by Tony Rayns
Since his changes of mind during production are unfortunately matched by an equally aleatory approach to editing, frequently requiring him to reshoot scenes and re-voice lines of dialogue or voiceover, Wong has sensibly looked for ways to bring his film-making under better control. His default solution is to think of films as aggregations of short stories, an idea no doubt sparked by the way that Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time resolved themselves into episodic narratives. Chungking Express comprises two contrasted short stories and was first envisaged as three; the third, about a hitman, was subsequently realised in Fallen Angels (1995), where it acquired another counterpoint in the shape of the story of the man who sets up businesses in shops and concession stands which have closed for the night. 2046 also began life as an aggregation of three stories; Wong thought of taking the storylines from three nineteenth-century operas and giving them a sci-fi spin. This idea, of course, was dropped when Wong found himself turning the film into a kind of sequel to In the Mood for Love, although the manager of the Oriental Hotel still plays opera discs loudly to drown out the sound of his domestic arguments.
The problems tend to begin when Wong sets out to stretch a short-story idea to feature length, as in Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster, all three of which strained budgets, production and post-production schedules and the morale of the crew to breaking point. Wong became acutely self-conscious about the financial and practical difficulties caused by his modus operandi soon after the one-minute-to-midnight rush to finish In the Mood for Love in time for its scheduled premiere in the Cannes competition. He told me at the time that he felt an urgent need to ‘change’, but rationalised it as a need to stay one step ahead of the world’s many Wong Kar Wai imitators. The line ‘I can change’ ran through the version of 2046 screened at Cannes in 2004 like a refrain, spoken twice in Japanese by the protagonist of Chow’s sci-fi story, and then repeated at the end of the film in Cantonese by Chow himself. In other words, Chow expresses himself through his fictional Japanese character Tak, and Wong expresses himself through his fictional Cantonese character Chow. The line survives only once in the widely released version of the film; Wong dropped the too-subtle idea of having it spoken in both Japanese and Cantonese, perhaps tacitly acknowledging that most foreign viewers wouldn’t notice the difference.
Since 2046, Wong has tried to force himself to ‘change’ by undertaking a film in English and an Ip Man biopic, but he failed to reinvent his idiom, themes or working practices in either case. My Blueberry Nights turned out to be an over-extended remake of his short film In the Mood for Love 2001, and Natalie Portman’s gambler was very obviously Gong Li’s Su Lizhen from 2046 come again. The Grandmaster turned out to be less interested in Ip Man’s life than in his chaste, yearning romance with Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), which of course directly echoes the central relationship in In the Mood for Love. Although the filming of My Blueberry Nights went more smoothly than In the Mood for Love and 2046 had done, production of The Grandmaster took him back to the chaos of 2046: an on-and-off shoot which stretched to nearly three years, two scheduled release dates missed, three substantially different versions released in different territories. The longest of the three cuts did very well in China, though, which may well signal a shift to more China-oriented subjects in Wong’s future.
Of all Wong’s earlier films (and misadventures in production), the one most relevant to In the Mood for Love is Days of Being Wild. Wong acknowledged as much in the ‘Director’s Statement’ he wrote for the press kit published by Jet Tone when the film premiered in Cannes. This text presents a selective version of the truth, but it’s interesting enough to quote in full:
Filming In the Mood for Love has been the most difficult experience of my career. We began shooting two years ago, amid the Asian economic crisis. Over the two years since then, we have been through a lot: problems with censors, the departure of some members of my crew, and the challenge of telling a story about only two people. We are physically and financially exhausted.
I’m always being asked when I will make the second part of Days of Being Wild, a film I remember with great affection. Over the years, I often asked myself the same question. Time moved on, but I kept looking for an answer.
In the Mood for Love happily reunites me with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. In a sense, this film answers the question I’ve been asking myself for so long.
Wong Kar Wai (May 2000)
While In the Mood for Love is clearly not Part Two of Days of Being Wild, the two films have an obvious kinship. Both are set in the Hong Kong of the early 1960s, both feature Maggie Cheung playing characters called Su Lizhen and Rebecca Pan playing surrogate mothers, both have vintage Latino pop music on their soundtracks, and both are somehow rooted in a Shanghainese identity. The former chanteuse Rebecca Pan speaks Shanghainese in both films, and brings to her scenes the spirit of all Shanghai ‘exiles’ in Hong Kong.
