Review - Ashes of Time Redux

By virtue of the fact that Argentina vs. Netherlands is later this afternoon I may not have any new translation work on the blog today. So here's something fun: half-movie review and half philosophical reflections from watching Wong Kar-wai's classic, Ashes of Time. The redux was released in 2008 and this original writing was posted to Facebook in 2010.

Enjoy!
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June 8, 2010:

I just finished watching Wong Kar-wai's "Ashes of Time Redux," the remastered 2008 re-release of the original 1994 wuxia melodrama. I'm conflicted about the film, and I need to try to write out why.

I'm conflicted because the film is truly beautiful. It is perhaps one of the most hauntingly beautiful films I have ever seen. It is less a traditional movie and more a sequence of moving impressions on celluloid. The aesthetic techniques are simple, relying on shadows, light, or framing, but they're used perfectly. Almost every scene has some kind of overtly aesthetic effect: mottled shadows dancing across rustic interiors with a single character lost in reflection; circular ripples in a desert oasis expanding outwards and dissipating across the mirrored sky; endless waves slowly swelling and breaking, an infinite field of blue motion lacking any solid foundation.

I don't know if the film falls in any genre of aesthetic style. The mottling, rippling, dappling, and other techniques used to infuse motion, light and shadow in the film feel distinctly Impressionist. The haunting mixture of emotion and vibrant natural scenery feel Expressionist. And the elements of Wu-Xia mastery, most notably the use of qi to create spectacular explosions in the water, or perhaps the epic struggle between a single lone swordsman and an infinite army of bandits, provide the film with moments of Magical Realism. These all contribute to the distinctly dreamy quality of the film, and after watching it I feel like I've woken up to a reality that is much less interesting than the film I just watched.

Like a dream, it feels incomplete and haunting, with scenes that linger or shift without expectation. The characters divulge themselves almost entirely through minuscule, subtle expressions. There are moments of battle, but even these are captured in blurry swaths of action, like brush strokes rapidly slashed across a canvass.

Perhaps it is this dreamlike, impressionist quality that makes the film so difficult as well. The narrative is so elliptical and fragmented that I didn't really feel like I understood the importance of everything that was happening until maybe three-fourths of the way through the film. Once the pieces came together, it was stunning. Fortunately, I've seen Wong Kar-wai films before, and know they often avoid conventional story structures. This is one of the reasons I enjoy his films (like the films of Almodovar, which are also reliably unconventional). Even for Wong Kar-wai, however, I thought this narrative was particularly difficult. Much like a dream, characters appeared or disappeared often with little reason, or with reasons that materialized after the action, as if hastily constructed by the sleeping brain.

The irony is that, despite how much we tell ourselves to the contrary, isn't this how much of life actually works? We tell ourselves that we are fully aware of our actions at all times, or that we live according to carefully thought out plans. But the reality is that much of our rationality constructed world appears only after the fact, that people enter and leave our lives frequently, and often for reasons that ultimately are never fully clear. Like a dream, we put together the pieces after the fact, trying to make a coherent picture of the multitude of impressions and experiences from our waking lives. In this respect, the difference between dream and waking life is not so different. When we make the distinction based on the conventionally dichotomy of image versus "reality," then the we tell ourselves the difference is clear. But if we look at the issue in terms of desire, experience, and post-hoc rationalization, then the difference between dream and reality becomes wavering and thin.

Perhaps it is this quality that Wong Kar Wai was hoping to capture - the murky shiftings of desire and memory, and the way these filter and color our waking lives, like the mottled shadows rippling across the faces of his emotionally wounded protagonists. The ashes of time settle in our hearts like dust collecting on a mirror. We no longer see the world bright and clear like when we were young, but all becomes mixed and cloudy through our losses and regrets, until we no longer realize we have slipped fully into the dream.