ASHES OF TIME
A Film Retrospective
by Kevin Leung
There are no films like ASHES OF TIME, or perhaps its influences are just too many. It is Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY, maddeningly oblique, overlapping vignettes told in diverging styles and points of view. It is Salvatore Dali's "The Persistence of Memory," perception of space and time all bent out of shape, droopy, melancholic. It is Claude Monet, its scenes composed in bold broad strokes, pushing at sensations directly experienced, the blur of consciousness. It has the mystery and discreet charm of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBRED and the fin de siecle rage of THE WILD BUNCH. Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 masterpiece has all these elements and much more. Half a dozen storylines intersect, drift apart, are illuminated by literary allusions, linked by ironic intimations of destiny and fate. Time runs in circles, dilate, becomes sublimal, or frozen in pastiches. Characters spontaneously age ten years, transform into their male/female alter egos, or the object of someone else's romantic obsession; they scale the heights of triumph and plumb the depths of despair, they are at the mercy of the elements, their fortunes blowing in the wind. There are enough materials and ideas to furnish half a dozen films, and these are held together, barely and brilliantly, by the sheer force of Wong's artistic vision and the heroics of his editing crew. The project is staggeringly ambitious, but its roots goes back to the origins of cinema -- 24 frames of still pictures a second, too fast for the human eye to separate, give the illusion of continuity. And so, by the raw speed of images sent in collision, ASHES OF TIME creates the appearance of unity and meaning where none exists.
Prologue
Terse black on white credits. Golden breakers crashing down on words as old as the sea. A quote from the Buddhist Canon, and then, in voice-over, the famous first words in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Two duellists stand at face-off, their half smiles full screen, long hair in the wind, the very picture of the exuberance of youth. There is the clean hard ring of metal unsheathed, and they are high in the air, swinging away; they strike with such majestic, world-nihilating power, where their blades cross mountains shudder and the earth moves. And it would be the last time the two friends draw their swords in combat in the film (Cantonese title, literally: "Evil East and Malicious West") named after them.
Background
Many years later they would become the elder statesman and arch villain in Jin Yong's martial art romances. As the literary prequel, ASHES OF TIME portrays these archetypal swordsmen as not so young men, their future darkened and their wings clipped. Melodramatic, larger than life, Jin's most popular titles chronicle the apprenticeship, romance, tribulations, and ultimate triumph of his young heroes. His books idealize loyalty and chivalry, family honor and national pride -- Chinese traditions perhaps long forgotten in the island of merchants that is Hong Kong. At the same time, he champions radical individualism and sentimentality -- the perfect escapist cure for the colony's suffocating corporate culture. No one works for a living in his novels, true love lasts a life time, martial artists can defeat thousands and leap over trees, but are always hopeless when it comes to matters of the heart. The heady mixture makes Jin's books enormously popular across age groups and gender divides. The genre is probably the most treasured literary form in the former British colony, notwithstanding the fact that most of its authors are from Taiwan. The film is darker, more visionary. Nothing lasts in ASHES OF TIME. Everyone lives for himself, there is little honor or loyalty, and (this being Wong Kar Wai's allegory about the island of political orphans saddled with uncertain future and ambiguous past) there is not a hint of family life or jingoistic drum-beating. From a grand simplicity of human motivations -- distilled to love and death -- Wong elevates the city state's alienation into myth. ASHES OF TIME is ultimately as quintessentially Hong Kong as the sword-fighting genre it debunks, but it also draws heavily from the traditions of European art cinema, American Westerns, and Japanese samurai epics. The inspired amalgam of Eastern and Western influences is part and parcel of what makes this, in my opinion, easily the greatest film ever created in Hong Kong.
