Ashes of Time Redux

I've seen Wang Kar Wai's films in reverse order: I saw 2046 first, and I've just watched Ashes of Time, one of the first films he directed after a decade of writing for the Hong Kong film industry.

Ashes of Time Redux is simply a staggering film, and it's hard to know where to begin; the acting, the story-telling, the cinematography, the music, the setting... Astonishing that when it was first released in 1995 it didn't create much of a stir. It wasn't until WKW, by then well-known, discovered that the original negatives had been so badly stored that they were disintegrating and needed restoration, spent time restoring and revising the film, re-recorded the sound track with Yo-yo Ma, and re-released it as the redux, that it's really come into its own. There's some question about how much digital enhancement was used, but that's not new: it's been used in films since the late 1970s.

Chinese films are often visually striking, but this one is in a category of its own in the use of image, and of the potential of film and filming. A lot of credit to Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, but it's WKW's film, his imagination, his way of working, his ability to use the talents available to him to get more than the best out of them.

A couple of visual moments: towards the end, at a transition point, WKW fills the screen with fire. I think it's a combination of the way the fire is shot, with the contrast of preceding scenes, dark, quiet, cool colours, that makes that fire like nothing I've ever seen before. (& I've seen forest fires up close.) & there's another moment, when the bandits appear, galloping across a foothill in the desert, against a blazing yellow background, sand, as flat brilliant yellow as a wall painted with emulsion. In long shot, of course, so they are flattened against the flat colour, and they keep rising up over the foothill: the beginning of the action part of the film, fighting, shown in brief blurred fragments. The background, the desert, is an important part of the film, and it looks amazing.

The film is amazing to look at, both the desert background and the faces in the foreground; the meeting of Ou-yang Feng and Brigitte Lin, for instance, under stunted trees in intense daylight, but this beauty is just the nature of what we're looking at, never a distraction. There are several stories, and they all interconnect, often in implausible ways. Ou-yang Feng (the late Leslie Cheung) lives alone in a hermitage in the desert as a fixer, usually 'fixing' the elimination of people for reasons of revenge. A perplexing couple, a brother and sister who want each other eliminated, but who are actually the same person, or are acted by the same person, a village girl who has no money, only a mule and a basket of eggs, are two of his clients. Sword fighters come to him looking for work: one survives, another doesn't. Desperate people. The end of the film isn't a climax to all these separate stories, but the discovery of how Ou-yang Feng came to be there in the first place, a story of love, of death, of nostalgia, a story about memory, loss, the seasons, a cyclic story...

In the extras, WKW appears, interviewed; calm, articulate in near-perfect English, eyes completely hidden behind the most impenetrable of dark glasses, like a blind seer. One can only wonder what visions he sees in there. The films are so moving, so intense and perfect, they might well hide tears, too.