As allegory, through these episodes of willful oblivion to the materiality of the characters’ physical environments, Wong highlights the real concern among contemporary subjects of Hong Kong—the impact of the erasure of the national boundaries of Hong Kong and mainland China on the sociocultural space of Hong Kong. At its extreme, this erasure will inevitably dissolve even the alienated familiarity of their experiences into mere memory. In this context, Gina Marchetti explains that “there is also a sense that Hong Kong has been abandoned and, worse, that, like the jilted lover, it has no power or say in this decision.”[54] [open endnotes in new page] Indeed, these examples bear testimony to the ways in which Wong foregrounds that the already striated capitalist social geography of Hong Kong is still the only space that Hong Kong’s imagined community had known, and thus implies that the implementation of mainland China’s sociocultural space is an alienating threat to identity and a sense of belonging.
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| The use of wide angles makes the character feel small and unnoticed in the urban environment, while also creating a sense of distance between characters who struggle to truly connect on a deeper emotional level. | |
An extended formal analysis of Fallen Angels is redundant here since it deploys most of the same themes and cinematic techniques utilized in Chungking Express and for the same meaning-making purposes. (Indeed, Fallen Angels was originally conceived by Wong as the third vignette in Chungking Express, but it made the final cut of the cumulative narrative too long.) However, some salient additional observations buttress the analysis. As with Chungking Express, in addition to its manipulation and thematization of cinematic time, Wong also manipulates the concept of space through the experimentation of different camera angles, positions, and framing, observed by the even more drastic warping of dramatic space in many scenes of Fallen Angels.[55]
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| Charlie on the phone with her ex-boyfriend Johnny, whose name is the only thing we only know about him. Despite having just met her and knowing little about their past relationship, 233 decides to join her on the search for Johnny’s new lover. | |
On one level, Bettinson argues that this effect portrays the protagonists’ intimate yet distant relationship on a specifically narrative level. Huang adds that the protagonist is, in fact, a representation of the every-man Hong Kong subject. Together these perspectives inform an argument that the excessive screen on screen within the movie is a visual illustration of the alienated Hong Kong subject in this lived space where they also feel claustrophobic and invisible.
Summarily, in another two-tiered narrative cross-over, Charlie’s (Charlie Yeung) and Prisoner 233’s (Takeshi Kaneshiro) narrative comes to an end when 233 realizes that she still has feelings for an unknown Johnny, and she overlooks 233’s amorous efforts in favor of a continued search for the absent enigma. After some time, Charlie and 233 meet once again, but she does not recognize him. Feeling heartbroken, he suddenly feels a new interest towards a woman with whom he had “too many chances to rub elbows in the past…till our clothes tore, but there were still no sparks,” a woman who happens to be the female agent (Michelle Reis) introduced at the beginning of the film. In this development Wong proffers another narrative metaphor of the contingent and ever-alienated nature of social connection in Hong Kong.
While the two protagonists, the female agent and 233, have gone through their own disparate narratives, Wong posits loneliness as the shared outcome of living in contemporary Hong Kong’s phase of liminality. Prisoner 233 and the female agent’s loose relationship stages what Bettinson describes as the intimate yet distant relationship that Wong presents in his films because although they are distant strangers, they are able to bond over their mutual alienation.[56] It does not seem, however, that they connect on any significant interpersonal level, and the film ends with the empty romantic imagery of him taking her as a passenger on his motorbike for a ride through the concrete city back to her home. She understands that he too will become just another stopover in her life when she blithely comments, “the road wasn’t that long and I knew I’d be getting off soon.” Herein lies the cinematic essence of the idea of what it means to be living in the age of transience where nothing lasts and nothing matters.
However, even in spite of this daunting age of transience, Rascaroli and Mazierska discuss how the protagonists of Fallen Angels do find ways to mark their existence through the use of tools (in contradistinction to commodities). The tools to which they refer vary from the characters’ personal belongings to video cameras.[57] For instance, the female agent and the assassin, Ming (Leon Lai), maintain their intimate yet distant relationship through items left behind by Ming. This is the only way she can learn about him since their jobs preclude them from physically or directly working with each other, another echo of the failings of objects to satisfactorily mediate social relations. Through these material traces of his presence in the same spaces, the female agent is led to a bar, his carefully protected space of loneliness and isolation. Reflective of her unknown name throughout the film, her desire to go to the bar to feel close to him suggests her curiosity to know what life is like for another person whose material remainders, the tools of his deadly trade, at least mark his actual existence in the world. This disconnected method of connection marks a temporally dislocated interpersonal experience in which objects become artefacts of historical record. However, as she steps into the bar, she is overwhelmed by this dislocated commune, and succumbs to the same familiar loneliness and isolation that was Ming’s in the same space. Here Wong illustrates the various, mutually invisible identities in a harrowing phase of liminality.
