ASHES OF TIME REDUX (Sony, 2008) D: Wong Kar-wai, w/ Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin. Rating: NNNNN DVD package: NNN Rating: NNNNN
Depending on your inclination, this is either a poetic meditation on lost love and lives blighted by regret or an arty, pretentious martial arts movie with the martial arts left out.
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Me, I’m moved by Wong Kar-wai‘s off-kilter, yellow-drenched images, bleak desert landscape, quiet score and obsessively repeated story points that eventually coalesce into an eloquent sorrow.
Others might point to the fragmented action scenes, directed by Sammo Hung with an eye for mood, not spectacle, and complain that the story is incoherent. Not exactly.
Ex-swordsman Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) lives in a remote desert, brokering deals between assassins and their clients and visited occasionally by a friend. Almost everyone is driven by some version of the same past events involving a swordsman and the girl he left behind who married his brother.
All deal with the past differently. One swordsman is going blind, another going for the bottle. Strangest are Murong Yin and Murong Yang, a brother and sister unknowingly inhabiting one body, one seeking a killer, the other a defender for the same man. Brigitte Lin makes a meal of the role. Her co-stars, all top Hong Kong actors, do equally well.
In a satisfying, detailed interview and making-of doc, Wong lets us into his meaning and methods and the purely practical reasons for making this slight revision of his 1994 original.
EXTRAS Making-of doc, Wong interview. Widescreen. Cantonese, French audio. English subtitles.
