with some Sergio Leone-like directing for the fighting scenes, we have in our hands a probable masterpiece. However, this is just me daydreaming... WKW movie is a masterpiece already in itself, one which deserves its fair chance to be seen and cherished by as many people as possible.