Once in Class 4, I forgot to do my homework. As the teacher walked from desk to desk, I prayed fervently that the bell would ring before she reached mine. The other boys were busy talking or playing but I was completely disconnected from them — my stomach was in knots and I was paralysed with fear. I kept checking my watch to see when class would end and the closer the teacher got to my desk, the longer the minutes seemed to stretch. That is when I realised that time as we experience it and time as we measure it are two completely different things.
Sometimes there are scenes in Wong Kar-wai movies that are very like the one I described. By themselves they mean little, a silent glance, a polite smile, a cigarette smoked. But Wong Kar-wai makes them mean something, sometimes a lot, by simply drawing our attention to them — making them stand out from the rest of the movie. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung buying noodles in In the Mood for Love is a great example, where the film suddenly switches tempo and moves into slow motion. A routine, even banal, activity is suspended in time. Even though their paths to and from the noodle shop would have crossed only for a second, it lasts much longer on screen — as a result, the look they exchange lingers and becomes loaded with meaning.
Time in Wong Kar-wai’s films takes on a persona of its own. It sometimes behaves in a way it otherwise never does, even within the movie. The disjunction between time measured and time experienced is never forgotten. Clocks and calendars provide frequent fodder for cutaways. There are seconds, minutes, moments, each discrete. For instance, the 60 seconds from 2:59 to 3:00 on April 16, 1960 would have been lived through by billions of people, but it belongs to Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Yuddy (Leslie Cheung). Nobody else can claim it because that’s the exact minute when Li Zhen fell in love with Yuddy.
Perhaps this sounds cheesy. It certainly would in a novel. But like Godard, Wong Kar-wai can read the poetry between the lines. In an early scene in Happy Together , Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are on their way to see a waterfall inspired by a picture printed on a lamp they own. The lamp itself is completely ordinary, a cheap thrift store imitation. It is a surprise that the lamp could inspire anything until, that is, Wong Kar-wai shows the waterfall. In a shot lasting two whole minutes, there is the waterfall and nothing else. Great jets of foam and fog rise continuously from the bottom of the falls and, much like Tony Leung’s smoke rings in In the Mood for Love , the smoky spray of water refuses to disperse or settle. It forms a continuous stream, refusing to die, never vanishing.
In 2007, neuroscientist David Eagleman conducted an experiment with free-fall in zero gravity. Participants were subjected to a sheer 110-metre drop with no harness of any kind, a nerve-wracking simulation of a near-death experience. When subjects timed their fall afterwards, Eagleman found that, on an average, they over-estimated the length of the fall by 36 per cent. His conclusion? “Time and memory are so tightly intertwined that it may be impossible to tease them apart.”
Memory is our refuge against the march of time. In Wong Kar-wai’s films, freeze-framed scenes of characters meeting for the first time often come with voiceovers revealing highly precise details — date and time, the music playing on the stereo, the exact centimetres between them — like details remembered from a well-thumbed photograph. Time may move on, but our memories stay. Love might have died now or might not have existed at all but there was a time when it did or could have — that time is long past but Wong Kar-wai’s characters revisit and relive those memories endlessly, like a favourite record on loop. And jilted lovers make their love stretch out and last, long after its expiry date.
As a result, Wong Kar-wai’s films are almost entirely made of middles, with neither beginning nor end. For a person without memory, every day would be a new beginning but Wong Kar-wai’s characters hold fast to their memories. They are unable to terminate things, forget, move on. They occupy the space in the middle, between things said and those left unsaid, between things wished for but never attained.
Devoted to their memories, Wong Kar-wai’s characters tend to be loners by nature — beat cops and assassins. Even when it’s a movie about a couple, the two are essentially alone, alienated. In 1963, Wong Kar-wai moved with his parents from Shanghai to Hong Kong. The 1960s was an economic watershed for Hong Kong, a period of rapid growth and change. In early 1960s, Hong Kong’s per capita income was comparable to South Africa and Peru. By the end of the decade, its factories had grown over three times to number 10,000. Over the next three decades, its GDP increased by 6 per cent each year, and around a fifth of it was re-invested in industry, a mutually replenishing cycle of growth.
Boatloads of immigrants poured in and moved into cramped apartment buildings like the Chungking Mansions, often sharing toilets, kitchens and hallways, practically everything except bedrooms. In such an atmosphere, love is allowed neither privacy nor intimacy and so love moves outside, to the cityscape. Chance encounters on street corners and at takeaway diners provide the context for love in Wong Kar-wai’s films.
But cities supply just that, the context, and love never fully materialises. Faces in a crowd melt into an impressionistic blur, street traffic coalesces into one indistinguishable stream of bright reds and yellows, frequent jump cuts frustrate actions before their completion — urban life hurtles along at such an exhilarating pace that it checkmates any possible move. Individuals lose themselves in the press of the crowd and, with it, the ability to form meaningful connections, often exchanging little more than pleasantries and polite formalities. Their most poetic thoughts are reserved for the audience, relayed though voiceovers. Even more often (and perhaps more telling of the depth of their alienation) Wong Kar-wai’s characters turn to inanimate objects — bars of soap, towels, tape recorders and the temple of Angkor Wat — to confide their heartbreak, secrets, anguish and desires.
There are a hundred different synonyms for the nostalgia that constitutes the heartbeat of a Wong Kar-wai film — saudade, sehnsucht, haikeus — but the one closest in meaning is from the director’s native Mandarin. Xiang Si , meaning two people in love but not together, yearning and pining for each other, or what the Chinese call lovesickness.
