Kino releases Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together on Blu-ray. I wrote on the film and the disc for Turner Classic Movies here.

Happy Together

Where previous Wong films like Ashes of Time and Chungking Express fractured the narrative with staccato editing and shifts back and forth through time, Happy Together presents a fairly straightforward narrative (even if the story is anything but conventional) and a visual style defined by longer takes and striking handheld camerawork that brings the viewer intimately close to the characters. And while it focuses on a gay couple (itself quite daring in Chinese cinema, which shies away from explicitly gay couples in movies and prefers suggestion to announcement), its portrait of characters who love each other but are combustible when together isn’t limited by the sex of the characters. They can be cruel, manipulative, dismissive and vindictive, but they are alive and vital. Cheung is all emotional impulse and convincingly reckless and self-destructive as Ho, a man used to seducing his way through life with his boyish beauty. Leung is more thoughtful and sad as the quiet, introspective Lai, whose ruminations provides the melancholy narration. “I always thought I was different from Po-wing. It turns out lonely people are the same everywhere.”

Ultimately, the film is about loneliness and disconnection, feelings exacerbated by being stuck so far away from home, in a culture that speaks a different language and dances to a different tune. Slow, sad tangos (predominantly Astor Piazzolla’s melancholy “Tango Apasionado”) sets the tone and the temperament of the film. It’s not always pleasant to be in their company and on initial viewing the characters can come off as emotionally brutal and callously manipulative, but under these actions they are vulnerable, yearning, fumbling people who genuinely love one another but keep falling into the same destructive patterns.

Read the complete feature here.

Kino remasters a pair of Wong Kar-wai’s films from the 1990s for new special editions. Fallen Angels (1995), made in the wake of his breakthrough film Chungking Express, carves out and expands on a splinter story originally written for that film. Two stories of disconnected individuals cross paths, a hit man (Leon Lai) loved the woman (Michele Reis) who arranges his contracts but never meets him (though she does clean his apartment), and a mute ex-con (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who breaks into businesses at night to play at running them who meets a volatile girl (Charlie Yeung). Wong punctuates his rather melancholy narrative with odd humor and unexpected explosions of shocking violence, all shot in Doyle’s sensuous, oversaturated colors. Wong Kar-wai’s most emotionally volatile drama Happy Together (1997) brings an edgier dimension to his work. Hong Kong heartthrobs Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung take a chance playing angry, ecstatic, frustrated, vindictive, in fact everything but happy together lovers who travel to Buenos Aires and find themselves stuck in the strange land. Rarely has a director so convincingly explored a love-hate relationship. Shot in grainy, high contrast black and white that transforms into delirious dream colors, the film achieves an extravagant, overwrought emotional quality, more real than real.

Wong Kar-wai's nocturnal world of "Fallen Angels"

Fallen Angels features a new interview with director of photography Christopher Doyle and three featurettes and Happy Together includes the new Q&A featurette Wong Kar-wai at the Museum of the Moving Image in addition to the previously released documentary Buenos Aires Zero Degrees. Both are mastered from fresh HD film transfers and look quite beautiful, which leads me to the obvious question: when will Kino enter the Blu-ray market?

Criterion releases Roberto Rossellini’s 1959 drama Il Generale Della Rovere, starring Vittoria De Sica as an Italian con man in World War II who profited in the margin between desperate Italian families and the German Gestapo who essentially policed the country. It’s a richly drawn drama of an opportunist whose conscience is reignited when opportunism becomes collaboration and De Sica’s performance is a model of understatement and ambiguity.

I knew that De Sica had been a matinee idol before the war, but only because it was part of the written history. And I knew that he continued to act in front of the cameras even after making his name as a director with Shoe-shine and Bicycle Thieves and maintaining a very busy career behind the camera right up to his death in 1974; the IMDb lists over 100 screen appearances since 1945, many of them in very quite frivolous productions. It’s only recently that I started to notice just how good he is, notably in reviewing the DVD of Max Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame De… and my debut viewing of Della Rovere. He is full of confidence and charm, understated in his playing, ambiguous in his intentions. His sense of aristocratic presence is unforced, assumed rather than stated, and in Della Rovere, he slips into his con artist rap so smoothly that it takes a few scenes to realize that pretty much everything coming out of his mouth is a line of bullshit, most of it apparently ad-libbed for the situation. De Sica makes it feel at once sincere and utterly false, and gives it the spontaneity of an impetuous storyteller, the gears grinding to work every situation.

