By Rowena Aquino
Wong Kar-wai's enthralling digital restoration of his 1994 film Ashes of Time revitalizes the cinematic fragments of love, desire, rejection and exile.
It was difficult for me to figure out how to start an article about Wong Kar-wai's upcoming release of the digital restoration of his 1994 film, Ashes of Time. Part of me wanted to just tell everyone to go see the film and leave it at that. If only it was that simple.
In a press meeting with Wong Kar-wai, when asked whether this redux is a "restoration" or more of a "revisit" and "rectification" of what the film originally was, he adamantly replied that it is a "digital restoration." He approached the restoration by strictly following what was already filmed -- given the result was good to begin with, albeit in dire need of digital clean-up and care -- and by sticking to the letter and spirit of the material. In other words, the image always comes both first and last, the bittersweet challenge of anyone writing about film.
Writing about Ashes of Time makes me more aware than usual of that challenge. Generally speaking, Ashes of Time is not your traditional Hong Kong martial arts film, and more particularly, it is not your traditional Wong Kar-wai film.
First, it is set in a time immemorial. The film takes its characters from Louis Cha's four volumes of The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. Second, the setting is the desert. But once the film soaks itself into your brain, it becomes evident that it is indeed a Wong Kar-wai film, traditional or not, whatever that may mean.
Although Wong has said in the past that his films are not about time and space, one would be a tad idiotic not to realise that in denial, there are grains of truth. The English title makes it explicit enough. Ashes of Time takes on the issue of time and space in a highly sensual way that only Wong Kar-wai can. So despite the martial arts context, the film is a hypnotic phenomenological rumination on how one passes the time.
On paper, nothing sounds more banal. That time is really the result of gaps between the occurrence of multiple events and thoughts is overstating the obvious. Because of its multiplicity, the passing of time is far from being one unfolding line, never looking or going back. For most of the characters in Ashes of Time, time is the product of rejection and living with it, betrayal and living with it; in short, it is the product of dealing with everyday life's interactions and dissolutions, in a positive or negative way. One of the most striking visual aspects of Ashes of Time is the play of light and shadow. But another aspect is the profound attachment to close-ups to convey the banality of the passing of time, from the present to the memories of the past that fill in the colour of the present. With the lighting and use of close-ups taken together, Wong Kar-wai makes the face as limitless and mysterious a landscape as the desert.
The nameless woman from his past
For those unfamiliar with the film, Ashes of Time presents a group of isolated individuals whose intended and unintended encounters trigger ripple effects of relationships amongst the others. Most central to the ripple effects is the accomplished swordsman-turned-cynical-entrepreneur Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing). Ouyang serves as a kind of broker between swordsmen-for-hire and those who want a job done. Ouyang's industry, however, belies a heartbroken past in his makeshift tavern/abode in the middle of the desert. Through his tavern and enterprise, he receives the annual visit of a fellow skilled swordsman Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who also nurses a broken heart. Complements of each other, they are in love with the same woman (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk). Aside from this main strand of memories, relationships and distances are four interrelating strands that feature an equally stellar supporting cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai as a blind swordsman; Carina Lau Ka-ling as the blind swordsman's wife in love with Huang Yaoshi; Jacky Cheung Hok-yau as an up-and-coming swordsman not yet tainted by cynicism; Charlie Young as a peasant girl waiting for a benevolent swordsman to avenge her brother's death; and Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia as Murong Yang and his sister, Murong Yin.
I would include more plot details, but it would be a futile exercise since all these strands overlap and appear in fragments like shards of glass. If they had appeared in the order that they actually occurred, the film would not be half as striking. Actually, at the time, it was considered an over-budget disaster of a production that took two years in the making. Even now for some, digital restoration notwithstanding, the labyrinthine to-and-fro structure propelled by remembrance of things past smacks more of self-indulgence than Proustian poetry.
But two sections in particular veer arguably toward the poetic. The blind swordsman's acceptance to take on the peasant girl's request to avenge her brother is one of the most elegiac. Elegiac because it tells of both a metaphysical and literal death: in the heat of battle against bandits, the swordsman's sight deteriorates and in the process gets killed, bringing his rejected love to an end. The blind swordsman's unrequited/rejected love encapsulates in one extreme the film's themes of desire, love, rejection and exile. On the other extreme is the section with Murong Yin and Murong Yang, which is absolutely enthralling just to look at. Murong Yang and Murong Yin each asks Ouyang to do a job that involves what is seemingly a love triangle with Huang Yaoshi. The sequences between Ouyang and Murong Yin/Yang are some of the most sensual and tactile in the film. Christopher Doyle's cinematography is hypnotic in the scenes with a hollow globe-shaped birdcage made out of straw. It is as if the conversation can only occur through the birdcage shielding one character from another, illustrating each of the character's nearly pathological isolation from others. It also exemplifies Wong Kar-wai's skill in the complex layering of faces, cloth and objects on the flat surface of the image to visualise the passing of time and subjectivity that goes beyond serving the plot/narrative.
A love triangle, Wong Kar-wai style: Ouyang Feng (background), Murong Yin/Yang and a birdcage
Because of the characters' apparently determined isolation, some critics have spoken of the absence of community in Ashes of Time, which makes it distinct from other Wong Kar-wai films. But there is a community at work here: a community of nomads, of the self-exiled, betrayed and/or rejected, each of their experiences an elusive piece of a larger web stretched out on the desert sands. A community of memories, if nothing else. It is not really a far cry to compare this community of wanderers with that found in Wong Kar-wai's most well-known film, Chungking Express (1994). Aside from sharing similarities with Chungking Express, traces of 2046 (2004) in Ashes of Time and vice-versa can be found. The fact that the characters' conditions/circumstances and interactions cut across different time, layers, and spaces in both films is so striking as to be self-evident. The emotional and physical effects of spending six months in the desert must have seeped into the shooting.
Desert-like conditions unfortunately also came to characterise the storage of the film negatives, which prompted the restoration. As Wong Kar-wai recounts, it was quite a shock to find the negatives stored on a building rooftop. There was substantial loss of material, including portions of the original soundtrack. As a result, the redux is ten minutes shorter than the original. (Interestingly, cinematographer Christopher Doyle was not part of the restoration process.) Material impetus aside, Wong Kar-wai was equally adamant about Ashes of Time being a pivotal point in his filmography, thematically as well as production-wise, as the first Jet Tone production back in 1992. In response to the nearly 15-year wait for Ashes of Time to look as it was more envisioned and to be released in the U.S., Wong Kar-wai stated simply, "Some films need some time to reach their audience."
In addition, Wong Kar-wai shared an interesting take on the film that points to the sometimes-overlooked literary influence on his work. He described Ashes of Time as "Shakespeare versus Sergio Leone... but in Chinese." At any rate, Ashes of Time wears the mark of time like a fine wine -- not with botox, but redux.
Ashes of Time Redux opens in U.S. theatres on October 10th.
Published: Friday, September 19, 2008