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| 233 replays the video clips he took of his father. “I know I’ll never taste his steaks again but I’ll never forget just how they tasted." | |
Similarly, Prisoner 233, when he shifts his attention from Charlie towards his relationship with his father, begins to record their daily lives together. When his father passes away, he notices in the videographically mediated images a dynamic between them which he had not realized previously, a connection that was especially difficult for them to foster since Prisoner 233 does not communicate verbally. These videotapes are the only thing 233 salvages when he leaves the tiny flat they were sharing. Wong romantically emphasizes the importance of retaining memories for the anxious Hong Kong subject against suffocating spaces that will inevitably be left behind as they resolve into the remembered spaces of nostalgia. Since the tapes help 233 remember a relationship he had with his father, Wong illustrates how these tools can duly help Hong Kong subjects retain a deteriorating collective memory that can help them to preserve a diminishing cultural identity.
In the end, using the tools of filmmaking allegorized in his narrative as a vehicle for preserving both memory and anxiety, Wong reproduces many of the visual mechanisms and narrative ellipses employed in Chungking Express. Again, these generate an aesthetic anxiety surrounding the alienating experience of the film’s characters, an experience that is familiar to the Hong Kong subject in the phase of liminality. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues,
“The existence of Hong Kong does not evoke the identitarian images of chronotopes but, as much literature on Hong Kong has established, it seems to be floating in an in-between of the local-global, the colonial-postcolonial, and the present-disappearing.[58]
Similarly, Jean Ma characterizes Hong Kong as “a place in a process of constant transformation, flux, and erasure, where capitalist modernity’s reigning value of speed and an uncertain political future converge to produce a foundational indeterminacy.”[59] However, neither of these insights explicitly link these aesthetics of anxiety to the 1997 handover of which they are a clear marker. Even Brunette reiterates how Curtis “Tsui plausibly claims that the film’s mostly humorous expiration-date motif, for example, refers to the expiration of Hong Kong as a British colony.”[60] In a space where everything appears to be transient, loneliness and isolation become overwhelming, and identity becomes just another disposable abstraction. Identity is rendered invisible in a new political phase where the sociocultural space is being dissolved by a perceived outsider identity. In both films, time robs each of the characters of the only connections they had managed to salvage, and of the meagre identities they had created in the disappearing space of Hong Kong.
Time becomes a symbol of loss for the characters, just as it has become for Hong Kong’s social framework as the two dates, 1997 and 2047, signified what was expected to be a shift of national boundary and the end to Hong Kong’s autonomy.[61] For the Hong Kong subject, it suggests an end to their own culture and identity. Despite these existential threats, the protagonists are still desperate to leave traces behind to remind them of their existence. On a more hopeful level, Wong demonstrates that retaining memories with such tools can help establish a visual reference for a common past that has been shared among Hong Kong subjects. This vehicle, both cinematic and diegetic, can help remind the anxious subject of their cultural and social background and to preserve Hong Kong’s embattled imagined community.
The nostalgic fantasy trapped in the present
in In the Mood for Love (2000)
Following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to the powers of mainland China, the populace of the city moved headlong into a phase of liminality that was expected to accrue over time towards the expiration in 2047 of the “two systems, one country” rhetoric . In consideration of In the Mood for Love’s year of release, three years after the 1997 handover, the historical specificity of this film (set in 1962 British Hong Kong) evolves from the rising anxieties of displacement and invisibility in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels towards a nostalgia invoked as a desire for Hong Kong’s pre-handover past.[62] The theme of nostalgia appears to be a major component of In the Mood for Love, which functions as “a bridge between the present and the memory or imaginary experience of the past (1960s Hong Kong).”[63] However, as with Chungking Express, the nostalgia in In the Mood for Love is one that longs for static time by confining the characters to claustrophobic and isolated spaces that are temporally and physically disconnected from the larger city.
“In decoupling offscreen space and desire, Wong introduces a temporal matrix that can imagine only the present. In the Mood for Love is unique among Wong's works in that it takes place in a present continuous, without past or future other than those intimated in the dialogs.”[64]
With reference to Wong’s auspiciously titled follow-up sequel to In the Mood for Love, 2046 (2004), Abbas points out the abiding nature of the theme of wishful thinking towards the fossilization of time in Wong’s post-handover films.
