Reliving The Past

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Wong Kar-Wai’s contemplates the vulnerability of a yearning heart with the return of his martial arts epic Ashes of Time Redux/ By Pancho Torres

Filmed in the remote Gobi Desert in China, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 martial arts film Ashes of Time was a troubled production from the beginning until the end. Crippled by the unpredictable and punishing conditions in the desert, the filming schedule was severely prolonged and the frustrated director took months to edit the film. The final product is not an action-oriented epic but an intricate narrative about the pitfalls of regrets. After it bombed in the box office, Ashes of Time slowly faded into obscurity and has become a lost classic that is finally revived in a “redux” version in 2008.

After garnering critical success with his second film Days of Being Wild, Wong got enough traction to gather funding for his ambitious martial arts project. Ashes of Time is the first and only wuxia film ever made by the filmmaker who is known for his melancholy romantic films. Wuxia is a fantasy subgenre of martial arts films which mainly deals with stories of swordsmen making a name for themselves in ancient China. For western audience, these are the action flicks that inspire pop icons like the Wu Tang Clan and Quentin Tarantino. While Ashes of Time is loosely based on the characters of the popular wuxia novels by Hong Kong writer Louis Cha, Wong’s illustration of the human side of these fantasized heroes is a refreshing take on a genre that is overdone by the constant recycle of the same old formula.

The story centers on a skilled swordsman by the name of Ouyang Feng (the late Leslie Cheung) who does contract killing for a living in a desert town. Every year, his friend and fellow swordsman Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) visits him for a brief reunion. One day, the mysterious Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin) comes through his door and hires him to kill Huang Yaoshi, who has broken his promise to marry Murong Yang’s sister Yin(also played by Brigitte Lin). Huang’s complicated relationship with the Murong siblings reminds Ouyang Feng of the reason for his self-imposed exile— his lover (Maggie Cheung) has become his brother’s wife during his adventures in the martial arts world. Later, Ouyang Feng meets a nameless swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Wong’s frequent collaborator) who needs a job for the money before he can go back to see the peach blossoms in his village once more before he goes blind. The blind swordsman has left his village after his wife falls in love with his best friend Hunag Yaoshi. In the film’s most action-oriented sequence, Ouyang Feng takes a homeless swordsman named Hong Qi (Jacky Cheung) under his wing. But the idealistic Hong Qi risks his life to avenge the brother of a penniless girl (Charlie Yeung) for the price of an egg. Such an all-star cast with Hong Kong’s most acclaimed actors shall never happen again, especially after the tragic suicide of the magnificent Leslie Cheung in 2003.




Wong’s intimate and personal take on such a culturally ingrained genre is reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, like the martial arts heroes in Ashes of Time, has been portrayed in hundreds of films and television programs with the same old clichés over and over again. Billy Wilder, who is famous for his ability to produce films that transcend their genres (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment), depicts a melancholy Sherlock Holmes whose strictly rational persona is rattled by his feelings for a woman. Like Wilder, Wong put life into a genre film with his very own themes and ideals. In Wong’s martial arts world, the super-human swordsmen are ordinary people tormented by loneliness and alienation. They often make irrational and regrettable decisions in their relationships— Ouyang Feng is haunted by his memories of his lover who is now his sister-in-law, Huang Yaoshi wishes a magical wine will erase the memories of his past affairs, Murong Yin is driven into insanity after being spurned by Huang and the blind swordsman wants to see his wife again even though she is in love with his best friend. A second-rate director can easily make these subjects look pedestrian and puerile, but Wong Kar-Wai always manages to capture the complexity of the heart’s desire with finesse and humanity.

Ashes of Time also transforms the martial arts genre aesthetically with Christopher Doyle’s iconic cinematography and William Chang’s colorful production design. With the desert landscape as a backdrop, Wong and his crew infuse a strong sense of desolation into the film like a Sergio Leone western. The dejected environment matches perfectly with the characters’ lonesome inner monologues. While the film is primarily a character study, there are a few notable displays of martial arts. The fighting sequences are composed of disorienting shots with various slow-motion and strobe effect that creates a one-of-a-kind viewing experience. However, a new version of the film is much needed because any existing version of the film on DVD has mercilessly butchered this gorgeously filmed epic with distorted colors and shadows, in addition to the poor sound quality and horrible subtitles. While the trailer for the Redux version gives a glimpse of the vast improvement made, the digitally altered colors look a little too glossy and saturated for this somber desert drama. The Redux version is also five minutes shorter the original release, and cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma have been added to the score. It is a little disheartening to witness such revisionist antics from the director, but any new version of Ashes of Time has to be better than any existing one.

The infamous production troubles and commercial failure could have been a career killer for Wong Kar-Wai. Yet during this difficult time in his career, Wong took a two-month break away from editing Ashes of Time and made a low-budget quirky comedy known as Chungking Express, a film that propelled Wong to international stardom. Ashes of Time can now serves as a remembrance of an unconventional chapter in an illustrious career.

Ashes of Time Redux opens October 24 at the Angelika Film Center Houston.

** UPDATE 10/22 ** On the Redux version:

In my original review (above), I was a little concerned about director Wong’s possible revisionist motives on his Redux version of 1994’s Ashes of Time. Watching the screening of Ashes of Time Redux proves that I was totally wrong. It is true that the colors of the sand and sky in the new film are more saturated than any earlier version, but the overall film is a top-notch improvement that is true to the original’s form.

There is some minor editing work that enhances the details in the quick-and-furious fight scenes of the film, but it is still the uniquely frantic visual spasm that is different from any martial arts film. My only complain is the digitally-enhanced blood in the new version, which only amounts to a few seconds of the whole movie.

For the viewers who are not interested in any bloodbath, there is no worry because the bulk of the film remains a meditation on lost love and rejection. Yo-Yo Ma’s cello solo of the original score proves to be a perfect fit for the film’s pensive mood. With newly added title cards, the Redux version illuminates the five chapters set to the five seasons in the Chinese almanac calendar, an important element in the film. From the one-minute friendship in Days of Being Wild to the expiring cans of pineapples in Chungking Express, Wong’s time-obsessed characters are often haunted by the memories of their past affairs and. The fortune-telling nature of the Chinese almanac adds a strong sense of fatalism into the heavy-hearted loners of the film.