1. Not considered herein is Wong’s most obvious film that occurs exactly at the moment of handover in 1997, Happy Together. While this might be considered an oversight on the surface, there are reasons for omitting its consideration. First, although it uses similar sensuous cinematic aesthetics, the other three films form something of a matching pair (if Chungking and Fallen are seen as a single extended double narrative) that surrounds the handover rather than lands on it. Second, Happy Together is more thematically concerned with queer identities and fragmented love in diaspora. It is more about escape and alienation than situated cultural anxiety in transition. As Fredric Jameson (2009) explains,

“the Hong Kong protagonists are abruptly transported to a setting utterly different from that overpopulated rock on which they have lived their previous lives. Indeed, the film opens with the classic shots of ... wide open spaces which not only contradict our images of Hong Kong itself, but also make us retroactively aware of the claustrophobic and nervous packed images of Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer long associated with Wong Kar-wai” (p. 318).

Peter Brunette (2005) claims that “[p]erhaps because the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese authorities was about to become a reality at the time the film was made, identity, specifically the narrow political identity that is linked to nation and legality, is important in Happy Together to a greater extent than in earlier films” (p. 75). He is quick to explain his meaning in the way that Lisa Stokes and Michael Hoover (1999) recognize in Happy Together “a challenge to the ‘normalization’ of Hong Kong-Mainland relations on the eve of the handover” (p. 268). According to Brunette, this was “mostly owing to the gay subject matter” (p. 76) which “transgressed mainstream Chinese standards” (Stokes and Hoover, p. 268). Fredric Jameson, “Globalization and Hybridization,” in NatašaDurovicová and Kathleen E. Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, Routledge, 2009, pp. 315-319; Peter Brunette, Wong Kar-wai, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005; Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, New York: Verso, 1999. [return to p. 1]

1b. Of particular note is Trump’s alarmingly contradictory Executive Order 13936 from 2020 entitled ‘The President’s Executive Order on Hong Kong Normalization’ in which he both accuses China of the ostensible oppression of Hong Kong at the same time that the order insists Hong Kong will no longer be afforded any preferential economic or political treatment now that it has been absorbed by Chinese politics.

2. Gary Bettinson, The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), p.60.

3. According to Shohini Chauduri (2016) the title of Wong’s film 2046 “refers to Chinese government promises to leave Hong Kong's socio-economic structure unchanged for 50 years following the 1997 handover” (p. 185). Interestingly, Ackbar Abbas (2016) refers to this simple allegory as “perhaps the only reference in Wong's works to the 1997 handover” (p. 144). However, in terms of the aesthetics that might more fulsomely represent this specific political advent than Abbas acknowledges, we look to various contributions regarding the more artistic elements of Wong’s films under scrutiny:  Shohini Chauduri, ‘Color Design in the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai’, in Martha P. Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016) pp.153-181; Ackbar Abbas, “Wong Kar‐wai's Cinema of Repetition,” in Martha P. Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016) pp. 134-151.

4. Abbas, 2016, p. 137.

5. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 45.

6. However, this historical anxiety about the distant end of the transition period in 2047 may have been over-anticipated. Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” will not be altered come 2047, a top Beijing legal official has said. By the Hong Kong Free Press: https://hongkongfp.com/2022/05/27/hong-kongs-one-country-two-systems-will-not-change-after-2047-top-beijing-legal-official-says.

7. Application of English Law Ordinance, Cap. 88, Laws of Hong Kong Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

8. Nina Glick Schiller, “Transnationality and the City,” in Stefän Kratke, Kathrin Wildner, Stephan Lanz (eds.), Transnationalism and Urbanism,(New York: Routledge, 2012) pp. 31-46 (p. 31).

9. Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam, “Hong Kong Screenscapes: An Introduction,” in Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam (eds.), Hong Kong Screenscapes from the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), p. 6.

10. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 281.

11. Abbas, 2016, p. 134.

12. Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “New Queer Angles on Wong Kar-wai,” in Martha P.  Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), pp. 260-80 (p. 268).

13. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997b), p. 41.

14. Hok-Sze Leung, 2016, p. 268

15. Ackbar Abbas, “The Erotics of Disappointment,” in Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai (eds.), Wong Kar-wai (Paris: Dis Voir, 1997), pp. 39-82 (p. 39).

16. Jean-Marc Lalanne, “Images from the Inside,” in Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai (eds.), Wong Kar-wai (Paris: Dis Voir, 1997), pp. 9-28 (p. 27).

17. Ibid.

18. Peter Brunette, Wong Kar-wai (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 51.

19. Wong quoted in Tony Rayns, “Poet of Time,” Sight and Sound 5.9 (September 1995), pp. 12-16 (p. 14).

20. Chris Doyle, “To the End of the World,” Sight and Sound 7.5 (May 1997), pp. 14-17 (p. 16).

21. Ackbar Abbas, “The Erotics of Disappointment,” in Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai (eds.), Wong Kar-wai (Paris: Dis Voir, 1997a), pp. 36-81 (p. 41).