Cast and Characters
The story takes place in the desert, a land of mirage, a testing ground, where travellers confront their fate and the anti-Christ lives out his apprenticeship. East (Tony Leung, THE LOVER), a one-time womanizer, is reduced to a passive, melancholic observer, while West (Leslie Cheung, DAYS OF BEING WILD) has become a pimp for killers. He is not yet the devil incarnate in Jin Yong's novel, in his frown you can still see concern for his contract hitmen, although he would never lift a finger to help. He is a fascinating figure, nihilistic, superstitious, the chief narrator of the film and commentator on the follies of his clients -- only much later is it revealed how much of his cynicism stems from personal wounds. When the film begins, East has his memories erased by a "magic wine" and stumbles zombie-like to his home-town, where he runs into his former best friend, a swordsman now approaching blindness, and the swordsman's wife he has seduced during her honeymoon. The dead-pan, darkly comic memory-loss episodes seem to be more sly references to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magnum opus has long been adopted as a fable of the colony's political fortunes -- an entire series of minimalist plays, loosely based on the novel, were staged in the 80's -- but more to the point, its inexorable fatalism and its enigmatic, self-defeating characters are the perfect frames of reference for ASHES OF TIME. The casting in this film are quintessential Wong Kar-Wai: Tony Leung (CHUNGKING EXPRESS), in the traditional Andy Lau role, plays the stalwart blind hero who is cursed from birth and can never find fulfillment; Karina Lau, as his wife, reprises her love-starved character in DAYS OF BEING WILD; Jackie Cheung is once again the Kid with the hair-trigger temper and the fast draw; Brigitte Lin, a relative new-comer to Wong but has many gender-ambiguous characters on her resume, plays Yin, the vain-glorious crown princess of a fringe nation who can't quite come to terms with her heritage. Maggie Cheung has a small, uncredited late appearance, but in many ways her character is the emotional core of the film. In the best traditions of myth, these fallen angels and wayward knights have their personalities engraved on their coats-of-arms. Yin is as self-limiting as her birdcage, the Kid is as straight-forward as his camel, while Karina Lau's long suffering character is always knee-deep in water, so that she seems to be wallowing in a river of her own tears. There is also Charlie Young, vulnerable and stubbornly bent on revenge, armed with *both* a basket of eggs and a mule, who plays a Kieslowskisque foil to the protagonists' mindsets. West cruelly suggests she prostitute herself to raise money and hire a killer; the blind swordsman, buried in his own sorrows, ignores her; while the Kid, naive and chivalrious, would eventually put life and limbs at her service.
But these sharply drawn individuals gradually lose their definition. What draws them together are their rootlessness, their lack of history and concrete heritage; their company gives each other a temporary sense of belonging even as it makes them interchangeable, sadly blended together. They are always referred to as "this man, that woman," even in the rare cases that they actually have names. Their ill-fated romances are always linked with peach blossom, the women all have water signs and are awash in tears, while the men all have the sign of the windmill, are bent on exploring the land beyond the next mountain, until the day their beloved leave them, whereupon they are stuck in the desert with nowhere left to go. They are all men, all women, all suffering from the same disease, forever searching for emotional anchors. "Perhaps they don't have better things to do," West observes dryly. The Kid is more optimistic: "there is always someone waiting for you back home." Yes, but this being Wong's film, it will always be the wrong person doing the waiting. In a recurring dream sequence, West desperately, violently grasps on to Maggie Cheung on her wedding night; in her drunken stupor, Yin mistakes West for East and slips her hand inside his tunic, while he pretends the hand to be someone else's; the blind swordsman forces a kiss on the girl with the eggs on the eve of his last battle; far away, his estranged wife takes out her displaced passion on a black stallion, her bare legs arched back, caressed by the shimmering light on the walls of the cavern reflecting off the water underneath. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle has such fine hands.
