A few years ago, a glitteringly restored version of Wong Kar-wai's second feature, Days of Being Wild (1991) was released in the U.S. to general ecstasy from American Wong fans who had only been able to catch the movie on videotape or Chinatown showings of well-worn prints. Now, inspired by the discovery that many prints of his Ashes of Time had been deteriorating, Wong has gone to great pains to buff that movie up and re-release it as Ashes of Time Redux. An odd, distinctively dreamy martial arts/swordplay film set in the desert, Ashes was Wong's third production but his fourth film released to theaters; he spent some two years working on it, taking time to dash off his masterpiece, Chungking Express, in quick order and having it ready for release while Ashes was still in post-production. Ashes never got much play in this country, either, though it's been seen just enough to be widely regarded as beautiful but bewildering. Looesly based on a novel, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, by Louis Cha--Wong' script is said to be along the lines of a prequel, using some of the book's characters--Ashes technically belongs to an historical action genre called wuxia, and some of its strangeness to Western eyes may relate to necessary adherence to genre conventions--though when Ashes was seen by Hong Kong audiences, they were reportedly scandalized by the degree to which Wong had bent the rules of the form to accommodate his personal vision.
The movie is episodic, with a series of vignettes linked by the character of Feng (Leslie Cheung), an embittered former swordsman who works as a kind of manager to other swordsmen working as assassins or bounty hunters. For much of the film, Feng is heard on the soundtrack sharing his insights into the transient nature of love and happiness and the self-destructive effects of pride and blindness--most metaphorical and, in the case of a fighter who is losing his sight (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), literal--while flashbacks relate stories of his encounters with various clients and hirelings. Ashes was an all-star affair--others in the cast include Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Jacky Cheung, and Tony Leung Ka Fai--and with the importance of these figures in the busy, star-conscious Hong Kong film industry, Wong's tying up so many of them with a location shoot that went on for six months was something of a scandal in itself. (The shooting schedule became a juggling act, with different actors coming and going to keep up with their other commitments.) A recent piece in The New York Times described a moment from the "round-the-clock" production: "One day the shooting in a grotto stretched into evening, and a scene with Ms. Lin, delivering lines of an intense dialogue while staring into a spinning bird cage, headed into 40-plus takes. More than a dozen crew members were crammed into the small space, made stuffier when smoke was fanned in for atmosphere. Mr. Wong was in a corner watching on a monitor. Every so often, in his measured way, he made a suggestion to Ms. Lin or called out to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, 'Is that all you can do?' Mr. Doyle, now a longtime collaborator of Mr. Wong’s, said in a recent telephone interview that he heard that question as a constant challenge. 'It should be the mantra for all people in the arts.' ”
In the Times piece, Lin acknowledges that when she saw the finished film she didn't understand it, but "Now, 14 years later, I do. Each image is like a painting. The camera is his brush, and it’s only when he picks up the camera that he knows what the film’s about.” Which is true, and is both the movie's glory and its limitation. The movie's fast cutting and use of slow motion so slow that it breaks the action down into a series of frames streaking by now look like a dress rehearsal for some of the effects that Wong, shooting fast and dirty, brought off in Chungking Express, but that movie's humor and urban energy are missing from Ashes, which mostly settles into one languorous, broken-hearted mood. What's remarkable is the way that Wong and Doyle caught that mood in the movie's look and sustained it to feature length, but without any conflicting tones or a strong storyline, it can see like an awful lot of one thing. Still, if any movie deserved to be judged on the basis of how it looks at its best, it's Ashes of Time. The digital remastering is sumptuous, and it's been augmented by a superb new score by Yo-Yo Ma, who does as much as Wong ever did to tie the movie's images together. After a busy first ten years as a director, Wong's production has fallen way off in this past decade, and recently his reputation has taken a few dents to go with it; after getting perhaps the best reviews of his career with 2000's In the Mood for Love--like Ashes of Time, a title that could fit neatly onto just about any of his movies--his follow-up, 2046, played to mixed reactions, and this year's English-language My Blueberry Nights has shaped up as his biggest bomb since, well, Ashes of Time. The movie will always be a little baffling and too intensely personal to be fully satisfying to a mass audience, but Ashes of Time Redux makes it clearer than ever that it's an amazing achievement and an important step in the development of a major filmmaker. A movie about the pain of pleasures lost and reduced to shards of memory has been rescued from turning into an example of it.