Ashes of Time Rating *** A must see Directed and written by Wong Kar-wai With Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Kar-fai, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia,Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, and Karina Lau.
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In fact Stanley Kwan and Yim Ho are two of my three favorite Hong Kong directors (Yim Ho is perhaps best known for Homecoming and his work on King of Chess, a feature completed by Tsui Hark). The third is Wong Kar-wai, whose dazzling if sometimes bewildering fourth feature, Ashes of Time (1994), is playing at the Film Center on Saturday and Sunday. Budgeted at five and a half million dollars–a veritable fortune for a Hong Kong film–it has a lengthy and troubled production history: Wong started shooting in northern mainland China in 1992, suspended work when his all-star cast had to leave to meet other commitments, then resumed shooting in the summer of 1993. During that long hiatus Wong wrote, shot, and edited Chungking Express (1994), and thanks to Quentin Tarantino this will be his first film to receive U.S. theatrical release. (Tarantino, recently granted his own subdivision at Miramax, is allowed to select a few foreign films a year for distribution, and Chungking Express was his first choice.)
Ashes of Time is neither the greatest nor the most accessible Wong film I’ve seen–Days of Being Wild (1991) is better, and Chungking Express is more accessible. But it’s certainly the wildest as well as the grandest in scale, and it probably bears greater witness to some of the recent changes in Chinese cinema. (I haven’t seen Wong’s first feature, the 1988 As Tears Go By, but according to J. Hoberman in the current issue of Premiere, it “successfully reworks the premise of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.”)
The rapidity of these sequences reminds me of an observation once made by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen about the differences between Japanese and Western cultures in relation to time. He noted that a Japanese tea ceremony is both slower and faster than a similar procedure would be in the West–the endlessly protracted process of sipping the tea is followed by a quick gulping down of the last drops. Applying this observation to Japanese music and other cultural forms, Stockhausen identified a pattern that helps account for what Western listeners and viewers perceive as the extreme slowness of certain passages and the extreme rapidity of others (often sequences involving violence). Related principles seem operative in many Chinese films, and they clearly play a role in Ashes of Time.
For all their thematic and stylistic differences, Wong’s three most recent features are plainly the work of the same artist. The slurred action scenes in Ashes of Time, for example, are just as evident in Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express–revved-up cadenzas and explosive interludes of exuberance (or desperation).