“Memory as the foldedness of times and places is suggested by the many meanings of the title itself. 2046 is firstly a place where ‘nothing changes’, and people go there in search of lost memories. It is also perhaps the only [explicit] reference in Wong's works to the 1997 handover, after which year the administration of Hong Kong is supposed to remain ‘unchanged for 50 years.’”[65]
As with Chungking Express, aesthetically, the use of overlapping editing and serial repetition mires the audience in the seemingly endless cinematic moment and acts as a resistance towards the future in the way that it delays time.
In an observation that more explicitly returns to the notion of an aesthetic of anxiety, Vivian Lee further points out how the use of mise-en-scene in In the Mood for Love helps form a nostalgic imagination and collective memory of 1960s Hong Kong. Lee specifically focuses on the use of symbolically-charged props such as “the cheongsam (qipao), hairdos, street lamps, handbags” that are characterized as iconic period objects.[66] Shohini Chaudhuri also highlights how aesthetics, especially visual and sound elements, help to form a nostalgic imagination. These aesthetic elements directly appeal to viewers’ senses and emotions which allows them to take in “the vitality of landscapes and capture the ‘spirit’ of a given place.”[67] However, Lee argues that the tension that is presented in the film in regard to the theme of nostalgia raises a tantalizing “mood” for a Hong Kong of the past since the past which Wong is trying to depict “refers less to an actual past than an illusive/elusive ‘pastness’ that history does not offer.”[68] For Lee, the construction of a nostalgic imagination in In the Mood for Love derives from the aestheticized and romanticized images of Hong Kong that Wong weaves together. By doing this, Wong provides a visual reference for an imagined common past in which the native subjects of Hong Kong can mutually engage.
Wong raises the theme of nostalgia via the aesthetic function of the film’s mise-en-scene, specifically with his use of colors and music. Wong is “undoubtedly one of cinema’s great colorists,”[69] in this case employing color towards the construction of a romanticised past of 1960s Hong Kong. Chaudhuri introduces the term “coloured audition” to suggest that Wong's use of colors is not merely for the aesthetics of the film, but with the accompaniment of music, helps to evoke a mood or emotion.[70] For instance, Wong often uses bright, saturated colors such as red and blue with melancholic music in romantic scenes led by the lead characters, Su (Maggie Cheung) and Chow (Tony Leung), to evoke a mood of intimacy. Wong creates two contrasting atmospheres between their rooms and the confined flat shared by multiple families; the plain yellowish wallpapers accompanied by dim lighting in the shared flat creates a dull and alienating atmosphere, but the use of a primary color palette and floral wallpapers in their private rooms creates a warmer and more welcoming atmosphere. The mood of intimacy evoked from the depiction of their romance helps to immerse the audience into the atmosphere of the nostalgic imagination.
Costume design is another aesthetic element that Wong foregrounds. The cheongsam is an iconic piece of clothing that Su wears throughout the entire film. It is a recognizable period item that is symbolic of 1960s Hong Kong and its fashion origins serve a purpose to the understanding of the film’s contemporaneous political implications. The cheongsam is a tight-fitting dress inspired by traditional long and loose-fitting robes, which men wore during the Qing dynasty and then altered and popularized as a fashion piece in 1920s Shanghai. Although the cheongsam originates from China, and is thus symbolic of Chinese identity, it is also associated with westernization as it was partly inspired by western fashion during a time when western education and culture were being widely introduced into the country.[71] The cheongsam also symbolizes modernity and female liberation since a significant number of women were entering the workforce and education sectors during that particular period of social reform.[72]
While the cheongsam “quickly lost its prominence in China after the Communist Party assumed power in 1949,” it remained popular in Hong Kong, especially during the 1950s and 1960s when Shanghainese tailors who were escaping from the civil war brought it along with them.[73] In cinematic representations, the cheongsam became “an emblem of modern Chinese womanhood and complex cultural understanding,” and further fed Hong Kong’s cultural hybridity.[74] This iconic fashion piece in In the Mood for Love is not only representative of Hong Kong’s pre-handover past but it is also symbolic of the city’s ambiguous identity that encompasses both British and Chinese culture. This “ambiguous identity” comprises part of a cosmopolitanism and différance that Hong Kong culture did not realize it could foster and localize until as late as the 1970s.[75]
