Wong Kar Wai - As Tears Go By
or, you gotta start somewhere
Catch up:
The first novel (2008) I ever attempted to write was a slightly embarrassing mix of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Factotum, and Dermaphoria. It was, at times, very funny, but it was often over-serious and flimsily thrown together.
Some of you reading this may have even been in the writing group that read however many chapters of it that I finished.
Noir: A Love Story was the first novel I ever completed (2010)—which would eventually be my third published novel—and it was a mix of The Savage Detectives, The New World (the extended cut version is better), and a dream I spent a decade of my dumb life having repeatedly with maybe a few touches of The White Hotel (more than a few touches, if I’m being honest).
I was a child in a man’s body trying to stand on the shoulders of giants and my developing style owed much to the writers and artists I admired most. That book, in fact, could not have existed without The Savage Detectives. A later novel began in 2013, still unfinished, called a palimpsest, only exists because of 2666 and Ulysses and a different dream that I tried to make real for a decade. Its dizzying structure and absurd ambition makes it nearly impossible to exist in any way that makes sense (101 narrators [that I wrote 60 of them over the course of three weeks also threatened to break my fragile mind and body] is, inarguably, too many; the 26 narrators of Noir: A Love Story was deemed as too many by most readers when it came out in 2014).
We young and aspiring artists so often retread old ground rather than break out into something new, and so it was with me and my early fumbling attempts at writing a novel.
And so it was with Wong Kar Wai in 1988 when he released his first movie, As Tears Go By.
As Tears Go By is not a bad movie, but it feels so very different from what the world would come to identify with Wong Kar Wai.
It’s a simple gangster movie, really, and I think you see the growing pains here in this young director. It has style and nerve but it feels like he’s retreading Scorsese’s ground or even trying to find his place in the burgeoning Hong Kong film scene, which was being defined by directors like John Woo.
Wong Kar Wai has much less interest in the action and violence, however. He’s interested in these violent people specifically when they’re not engaging in violence.
In every way, the gang violence feels like an interruption to the narrative rather than the narrative. But there’s also an uneasy relationship between the gangster movie this is and the love story it sometimes wants to be.
As Tears Go By tells the story of Wah, a triad enforcer, who sleeps away most days before coming alive at night. His relationship with women is disastrous as he demands a sort of rootlessness to his life. He is devoted to his “little brothers” which we mostly see through his relationship with Fly.
Fly sucks but we’ve also all had friends like Fly. Friends who actively make our life worse but who we love enough that we can’t help but try to make their life better.
Along the way, Ngor, Wah’s distant cousin, comes to stay with him while she goes to the hospital for some kind of lung illness. Though it seems unlikely, a romance begins to bloom here.
But even as these dueling narratives intersect and interact, they never really fully gel, I think, and so the movie feels continually at war with itself over where the heart of the movie resides.
Is this a story about friendship and loyalty or is this a romance?
I mean, it’s kind of both but also kind of neither, ultimately.
Later, we’ll see how Wong makes a deliberate choice on what kind of story he wants to tell and that choice is why we’re even here talking about him at all.
But it’s interesting to see where this all started. And I know I could have and maybe should have told you all to skip this movie, but I’m the kind of dummy who finds the development of style and artistry as interesting as the ultimate result. It’s why I often try to read authors in publication order or why I even end up diving deep into an artist’s entire oeuvre rather than simply settle for the works consider the best.
But I have to tell you that The Waves is the best Virginia Woolf novel (and by extension the best Modernist novel), but it’s better if you’ve read Jacob’s Room, too, which you would only bother reading if you’ve already hit To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway and Orlando and, well, I mean, you really should just read everything Woolf wrote (more on this someday).
And so As Tears Go By is not the work of an artist at the height of their ability or even the visionary work that will come to define a career, but we see hints of who he will be.
The kinetic movement through Hong Kong at high speed will show best when we get to Chungking Express and the romance will hurt most when we get to Happy Together and In the Mood for Love and the clash of styles and narratives will strike most powerfully at Ashes of Time, but it all began here, in a quick punch of a gangster movie that’s fighting above its weight class, standing on wobbly knees.
Plus, we get Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau and that’s never a bad thing.
Days of Being Wild is next. That essay should go up on March 21st.
It’s another step in the direction of who Wong Kar Wai will become. And it stars Leslie Cheung! Tony Leung makes an appearance!
And it forms a loose (real loose, if you ask me) trilogy with In the Mood for Love and 2046, so it really is a must-see.