22. Ibid., p. 43.

23. Eric Greene, *Planet of the Apes* as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p. 13.

24. Brunette, p. 22.

25. Ibid., p. 51

26. Abbas, 1997a, p. 40.

27. Abbas, 2016, p. 137.

28. Bettinson, p. 60. Mette Hjort uses this same metaphor in a description of Wong’s 2004 short film contribution to the anthology film Eros called “The Hand,” “Wong's sensuous narrative about a courtesan (Gong Li) and her tailor (Chang Chen)”; Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen E. Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, Routledge, 2009, pp. 12-33 (p. 23).

29. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels’ portrayal of characters with fragmented and disorientated identities can be seen as a reflection of Wong’s take on the deleterious effects of Hong Kong’s changing and disconnected space. Similarly, In the Mood for Love portrays Hong Kong’s ever-changing social space and community but from a different perspective and context since it is set in the earlier period of the1960s even though it was released after the hand-over. The film’s setting, which takes place primarily in a confined Hong Kong flat depicts a multicultural community shared by two Hong Kong couples and a group of Shanghainese families who had migrated to Hong Kong, a diasporic populace that re-emphasizes Hong Kong’s history as an ever-changing social urban landscape.

30. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 4.

31.   Wai Yee Ruby Cheung, Hong Kong Cinema 1982-2002: The Quest for Identity during Transition, Diss. University of St Andrews, 2008, p. 123. [return to page 2]

32. Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, “Trapped in the Present: Time in the Films of Wong Kar-Wai,” Film Criticism, 25.2 (2000), pp. 2-20 (p. 4).

33. Ibid.

34. Tsung‐Yi Huang, ‘Chungking Express: Walking with a Map of Desire in the Mirage of the Global City’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video 18.2 (2001), pp. 129-142 (pp. 130).

35. Ibid., p. 131.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 130.

39. Bettinson, p. 52. As David Desser more broadly acknowledges, the cinematic “disavowal of Hong Kong” from many of its own producers “and the substitution of ‘China’ continues the deja-disparu identified so memorably by Ackbar Abbas—here not the disappearance of Hong Kong's culture within Hong Kong, but the disappearance of Hong Kong itself.”  David Desser, “Diaspora and National Identity: Exporting ‘China’ through the Hong Kong Cinema,” in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden(eds.), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (Taylor & Francis, 2006) pp. 143-155 (pp. 154-5).

40. Ibid., p. 58.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., p. 52.

43. Joe McElhaney, “Wong Kar-wai: The Actor, Framed,” in Martha P.  Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), pp. 357-279.

44. Shohini Chaudhuri, “Color Design in the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai,” in Martha P. Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-wai (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016), pp. 153-181 (p. 165).

45. Ibid.

46. Bettinson, pp. 49-50.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., p. 49.

49. Abbas, 2016, p. 137.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Huang, p. 133.

53.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 1983.

54. Gina Marchetti, “Buying American, Consuming Hong Kong: Cultural Commerce, Fantasies of Identity, and the Cinema,” in Poshek Fu and David Desser(eds.), The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 291. [return to page 3]

55. Chaudhuri, p. 64.

56. Bettinson, p. 65.

57. Mazierska and Rascaroli, p. 13.

58. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, “Metonymy, Mneme, and Anamnesis in Wong Kar-wai,” in Martha P. Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016, pp. 398-414 (p. 403).

59. Jean Ma, Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong University Press, 2010, p. 2.

60. Curtis K. Tsui, “Subjective Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai,” Asian Cinema 7.2 (1995), pp. 93-124 (p. 116); Brunette, p. 51.

61. Although, again, the 2047 date is, in hindsight, only a symbolic signifier. According to a top Beijing legal official, the fifty years is just a “figurative saying” and the anticipated socio-economic disruptions during and after the ostensible liminal period are likely to have stabilized for the foreseeable future beyond 2047.

62. Vivian Lee highlights that “time, memory, and nostalgia are known to be recurrent motifs in Wong Kar-wai's films” (p. 380). Vivian P. Y.  Lee, “Infidelity and the Obscure Object of History,”in Martha P.  Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), pp. 380-397.

63. Ibid.

64. Yomi Braester, “Cinephiliac Engagement and the Disengaged Gaze in In the Mood for Love,” in Martha P. Nochimson (ed.), A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016, pp. 462-479 (p. 475).

65. Abbas, 2016, p. 144.

66. Lee, p. 382.

67. Chaudhuri, pp. 155, 177.

68. Lee, p. 381.

69. Chaudhuri, p. 153.

70. Ibid., p. 177.

71. Wai-Chung Ho, “Westernization and Social Transformations in Chinese Music Education, 1895-1949,” History of Education, 32, no.3 (2003), pp. 289-301 (p. 295).

72. Sandy Ng, “Clothes Make the Woman: Cheongsam and Chinese Identity in Hong Kong,” in Kyunghee Pyun and Aida Yuen Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia, (London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2018), pp. 357-378 (p. 362).

73. Ibid., p. 369.

74. Ibid., p. 365.

75. Abbas, 1997b, p. 6.

76. Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Oxon: Routledge, 2004), p. 6. [return to page 4]

77. Nancy Blake, “‘We Won’t Be Like Them’: Repetition Compulsion in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love,” The Communication Review, 6.4 (2003), pp. 341-356 (p. 347).

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. Abbas, 2016, p. 142.

81. Bettinson, p. 50.