Yin
The first vignette of the film is shot in seemingly random flashbacks, as if seen from Yin's overheated imagination; it is as out of kilter as she is schizophrenic. Jilted by East, Yin's superego (her "brother," i.e., she herself in male disguise) puts a price on East's head, while her id, clinging on to the notion she is East's "most beloved" -- her only claim to identity -- asks to be rid of the the brother instead. The two halves of her splintered psyche petition West daily in an increasingly bizarre game of one-upsmanship while he bemusedly looks on. Wong evidently has great sympathy for the poor mad girl -- Faye Wong's waif in CHUNGKING EXPRESS would be a benign version of the same character -- and this segment boasts some of the most lyrical images in the entire film. One night, insolently drunk, Yin drains her saucer and tosses up a huge china moon staring down impartially on shattered plates and a broken soul struck dumb by wonder. Terrence Malick would not have shot that scene better. The wine may as well be the memory-erasing wine, for it washes away the last shreds of her sanity. With exquisite classical restraint the haughty princess slowly caresses the length of West's body laying there feigning sleep, and she has the hands of a harpist. When morning comes the birdcage lies broken and the spirit flown, and henceforth she is always found slashing at her reflections in the water, forever trying to scratch out her other half that fills her with such loathing. They say that water cures you of your madness, but it is too perfect a mirror, and in its depths the seeds of dissolution fester.
Blind Swordsman
For its sheer technical virtuosity, and its innovative, subjective depiction of space and time, the blind swordsman's story is a modern classic that should be enshrined in textbooks. As a parable of man working against fate, about human dignity in the face of certain defeat, it has all the nobility of JEAN DE FLORETTE condensed into twenty minutes. Wong's desert battle evokes a dozen American and Japanese masters, but it has a lyricism all his own -- in his films, the specter of windswept curtains invariably announces the coming of tragic deaths. Time grates so heavily on the skin as the samurai holds vigil each night in a ruined cottage, waiting by a candlelight for the enemies he can no longer see. Penniless, his eyes failing, he has agreed to ambush some highwaymen, hoping to get home in time to watch one more peach blossom. (West's commentary: "flowers bloom with the seasons, but no one knows when the bandits will arrive"; somehow it comes as a shock that so corrupt a mind is capable of so pure a thought.) When he finally rides out for the mercenary war, accompanying him are only the drying tears of a woman who is not his woman, and the urging of the elegiac battle hymn. The attack comes in broad daylight. The bandits ride huge and mythical out of a slow rise, an entire army of them. At first the samurai can use his mobility and the wide open space to neutralize the bandits' numbers, and the editing, the flow of the scene are athletic. Then the sky darkens, his eyesight falters, and the sword fight collapses to impossible close quarters, the flailing bodies and agonized grunts shot in excruciating slow motion. When the first attackers are dispatched, there is a lull, the clouds open, and he sees his fate. In the middle distance the dismounted dragoons have formed up in a ragged battle line that blurs and multiplies and coaleases until it turns into an entire human forest. It stretches all the way to the far side of the cottage, surrounding him on all sides. His smile could be one of recognition or merely fierce pride, and soon enough it gives way to a grimace. He charges, right at the center of the advancing second wave. The denouement, a Brechtian note of resignation and wonder, could be the perfect epitaph for all of Wong's existential heroes who die young.
Seven
The Kid has a name -- it marks him the seventh son of a rural family -- but he comes from nowhere and does not wear shoes. West recruits him to complete the Task set forth by his Predecessor, but he never trusts the new hitman, for an astrologist has warned that his death would be linked to the unlucky number. This vignette serves as a fascinating study of the notion of chivalry that drives young people like Seven to martial arts. In a precious shot, lasting perhaps two seconds, Wong reveals what may lie beneath the nameless, faceless masks of banditry Jin Yong's heroes slaughter by the thousands to rescue their damsels in distress, thereby thoroughly debunking the fame and glory that only comes with high body count. Meantime Seven drives away his country wife who has followed him to the desert, while the local pretty girl with the eggs beseeches him to avenge her brother's death at the hands of the Colonel's bodyguards. Aided by West's tactical advice, Seven blows out of a sandstorm and annihilates the entire regiment of bandits. Soon wind blown gravels cover up the bodies, and the killings, like the machine-gunning at Garcia Marquez's mythical train station, may well have never happened.
