THE WORLD OF WONG KAR WAI — A RETROSPECTIVE
This Retrospective Ended February 28, 2021
Seven superlative works – lavishly restored and remastered in 4K – by cinema’s supreme rhapsodist of romantic longing. Presented in cooperation with Janus Films, which is graciously sharing rental revenue with CWC.
With each screening of a film from this retrospective purchased via CWC links, you’ll provide much-needed support to both CWC and Janus Films, who will split revenue after platform expenses. Individual film rental $12 per household. Save $14 – seven-film package $70 per household.
☀ See trailers and descriptions for each film, by title, below. ☀
About The Films
With his lush and sensual visuals, pitch-perfect soundtracks, and soulful romanticism, Wong Kar Wai has established himself as one of the defining auteurs of contemporary cinema.
Joined by key collaborators such as cinematographer Christopher Doyle, editor and production and costume designer William Chang, and actors Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, Wong (or WKW, as he is often known) has enraptured audiences and critics worldwide and inspired countless other filmmakers with his movies’ poetic moods, narrative and stylistic daring, and potent themes of alienation and memory. Whether tragically romantic, soaked in blood, or quirkily comedic, the films in this retrospective are an invitation into the unique and wistful world of a deeply influential artist.
Janus Films is proud to present the following Wong Kar Wai classics in brand-new 4K restorations, As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love. In addition, the retrospective features a new director’s cut of The Hand.
☀ From the Director: During the process of restoring many of the pictures you are about to watch, we were caught in a dilemma between restoring them to the form in which the audience had remembered them and to how I had originally envisioned them. There was so much that we could change, and I decided to take the second path, as it would represent my most vivid vision of these films.
In The Mood For Love
2000, Hong Kong, 99 minutes, in Cantonese, Shanghainese with English subtitles.
Watch the Trailer. Purchase rental screening.
Behind the Screen (original CWC film page).
WONG KAR WAI’S ODE TO UNREQUITED LOVE
Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments.
With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely framed cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.
In collaboration with the Criterion Collection, Wong Kar Wai and L’Immagine Ritrovata spent five years on the 4K restoration of not only IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, but also CHUNGKING EXPRESS, FALLEN ANGELS, and HAPPY TOGETHER, DAYS OF BEING WILD, and AS TEARS GO BY.
Chunking Express
1994, Hong Kong, 102 minutes, in Cantonese with English subtitles.
Watch the trailer. Purchase rental screening.
The whiplash, double-pronged Chungking Express is one of the defining works of nineties cinema and the film that made Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai an instant icon.
Two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung), both jilted by ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out restaurant stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works.
Anything goes in Wong’s gloriously shot and utterly unexpected charmer, which cemented the sex appeal of its gorgeous stars and forever turned canned pineapple and the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” into tokens of romantic longing.
This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata, Jet Tone, One Cool and 3H Sound Studio. It was supervised and approved by Wong Kar Wai.
As Tears Go By
1988, Hong Kong, 102 minutes, NR, in Catonese with English subtitles.
Watch the trailer. Purchase Rental Screening.
Wong Kar Wai’s scintillating debut feature is a kinetic, hyper-cool crime thriller graced with flashes of the impressionistic, daydream visual style for which he would become renowned. Marrying the pulp pleasures of the gritty Hong Kong action drama with hints of the head-rush romanticism Wong would push to intoxicating heights throughout the 1990s, As Tears Go By was a box office smash that heralded the arrival of one of contemporary cinema’s most electrifying talents.
Set amidst Hong Kong’s ruthless, neon-lit gangland underworld, this operatic saga of ambition, honor, and revenge stars Andy Lau as a small-time mob enforcer who finds himself torn between a burgeoning romance with his ailing cousin (Maggie Cheung, in the first of her iconic collaborations with the director) and his loyalty to his loose cannon partner in crime (Jacky Cheung) whose reckless attempts to make a name for himself unleash a spiral of violence.
This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata and One Cool.
Days Of Being Wild
1990, Hong Kong, 94 minutes, NR, in Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin, Tagalog with English subs.
Watch the Trailer. Purchase Rental Screening.
Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough sophomore feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. The first in a loosely connected, ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046, this ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twenty-somethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a cycle of frustrated desire.
The director’s inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the film its gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a never-realized sequel, Days of Being Wild is an exhilarating first expression of Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing, dislocation, and the restless search for human connection.
This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata and One Cool.
Fallen Angels
1995, Hong Kong, 99 minutes, in Cantonese with English subtitles.
Watch the Trailer. Purchase rental screening.
Swinging between hardboiled noir and slapstick lunacy with giddy abandon, Fallen Angels is both a dizzying, dazzling city symphony and a poignant meditation on love, loss, and longing in a metropolis that never sleeps.
Lost souls reach out for human connection amidst the glimmering night world of Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s hallucinatory, neon-soaked nocturne. Originally conceived as a segment of Chungking Express only to spin off on its own woozy axis, this hyper-cool head rush plays like the dark, moody flip side to Wong’s breakout feature as it charts the subtly interlacing fates of a handful of urban loners, including a coolly detached hitman (Leon Lai) looking to go straight, his business partner (Michelle Reis) who secretly yearns for him, and a mute delinquent (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who wreaks mischief by night.
This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata, Jet Tone and One Cool. It was supervised and approved by Wong Kar Wai.
The Hand (Extended Cut)
2004, Hong Kong, 56 minutes, in Mandarin with English subtitles.
Watch the Trailer. Purchase rental screening.
Like In the Mood for Love, The Hand is set in the hazy Hong Kong of the 1960s, but its characters couldn’t be more different from the earlier film’s restrained, haunted lovers. Originally conceived for the omnibus film Eros, the film—presented in this retrospective for the first time in its extended cut—tells the tale of Zhang (Chang Chen), a shy tailor’s assistant enraptured by a mysterious client, Miss Hua (Gong Li).
A hypnotic tale of obsession, repression, and class divisions, The Hand finds Wong Kar Wai continuing to transition from the frenetic, energized style of his earlier films into a register that is lush with romantic grandeur.
Happy Together
1997, Hong Kong, 96 minutes, NR, in Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish with English subtitles.
Watch the Trailer. Purchase rental screening.
One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar-wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again.
Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong—when the country’s LGBT community suddenly faced an uncertain future—Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that’s by turns devastating and deliriously romantic.
Shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and luscious saturated color, Happy Together is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that swoons with the ache and exhilaration of love at its heart-tearing extremes.
This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata, Jet Tone and One Cool. It was supervised and approved by Wong Kar Wai.
