LONELINESS IN THE BIG CITY: THE BRILLIANCE OF WONG KAR WAI FILMS
Fallen Angels (1995)
I love sad endings more than I should. After all, it is not the happy conclusions that stay with us but the tragedies that do.
It is the longing between two characters who are forced apart by circumstance or personal choice that keep me up at night crying for fiction. It is the all-round experience of a heart-breaking soundtrack and monologues so powerful that they become the most popular quotes on Tumblr. It soundssound so Gen-Z but it is true.
Happy Together (1997)
Quotable film scenes elevate the movie’s message for me just as much as aesthetically pleasing scenes do and that is why I am so deeply in love with Wong Kar-wai.
Wong Kar-wai is a Hong Kong film director, screenwriter and producer who is often lauded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time for his atmospheric and non-linear narrative films. But what separates his work from the rest of the artsy films that have beautiful images of sunsets but lackluster stories? The pure and raw emotion.
The first time I encountered the director’s work was through the much celebrated ‘In the Mood for Love’ which really threw me in for a loop because I failed to understand what everyone seemed to love. At first, I thought the two main leads did not convey enough emotion nor be intimate enough to substantiate their longing for each other. However, I was watching it from the perspective of someone who has spent most of their life thinking characters show longing by slamming into one another and kissing passionately while mumbling, “I missed you so much,” into each other’s mouths. Additionally, as someone who also emphasises the importance of poignant dialogue, In the Mood for Love started to feel incomplete because of its minimal dialogue.
I failed to realise that not every scene or emotion needed words. The love affair in this movie was one that was characterised by subtlety, loneliness and longing – trademark themes WKW is known for. A rewatch allowed me to fully immerse myself into the world of two people who use each other to escape their failing marriages and understand why their love story is a sorrowful one. The movie is not a typical romance because Wong Kar-wai is not a typical filmmaker either. The director is known to only write scripts during filming while encouraging actors to improvise so that their performances are authentic. While this process is laborious, the results are stunning and memorable.
in the mood for love (2001)
To me, what is more striking than just the beauty of Wong Kar-wai films is how vivid imagery and atmosphere are used to contrast the loneliness of his characters despite being in one of the most densely populated places in the world. I come from Johannesburg, a densely populated city as well, but the films I have seen about the city barely explore the internal complexities of the characters who live within.
What does loneliness in a city full of people look like?
In Wong’s films Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, the filmmaker shows a vast range of characters from drug dealers to police officers who all want to experience a deep and fulfilling love. The way they express their love is often intrusive and desperate. In Chungking Express, Faye secretly cleans Cop 663’s apartment in an effort to care for him instead of being upfront about her feelings.
In the end, the viewers know more about the characters’ feelings because of the use of monologues. Monologues are a medium the director uses that make us feel closer to the characters and emphasises their solitude. He achieves this by having characters express both random thoughts about their observations and their true feelings.
Although the lives of the characters are lonely and melancholy, their backdrop and the visuals of the film are vibrant and saturated much like the city. Life never stops because you are desolate, the raucous hustling and bustling won’t look like how you feel and that is what loneliness in a big city looks like.
Chungking Express (1994)
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