He is upon the bodyguards while they sit sipping wine, an angry god on a rampage, out to meter justice on the Chinese almanac's Day of Atonement. The fight is the same senseless revenge-by-proxy Andy Lau would enact a millenium later in AS TEARS GO BY, and even the seedy watering hole looks exactly the same. The perspective has evolved, becoming more objective, affording multiple interpretations -- the sure sign of a mature artist's work. Like the previous fight, this desperate melee is shot entirely in impressionistic montages, as if by their sheer savagery these suicidal furies have broken through some speed barrier to a netherworld where leaping assassins are blurred shadows, spurting blood are frozen paint drops, and shattered straw hats and wind swept sand dust are angry brush strokes stopped dead in their tracks. Or perhaps all this is merely a cinematic realization of the Buddhist saying immortalized in the film's prologue, which in retrospect seems so utterly appropriate:
The flag lies still / the wind does not blow
It is the heart of man that is in tumult
The fight costs him dearly; he will not use his sword again. But (despite his resemblence to other Jackie Cheung incarnations) Seven is also a new paradigm, never before seen in Wong's films. He is not afflicted with the Curse, and would live to laugh about his losses. "The difference between you and me," he tells West, "is that you will never risk anything for an egg." In one stroke he has repudiated both West and Yin. Values do not derive from monetary worth, any more than identity derives from external sources. His apprenticeship is over. >From then on he is his own person, a modern day Orestes, the doer of the deed. One can only speculate how much the director identifies with the character the film loves. Wong is himself the "unsophisticated" China immigrant turned enfant terrible of Hong Kong cinema, the star of an industry that honors him but will never completely embrace his talents, the world class artist and intellect of a city state that never has much use for either. ASHES OF TIME was two years in the making, shot on locations all over China, its rare huge budget a largesse of DAYS OF BEING WILD's success; Wong shot it like he had a score to settle, like he wielded his sword in the proverbial wind. He went for it all, and there was never any question any one scene would be less than shoot-the-lights-out brilliant. This is truly one of the great films of our time. I sincerely hope it gets a proper stateside release. Given his preference for small films, it is unlikely the reigning Cannes film festival best director will try something on this scale any time soon.
The Woman at the Water's Edge
But there is the story of one more person to unravel before director, characters, and cast can move on. She is the excuse for East's melancholy, the origin of Yin's murderous rage, the reason for West's self-imposed exile. In five minutes' screen time her presence threads together all segments of the film and then releases the knot, allowing the protagonists to go their own way. The role can only be entrusted to Maggie Cheung, Wong's special actress since his first film. In the full glory of her bridal red she is an angel, far removed from the struggles of the other earth-colored mortals. She is the same woman she has played in Wong's previous films, the woman born in backwater towns (Lantau Island in AS TEARS GO BY, Macau in DAYS OF BEING WILD), the embodiment of pastoral beauty, the closest thing his disaffected heroes have to the idea of Home. There is no doubt she might once have found adventure with Wong's leading men, and I always imagine her looking longingly at the far end of the horizon, where presumably the water ends and the clouds begin. She is much older now, her face looks too red and unwell; the longing is replaced by a wistfulness, born of the realization that her chance for happiness has passed by. Looking across the water she muses about what might have been, while East supplies his own succinct observations in voiceover. The two sing-song voices blend and alternate with perfect harmony, and they finally seem to make order out of the rampant self- deceptions and bitter pride that has ruined so many lives in the film. But the epiphany is a false one; it does not belong to the characters, only the audience. For something like five straight minutes the camera peers mercilessly into her eyes while she does her soul-searching, and Ms. Cheung's performance here is one for the ages, one that I will never forget. Her brief appearance is in effect a summation of Wong's first phase of filmmaking. Since then she has not returned to his films, and his later works have yet to find a comparable center of gravity.