Wong himself is Shanghainese by birth; his family moved to Hong Kong in 1963, when he was five years old, and his father worked as a nightclub manager. (He says, incidentally, that Nat King Cole was his mother’s favourite singer.) He would have been too young to have many clear recollections of life in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, but Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love and parts of 2046 are imbued with a potent nostalgia for the Shanghainese environment and ambience in which he grew up. It is no accident that Wong’s closest collaborator since he turned director has been William Chang, who was born in Hong Kong (he is five years older than Wong) to Shanghainese parents. Chang has been credited as production designer on Wong’s films since the start (As Tears Go By [1988]), and as chief editor since Chungking Express (1994), but the collaboration goes much deeper; Chang has been Wong’s indispensable advisor in every aspect of the films they’ve made together.
Days of Being Wild was conceived as a touchstone for the look, mood and nihilism of the early 1960s, across the stories of two charismatic but flawed protagonists and a small group of other ‘lost’ characters who know and love or lose them. Leslie Cheung’s playboy (hideously dubbed ‘Yuddy’ by the film’s original subtitler) was the first protagonist; after the character’s death in the Philippines, his function as the figure around whom the others orbit would be inherited by Tony Leung’s equally heartless gambler. Wong took the Hong Kong release title for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) as his own Chinese title: A Fei Zhengzhuan, meaning ‘The True Story of Ah Fei’. (Ah Fei was the generic name for a young tearaway/delinquent in the Hong Kong of the 1950s.) Jacky Cheung’s role as the hanger-on who idolises the playboy is directly modelled on Sal Mineo’s role in Ray’s film. Incidentally, Wong used the same ploy again seven years later when he took the Hong Kong release title of Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) (Chunguang Zhaxie, ‘Spring Light Bursts Forth’, connoting the revelation of something indecent) as his Chinese title for Happy Together.
As we’ve noted, Wong was under contract in 1990 to In-Gear, owned by the former matinee idol Alan Tang and run by his brother Rover Tang; he had already made As Tears Go By and scripted other films for them. He reportedly began filming Days of Being Wild with a storyline draft and notes on the main characters, but changed his mind about many things as the shoot progressed. After spending a reputed HK$20 million of In-Gear’s money (much more than the average budget for a Hong Kong feature at the time, justified by the roster of top stars and the pre-sales to East and South-east Asia) but with no end in sight, Wong proposed to his producers that the film be split into two parts, set a year or two apart, the first starring Leslie Cheung and the second Tony Leung. But In-Gear had pre-sold the film on the basis of its title and all its stars, so it was contractually imperative that Tony Leung should still appear in the first film. Hence the film’s much-discussed coda – a single, extended shot showing the gambler preparing for a night out, added without explanation at the end of the film. Editor Patrick Tam, an out-and-proud Godard fan, came up with this solution to the contractual problem.
> Of course, Part Two was never made. The film was modestly successful in Hong Kong, probably because of its cast, but came nowhere near to recouping its production cost. The clincher came when distributors in neighbouring countries begged In-Gear not to send them another film ‘like that’. So In-Gear pulled the plug and Wong left the company to go independent. We’ll never know – and Wong isn’t telling, always assuming he knows himself – what would have happened in the second part of Days of Being Wild, but it’s fair to assume that Tony Leung’s gambler would have been more like the hardened, hedonistic Chow Mo-Wan of 2046 than the hesitant, proper Chow Mo-Wan of In the Mood for Love. The only real sense in which In the Mood for Love answers the Days of Being Wild Part Two question is that it returns to the milieu of the earlier film and uses a broadly similar aesthetic in order to rethink Wong’s view of the 1960s. In place of a reckless indulgence in nihilistic sexual relationships and adventures, it offers a profoundly nostalgic meditation on a time and a place that have been lost.
