impossible love
by Douglas Messerli
Jeffrey Lau and Wong Kar-wai
(screenplay), Wong Kar-wai (director) 旺角卡門 (Wàngjiǎo Kǎmén) (As Tears Go By) / 1988
In this film the lovers are a handsome young mob enforcer, Wah (Andy
Lau), who is well-liked by the godfather and other toughs who for him. However,
Wah’s younger brother, Fly (Jacky Cheung), as some of the other mobsters claim,
is “out of control,” and Wah is forced to spend most of his time getting his
younger brother out of hot water, often after brutal beatings from Tony (Alex
Man) and his gang members.
Quietly, Ngor insinuates herself into Wah’s world, cooking for him,
cleaning up, and even buying him a new set of glassware. Discovering that she
is not ill after all, she departs, leaving a note behind to tell him about the
new glasses, suggesting that she knows all of them will soon be destroyed, but
that she has hidden one away for later use; she also invites him to visit her
someday.
Although Wah has tried to find Fly a
normal job selling fish from a local cart, Fly hates his job, and returns to
Tony’s club, destroying the mobster’s car, and threatening him with a gun. This
time even the godfather will not intrude, and both Fly and Wah are severely
beaten by Tony and his gang.
Wah attempts to return to Ngor, but once again he hears of even more serious difficulties: Fly has offered Tony to assassinate a heavily guarded informer, if Tony agrees to release him from his debt. The situation is clearly a suicide mission.
By the time Wah reaches him, Fly has already shot the informer and
several of his guards, but he himself has also been killed. With true
sacrifice, Wah finishes up the killing and is himself shot to death.
In some respects, even in 1988, Wong’s characters’ actions parallel the
events upcoming 1990 transfer of the highly westernized city to China. The love
the former Colony might have for all things western ultimately will clearly
have to sacrificed to the new order. Love, in short, is thwarted in this city,
long of the cusp of transition from a culture of openness to the dictatorship
that the city faces, and which Wong’s characters so obviously reflect.
Wong is not always sure of his focus in As Tears Go By, sometimes prettifying the ugliest of human
behavior, and at other moments sentimentalizing and even fantasizing Wah’s and
Ngor’s love (it’s unexplained, for example, how Wah, already on the boat to
Hong Kong could suddenly get back to the quay in time to greet the waiting
Ngor), and, even more seriously, creating plot strings that go nowhere (why was
Ngor so convinced of her nonexistent illness, and why?); we can, nonetheless,
see that the director’s instincts are spot-on. Besides, if Ngor’s illness is a product
of her hometown doctor’s imagination, by the end of the film she has a deeper
sickness to face for the rest of her life.
Los Angeles, May 24, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).
No comments:
Post a Comment