West
Her departure from the film is shattering, and not just emotionally. At last it is revealed that she is the one who has sent the magic wine at her deathbed. Therefore the film's hidden center has been deceased the whole time, all pretense to a chronological narrative is wiped out, and all the bloodshed, the exiles, the madness, they have all been in vain. Thereafter revelations rush by in a blur, the images become more allusive, the scenes increasingly elliptical. It takes this native Cantonese speaker half a dozen viewings to sort through the disjointed narrative, but then again, no one ever needed to count the petals to appreciate Monet's waterlilies. Figures appear in the distance, squating, riding on horse back, split between land and water, their inverted reflections towering in the high desert heat. These seem like characters we already know, or maybe they are merely mirages in the sand. Another recurring image has the desert mariner at his wind-filled flagstaff, watching the ravishes of time disguised as dancing lights unfolding like a sea change. At last West drinks the magic wine, and goes on delivering his sales pitches as before. It is the same pitch that opens the film, and yet subtly different; maybe the end of the film is also its beginning, or perhaps it is merely part of the eternal recurrance. When he learns of the passing of his beloved, he tells us, in the same chilling matter-of-fact voice, about his two-days vigil. We watch with him the miracle at sundown, the heavens on fire on the far rims of the horizon, the sky darkening, dissolving into montages of a burnt out grey dawn. And then the flames started again. All this time we never get to see his eyes.
Epilogue
When Christopher Doyle photographs fire or the roaring sea he shoots full screen, in primary colors, for extra duration and exposure, as if it needs be emphasised the forces of nature possess a vivacity, a permanence, a fullness of being Wong's tormented characters can never dream of attaining. Another year, another spring; West burns down his dilapidated cottage [the almanac that day -- Courier rides, Mars ("Fire," the red planet) chases Venus ("Gold"), Auspicious westward], heads back to his home town, and becomes the terror of western China. With no more ties to desert, East has long departed; he would cement his reputation as the premier swordsman along the eastern seaboard, then retire to an island, and father the bright-eyed heroine of Jin Yong's novel. As for Seven, I suppose nothing ever ties him down, and he too has long gone, camel and wife in tow (i.e. he has to terms with his heritage, such is the economy of Wong's sleight of hand), eventually to become the eccentric Great Northern Beggar, the righteous leader of thousands, and mentor to Jin's young hero. The day he and West part company, "Pole star presides, the wind blows south," boiling stratus embellishes a time-lapsed dream; Seven deliberately heads into the north wind as West looks on, and that long look cements the covenant, foretold by astrologers and flashed in subtitles across the screen, and which martial arts genre afictionidoes already know all along -- that thirty years hence West and his one-time protege would duel to mutual destruction at the climax of Jin's epic chronicles. It is an intimiation of destiny fulfilled, mankind vindicated. Perhaps some day Wong's characters will find peace and destiny that are theirs, not imposed by "fate"; perhaps his angry, violent, alienated heroes, never afraid of death, will at last find something worth dying for. This is more than good enough for now. In ASHES OF TIME Wong has finally given my birthplace something it never had: a cinematic Great Novel, an epic poem for the dispossessed; a requiem for the dead, and anthem for the living. The epilogue is as purely cinematic and brilliant as anything else in the film, and the absences are just as significant as what appears on screen. We find East, years later, facing down an army of assailants; Seven, brandishing in his ruined hands the light club that would bring him fame; Yin, steep in her madness now, waltzing with the corpse of a dead swan; and West, his long hair flying, sword drawn, last seen slaughtering his enemies in a vicious Dragon Inn melee, his still youthful smile registering genuine pleasure, even surprise, at his own personal well-being. Their exploits are legend, written in the Books; their personalities become archetypal, celebrated forevermore. As for the blind swordsman fighting for a last chance to see his hometown, his estranged wife, and the woman with a face the color of a defiant, dying peach blossom -- they do not get their second chance on earth, and they are not seen or heard from, but their stories live on in Wong's silver-etched memories.
[I would like to thank Ian McDowell and Gary Pollard]
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