Vittorio De Sica as the man who would be "Il Generale Della Rovere"

Faye Wong

Wong Kar-wai first burst onto the international scene with this jazzy little cinematic improvisation on a themes of love, loss, connection, and the craziness of emotion. The two stories revolve around cops, but any resemblance to the usual Hong Kong action fare ends there. In the first story, rookie Takeshi Kaneshiro falls for femme fatale in a blond wig Brigitte Lin, and in the second ladies man Tony Leung Chia-wai finds himself the object of the affections of big-eyed pixie Faye Wong (a popular Cantopop chanteuse who make her film debut here and sings a Cantonese version of The Cranberries’ song “Dreams”). A unique peek into the urban flavor of one working class suburb in the crowded island nation of Hong Kong, this a film that sways to its own beat, and those unusual rhythms are infectious, as are the smeary/stuttery visuals of cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Previously released on DVD, Criterion puts their stamp on the disc with a new edition and will follow it up in December with a Blu-ray edition.

Read the DVD review on my MSN column here.

Also new this week is the underrated superhero drama Hancock, starring Will Smith as a superhero by way of an unnatural disaster, a caustic street drunk faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and more impetuous and self-absorbed than a three-year-old on a sugar jag.

But for all the dark humor of Hancock, this film puts a more serious spin on the superhero genre by shifting into myth and archetype. I’m a sucker for the eternal hero and for the tragic ironies of the ancient heroes. Both are here in a strange, sometimes awkward but always intriguing spin on the modern comic book hero movie, an adult drama with fierce conflicts and fatal consequences, which director Peter Berg delivers with an unnerving intensity. Even by the standards of a maturing superhero genre, this is not a film for kids.

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Ashes of Time Redux (1994/2008, Hong Kong) dir: Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai released his sole martial arts film in 1994. Of course, it was more of a meditation on memory and regret than an action film, and the fight scenes (though choreographed by Sammo Hung) were shot in the familiar impressionistic visual style that Christopher Doyle developed while working with Wong (blurry  imagery, stuttery skip-frame action) and edited in fragmentary glimpses. But Wong reportedly rushed the film out to make the New Year release deadline and was not satisfied with the finished film. And not necessarily because it was almost impossible to follow the story (or rather, stories) of a mercenary “middleman” (Leslie Cheung as Ouyang Feng) and his former best friend turn nemesis (Tony Leung Ka Fai as Huang Yaoshi), who recall past loves and betrayals while dealing with clients who want to hire swordsmen and young swords looking for work, all in a narrative that slips back and forth in time and shifts between narrators. Their stories are found in the echoes of those they meet: a veteran swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) on the verge of going blind who is looking for one last job before he goes home, an impulsive, undiscplined young warrior (Jacky Cheung) more interested in flaunting his talent than making money, a yin and yang of brother and sister (both played by Brigitte Lin) who each hire Ouyangto kill the other. The all-star cast of nineties Hong Kong glamor also features Carina Lau, Charlie Yeung and Maggie Cheung.The swirl of flashbacks and remembrances left audiences confused, but that elusive quality was also part of its beauty, a film built on emotion more than narrative.