In the Mood for Love had an unusually complicated genesis. As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong approached, Wong Kar Wai came out of the worldwide triumph of Chungking Express and the respectable showing of its follow-up, Fallen Angels, with a plan to save money by making two features back to back. One of the films would be about fleeing Hong Kong; guided by his enthusiasm for Latin American writers, including Manuel Puig and Julio Cortázar, Wong chose to set it in Hong Kong’s antipodes, Buenos Aires. After another awkwardly protracted shoot in Argentina, eventually curtailed by Leslie Cheung’s contractual commitments elsewhere, this emerged as Wong’s first Cannes prizewinner, Happy Together. Before going to Argentina, though, Wong had conceived the other half of the diptych as the other side of the coin: a light-hearted movie, in the vein of Chungking Express, about embracing the motherland. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung were set to star in it. Wong’s title for the film was Summer in Beijing; he drafted some ideas for the story and went to the communist government’s Film Bureau in Beijing to discuss it. The Film Bureau pointed out (politely, Wong says) that its regulations prohibited the production of any film in China without its pre-approval of the script. Wong’s explanation that he didn’t work like that fell on deaf ears, so the project was abandoned. It got no further than a series of poster designs, later published by Jet Tone in a limited-edition folio.
Following the success of Happy Together in Cannes, Wong returned to the Summer in Beijing ideas. The project evolved into a three-episode film, with one story about a chef, one about a writer in the 1960s, and another about a delicatessen owner. The linking theme would be food; ‘Beijing’ became the name of a restaurant in Macau. As he began mapping out the project (with some urgency, since Maggie Cheung was expected to leave to act in a Hollywood film – which in the event went into turnaround), Wong once again changed his mind. As he told me: ‘We planned the story about the deliowner and then moved on to the one about the writer – at which point, I realised that the one about the writer was the only one I really wanted to make.’
One of the poster designs for Summer in Beijing
The writer on his mind was Liu Yi-Chang (born in Shanghai in 1918), who has lived and written in Hong Kong since 1948. Wong particularly liked his short story Duidao, which has been serviceably but improvably translated by Nancy Li as Intersections. The story first appeared in Chinese in 1972, the translation in 1988 in the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s periodical Renditions. (The title Duidao is the Chinese translation for tête-bêche, a term from philately for a pair of stamps from adjacent sheets in which one is the inverse of the other.) The translation has been reprinted in the brochure that comes with the Criterion home-video editions of In the Mood for Love and appears too in Block 2 Pictures’ photo book tête-bêche (2001), which also contains Joanna C. Lee’s short interview with Liu Yi-Chang about the film.
Liu’s story has forty-two mini-chapters which alternate between two characters. One is Bai Chunyu, an elderly Shanghainese who has lived (like his author) in Hong Kong since the late 1940s and watched the city grow from a sleepy port into an overcrowded, high-rise metropolis. The other is Ah Xing, a young Cantonese woman who worries that she doesn’t yet have a boyfriend and picks up a pornographic photograph discarded in the street. Bai looks back to the time he fled Shanghai as the civil war got nearer, and also remembers a period he spent in Singapore. Ah Xing fantasises about being a popular singer, about getting married, about sex. The story traces their itineraries across one day. Independently, they witness the same events in Mongkok – the robbery of a jewellery shop, a woman knocked down by a car – and then happen to choose adjacent seats for the 5.30 screening of a movie. But they never meet or speak, and eventually go their separate ways.
From quite early on, Wong felt a kinship between this story and the film that In the Mood for Love eventually became. There was never any question of directly adapting the story for the screen: Chow and Mrs Chan are about the same age, their backgrounds are at best a marginal issue, and their spatial and emotional trajectories converge from the start. Whereas Bai Chunyu and Ah Xing are virtual polar opposites, and their differences reach a crux in their reactions to the climax (a wedding) in the movie they happen to watch side by side: he laughs out loud, scornful that a marriage is presented as a happy ending, and she is disgusted by what she assumes to be his lustful thoughts. This polarised reaction to the prospect of wedded bliss – in essence, experience meets innocence – is one of several motifs that trickle down into Wong’s film. Others include nostalgia for the traces of Shanghai in old Hong Kong, the notion that a life can be sketched through close attention to its quotidian routines, and the perception that women and men can see the same things very differently. We should note in passing that Chungking Express owed comparable debts to the Japanese writer Murakami Haruki, but those were signalled only in the titling of tracks on the soundtrack CD, not in the film itself.
