You know that feeling when you're walking home late at night, the streetlights are hitting the rain puddles just right, and suddenly your life feels like a movie? That’s basically the permanent state of a Wong Kar Wai film. It’s not just cinema; it’s a vibe, a mood, a deep ache in your chest that you can’t quite explain to your therapist.
He doesn't do "plots" in the way Hollywood does. If you go into In the Mood for Love expecting a standard "will-they-won't-they" rom-com, you're going to be staring at a lot of slow-motion cigarette smoke and patterned wallpaper wondering when the action starts. But that’s the secret. The smoke is the action. The wallpaper is the dialogue.
The Chaos Behind the Beauty
Most directors show up with a script. Wong Kar Wai shows up with a feeling and maybe a few lines scribbled on a napkin. It sounds like a recipe for a disaster, right? Honestly, sometimes it almost was.
Take Days of Being Wild. It was supposed to be a massive two-part epic. He spent so much money and took so much time filming the first part that the studio basically had a heart attack. The "sequel" never happened in the traditional sense, though the characters sort of drifted into his later work like ghosts. Tony Leung Chiu-wai famously spent weeks filming a final scene for that movie—just him dressing up, sharpening a nail file, and putting money in his pocket—without a single word of context. It became one of the most iconic endings in cinema history, yet Tony himself didn't even know what he was doing at the time.
This improvisational style is why a Wong Kar Wai film feels so alive. It’s messy. It’s spontaneous. It mirrors the way we actually experience memory—fragmented, blurry around the edges, and fixated on the weirdest details.
Christopher Doyle and the "Blur"
You can't talk about Wong without talking about Christopher Doyle. The cinematographer. The man who made Hong Kong look like a neon-soaked dreamscape.
They used a technique called step-printing. Basically, they’d shoot at a low frame rate and then repeat frames to get back to standard speed. The result? That streaky, dizzying motion blur you see in Chungking Express. It makes the world look like it's moving too fast for the characters to keep up.
It’s genius.
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When Faye Wong is cleaning 663’s apartment in secret, the camera feels like a voyeur. We aren't just watching a story; we are invading a private moment. Doyle once described their collaboration as a dance where they didn't always know the steps until the music started playing. That lack of a safety net is why those 90s movies still feel more modern than stuff coming out today.
Why Time is the Real Villain
In almost every Wong Kar Wai film, the clock is ticking. Or it's stopped. Or it's being obsessively monitored.
Think about the expiration dates on the pineapple cans in Chungking Express. May 1st. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character is literally eating his grief, one tin at a time. It’s funny, but it’s also heartbreaking. We all do that. We all put deadlines on our pain. "If I don't hear from her by midnight, it's over."
Wong is obsessed with the "near miss." Two people passing each other on the stairs, their shoulders brushing for 0.01 seconds. In his world, that’s enough to change a life. In the Mood for Love is the peak of this. It’s a movie about what doesn't happen. It’s about the space between people.
People often call his movies "romances," but that’s not quite right. They are movies about loneliness. Even when the characters are together, they are alone in their own heads, trapped by their memories or the social constraints of 1960s Hong Kong.
The Music is the Script
If you close your eyes and think of Happy Together, you hear the accordion. You hear "Cucurrucucú Paloma."
Wong uses music as a structural element. In In the Mood for Love, Shigeru Umebayashi’s "Yumeji’s Theme" plays over and over. Every time Maggie Cheung walks to the noodle stand in those stunning cheongsams, that waltz kicks in. It creates a rhythm. It’s hypnotic.
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He’s been known to play music on set to help the actors find the mood. He doesn't tell them "act sad"; he plays a record and lets the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. This is why his films translate so well globally. You don't need to speak Cantonese to understand the yearning in 2046. The music speaks for you.
The Struggle of the Perfectionist
Let's be real: working for Wong Kar Wai sounds exhausting.
The Grandmaster took years. Years! He sent his lead actors, Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, into intense martial arts training for ages. Tony actually broke his arm twice. All for a movie that, in the end, focused just as much on the philosophy of a flickering lamp as it did on the fight choreography.
He edits and re-edits until the last possible second. Rumor has it he was still tweaking 2046 while it was literally on its way to the Cannes Film Festival. This isn't just "being difficult." It's a refusal to let the work be anything less than a pure transmission of an emotion.
Sometimes it backfires. Some fans felt The Grandmaster was a bit too fragmented compared to his earlier work. But even a "flawed" Wong Kar Wai film has more soul in one frame than most blockbusters have in two hours.
How to Watch Him Without Getting Lost
If you’re new to this world, don't start with 2046. You’ll be confused.
- Start with Chungking Express. It’s light, it’s fast, it’s cool. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a shot of espresso in a crowded night market.
- Move to In the Mood for Love. This is his masterpiece. It’s quiet. It’s painful. It’s perfect.
- Then hit Fallen Angels. It’s the dark, gritty cousin of Chungking.
Watch them at night. Turn off your phone. Don't worry if you don't understand the "plot" right away. Just look at the colors. Listen to the rain.
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The Cultural Impact
Wong Kar Wai changed how we see cities. He made the urban landscape feel intimate. Before him, Hong Kong was often just a backdrop for action movies. He made it a character. He captured the anxiety of the 1997 handover without ever making a "political" film. He captured a feeling of a world that was about to disappear.
His influence is everywhere. You see it in the lighting of Moonlight. You see it in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. You see it in countless music videos and fashion shoots. Everyone wants that "Wong Kar Wai look," but nobody can quite replicate the heart behind it.
Acknowledge the Wait
We've been waiting for Blossoms Shanghai for what feels like a decade. His move into television with that project shows he's still pushing. He’s not interested in repeating himself, even if he returns to the same themes of nostalgia and lost time.
The reality is that we might never see another director like him. The industry has become too focused on "content" and "deliverables." Wong Kar Wai doesn't deliver content; he delivers a piece of his soul, usually three years late and way over budget. And honestly? We should be grateful for it.
Actionable Steps for the Aspiring Cinephile
If you want to truly appreciate a Wong Kar Wai film, you have to change how you consume media.
- Look for the "Rhyme": Notice how scenes repeat. In In the Mood for Love, notice how many times they practice saying goodbye. It’s not a mistake; it’s a rhyme.
- Research the Costumes: William Chang is the unsung hero here. He’s the production designer and editor. Look at the colors of the dresses. They often signal the internal state of the character before they even speak.
- Listen to the Ambient Noise: The sound of a ceiling fan or a distant radio is just as important as the dialogue.
- Check out the 4K Restorations: Criterion recently released a box set. Some fans were annoyed that he changed the color grading on certain films (making Chungking Express more green, for example), but seeing them in high definition is a revelation.
Stop trying to "solve" these movies. They aren't puzzles. They are songs. You don't ask what a song "means" while you're dancing to it; you just feel the beat. Do the same with Wong. Let the neon wash over you. Embrace the sadness. It’s beautiful there.