"Ashes of Time redux" - oversaturated colors pushed to abstraction

More than a decade later, Wong returns to the film, but from what I see, it’s less about completing the film as he imagined it then than reworking it in the style he’s been following in recent years. Cheung’s Ouyang Feng dominates this version as the narrator. “I solve problems,” he says by way of introduction, and he’s a middleman in all things, including life: he watches the lives of clients and contractors as they drift into his desert home and then drift away to carry on the lives that they put on hold in his orbit. Redux is actually shorter and certainly easy to follow, organized by seasons and chapter markings, with shifts in narratoris made clear with direct visual cues. But he’s also completely worked over the footage from the original cut, digitally manipulating Doyle’s original imagery so completely it verges on vandalism. (Could their very public professional break have anything to do with Wong’s distortion of Doyle’s vivid photography?) Wong has digitally thrown a light haze over the film, as if looking through the gauze of memory, and pushed the colors into unreal hues, like he’s abstracting the image from any worldly, physical roots. And if anything, it’s even less a martial arts movie  film than before, with fewer action scenes and more abstracted versions of the ones that are left.

It has a new score featuring melancholy solos by Yo-Yo Ma and fewer (and more abstracted) action scenes, and Wong digitally mucks with Christopher Doyle’s photography. He oversaturated some washes of color and puts a haze over the entire film, as if seeing it through the gauze of memory. Or a sandstorm. It’s a little visually precious and obscure but still a marvelously wistful film of regret and retreat, in which even the magic wine of forgetfulness erases only the memories, not the pain.

I don’t know that the it’s necessarily better – I like the confusion of narrators and the murky timeline of the original. Whether it was intentional or not, the narrative abstraction creates a sense of dislocation that matches the emotional disconnection of Ouyang Feng and the sense of gnawing regret of Huang Yaoshi, narrators who have removed themselves from the world and now look on as one big memory of swirled stories. Wong structured the original film and the stories withing stories in circles, ending up where they began, the characters trapped by their fates, doomed to repeat their mistakes. Or are they second (failed) chances?

Read the review in the Seattle P-I here.

Pride and Glory dir: Gavin O’Connor

It’s hard to tell just whose story Gavin O’Connor is trying to tell in his busy but dramatically listless police drama of an Irish cop-family clan torn by a police corruption scandal ignited by one of their own. Is it

Edward Norton is pensive brother Ray, pulled out of his personal and professional withdrawal after four officers are killed in what looks like a routine drug bust. Noah Emmerich is responsible elder brother Frannie, the commanding officer whose career gets caught in the complications when the investigation leads back to officers in the precinct.

Colin Farrell, meanwhile, plays it straight ahead as their out-of-control brother-in-law, Jimmy: a doting, warm family man when he’s at home, a practical schemer on the streets and ruthless killer when his little scheme is on the line.

…

You can feel the debt to Sidney Lumet’s ’70s studies in police corruption and cop brotherhood, but O’Connor never captures the edge of danger, anger and moral stands being ground up in compromise. These guys (apart from Jimmy) aren’t as conflicted as they are confounded victims of circumstance.

Read the complete review in the P-I here.

Wong Kar-wai’s English language debut My Blueberry Nights has been getting pummeled by the critics. Maybe it’s just me, but I loved this film.

The delirious poster to a delirious film

It’s classic Wong, circa Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and 2046: the short story format for tales about impossible relationships, unrequited loves, damaged loves, broken romances, and wounded hearts traveling to distract from the hurt. This is a kind of storytelling I love, about moments captured in time, about the sensuality of image, about the overwhelming emotional assault of loving and living. Norah Jones is no Faye Wong, but she has a face just as lush and open and Wong loves to look her and redirect our perspective through her wide eyes.

What is it about the American road movie that so attracts foreign directors? Blueberry isn’t anything like Paris Texas, except perhaps for the broken relationships and a score by Ry Cooder, but both are visions of America from the eyes of a foreign filmmaker making a first-time English film, complete with the romanticized baggage they bring. For Wenders, it’s the frontier, the myth of the cowboy loner in a civilized world, and the responsibility of the man to repair his family and own up to the damage he’s done. For Wong, it’s the confounding world of broken relationships and messy emotions that drive us to either smother or flee the ones we love. It’s no coincidence that Jones’ character, Lizzie, changes the name on her name tags with every new job.

Darius Khondji’s cinematography pushes the signature style that Christopher Doyle created for Wong, super-saturated colors and skip-frame effects that momentarily freeze images to isolate fleeting moments, with even more discreet camerawork, shooting through windows, from behind display cases, around furniture, as if eavesdropping.

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