Wong’s principal interest in Liu Yi-Chang is precisely that he is a writer. Specifically, a writer whose work reflects the perceptions of a Shanghainese immigrant in Hong Kong. Wong reveres writers, probably even more than he reveres some cineastes (the one most often cited is Antonioni) and some pieces of music. Much of the idiosyncrasy of Wong’s cinema springs from his wish to apply lessons learned from literature and music to film-making. In this instance, where journalist and wuxia novelist Chow is clearly not a surrogate for Liu Yi-Chang, Wong chose to express his respect for Liu by quoting him on screen. As we’ve noted, the film opens and closes with quotations from Liu’s writings (they are presented like silentmovie intertitles) and includes a third quotation between its two 1966 codas about the past being a closed chapter. The wishful intention, I think, was to give the whole film a literary cast. I recall that at the start of the long-drawn-out subtitling process, Wong gave me a dozen Liu quotations he’d selected for possible use as captions in the film, as usual allowing himself plenty of leeway to make choices later. Here’s one I translated which didn’t make the cut:
At that time, he hadn’t known what love was. He had liked several women. But it was always ‘like’ rather than ‘love’. He still doesn’t know what love is. Even when he married, he didn’t know. He didn’t love his wife, and his wife didn’t love him.
When he started making In the Mood for Love in Hong Kong early in 1999, Wong had no clear sense of what the film would become. On the contrary, he was still thinking in terms of the Summer in Beijing frivolities. So he filmed sequences in room 2046 showing Chow and Mrs Chan stir-frying food in a wok; sequences showing them carrying kitchen implements and a live chicken up to the room despite management protests; sequences in which they sing (or more accurately mime) bits of Cantonese opera and even a sequence in which they perform a pastiche of John Travolta and Uma Thurman’s dance from Pulp Fiction (1994). All of this can be seen in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love, which is available on several home-video editions of the film. The documentary also includes a rather surprising interv
iew with Tony Leung in which he wonders aloud why these comic sequences didn’t make it into the finished film; the interview was clearly shot before he won the Best Actor prize in Cannes. @ In the Mood for Love was begun by Kwan Pun-Leung and Amos Lee, who had made a film about the shoot of Happy Together, but their names don’t appear in its credits.
Rejected ideas: cooking in room 2046 …
Singing Cantonese opera in room 2046 (production photo with actual singer foreground) …
… and dancing in room 2046
Wong took the documentary out of their hands and finished it himself with footage of the film’s premieres in various cities, possibly because he couldn’t afford to go on paying them.
In passing, during the Hong Kong shoot in 1999, Wong hadn’t settled on the film’s title either. His sales agent Fortissimo discussed pre-sales of the film in the Berlin Film Festival market that year under the title The Mood for Love. Their flyer promises delivery in May 2000 (a promise that was more or less kept), but includes stills from scenes that would eventually disappear from the film, including one of Chow and Mrs Chan eating together in the daibaitong and another of the sex scene.
By 1999, Wong Kar Wai had reformulated his 1996 plan to economise by making two films back to back. The new plan was to knock out In the Mood for Love quickly, the film being essentially a two-hander to be shot in a few recurring settings, and to then move on to the bigger 2046, still thought of as an ‘operatic’ sci-fi movie. Since 2046 was to be a large-scale production, investments were sought (and found) in neighbouring countries: one concrete result was that the Japanese Kimura Takuya and the Thai Thongchai ‘Bird’ Macintyre – top singing stars in their respective countries – were contracted to appear in the film. Other stars – from China, South Korea and who knows where else – were expected to join the cast list later. Having turned singer Faye Wong into a movie star overnight in Chungking Express, Wong remained confident that his touch could turn charismatic pop stars into viable screen actors – despite his cautionary experience with the wooden Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. This confidence carried through into his casting of Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights.