Wong Kar Wai - Ashes of Time
or, the disaster I love
Catch up with me:
Imagine a big budget action blockbuster based on one of the most popular books in the world with a cast of beautiful rising stars in Hollywood directed by an indie darling and rising star ready to breakout and become the biggest filmmaker in the world.
And then imagine that, instead of an action epic, you get a deeply introspective film that subverts the source material and offers no big action setpieces, where much of the film, instead, is shot in cramped rooms where people talk about lost love.
That’s Ashes of Time.
It was a colossal failure, giving fans, audiences, and critics nothing that they wanted or signed up for.
I love it.
It probably would have ended Wong Kar Wai’s career had he not filmed and released Chungking Express between shooting and editing Ashes of Time.
By all accounts, the shooting of the film was a disaster, going overlong and with Wong seemingly losing control or having little control of his own vision.
The original prints were also lost for this, which caused Wong to recut and reassemble to movie from what remained, which is why the one available to you, should you choose to watch it, is Ashes of Time: Redux.
This is what happens without preservationists, by the way.
I managed to see the original ten years ago through digital piracy. I’m sure yo can still find the original print, but the version I watched this time was Redux.
It does address many of the problems viewers and critics had with regard to following the plot. It’s not an overly difficult film to follow, but it’s also not something you can passively watch and know what’s going on. The film is elliptical and moody, less interested in its plot than in the sensation of letting this wash over and through you.
The youths would call this a vibe but I’m old so I call it something dumb like—I don’t know—my soul.
When I originally watched this, I didn’t know it was based on The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong1 because I’d never heard of that, despite it being one of the bestselling series of all time. Of course, all those sales are in East Asia so I’ll forgive myself, especially since the English translation I did finally read didn’t come out until a few years ago.
It’s real good.
But it is so distinctly different than what we get in Ashes of Time that it’s no wonder audiences were perplexed and maybe even angry about what they got.
Where The Legend of the Condor Heroes is epic in scope and ranging in tone from slapstick comedy to philosophical to romance to action adventure, Ashes of Time has only one register: somber melancholy.
I mean, there are a few moments of humor, but this is a sad movie about sad swordmasters.
I love it.
But let’s talk about the plot a bit:
Ouyang Feng—the antagonist of The Legend of the Condor Heroes—is the central character here. He lives in the desert and is visited by a sequence of great warriors who stay for a time before heading off.
Two of these warriors go on to become important characters in The Legend of the Condor Heroes, with a few mentioned as great warriors of the past.
All these great warriors have holes in them. They’re all seeking something. Call it meaning or love, but they all have great regrets and big desires, and these two twist inside them.
Lost loves. Brutal pasts. The desire for greatness. The longing for love, for a return to the past that they can never have.
Structurally, the plot is somewhat accidental. Someone shows up with a problem. They stay with Ouyang Feng for a time, who does nothing to attempt to solve their problem, and then they depart, either by dying or forgetting or choosing to change their life.
But Ouyang Feng is the single constant and he is stuck in the middle of the desert, unable to deal with his regret.
The harder you try to forget something, the more it’ll stick in your memory.
Ouyang has lost his love. He lost her because he never told her that he loved her. Yes, she knew, but she needed to hear him say it, needed to have him give himself to her.
But he didn’t, until the night before her wedding when he tried to convince her to run away with him.
But he was too late. She married and he left to nurse his hurts and regrets in the desert. He could not give up his desire to be a great warrior, and so he lost everything but his ability to fight. And in time, he would be a legendary warrior, a villain, known as Western Venom.
His friend Huang Yaoshi—who would one day be known as Eastern Heretic—visits him every spring. What he does not tell Ouyang Feng is that, on the way to him, he visits that woman Ouyang Feng once loved.
At the beginning of the movie, Huang Yaoshi bring a magical wine that makes the drinker forget. It was a gift for Ouyang Feng from his former lover, though Ouyang Feng never knows this. He refuses to drink the wine, but Huang Yaoshi spends most of the movie drinking it, forgetting.
Because of this, that visit was the final one.
He has forgotten Ouyang Feng.
Ouyang Feng, while waiting for Huang Yaoshi, receives a letter telling him that his former lover has died. Only then does he try to drink the forgetting wine, but it only makes him remember her stronger.
He then burns down his desert home and leaves.
And that’s that!
It’s melancholic and tragic and beautifully shot, but it’s also a very strange and elusive movie. When I was a younger, sadder boy dreaming of greatness and nursing my own hurts and regrets, it touched me deeply.
It touched me last night when I watched it again.
My own obsession with memory, with my ghosts haunting me, make me an obvious target for this kind of story, so I can’t really say that this will work well for you, but I found it beautiful both times.
And it is difficult to follow for those not immediately drawn in. Full of visions and illusions, memories and blurs of streaking action. The violence is painted with a wide brush rather than with fine detail. The suggestion of movement, of combat, of violence rather than the steady eye one might expect in a movie billed as an action movie based on a book perhaps best known for its fighting.
But I actually think, in a very specific way, this is an excellent reflection of the source material, which is often far more interested in its character’s inner life than in their fighting.
The book is massive and long—in English, stretching over four 500-page volumes—but most of that length is all characters talking and hanging out and doing character type things. The fighting is not the focus of the novel, but the occasional interruptions to the real narrative.
Even the epic showdown that all of those pages lead to is not really what you might expect once you get there.
It’s a book that subverts itself and its readers expectations almost constantly, and so I, personally, find it fitting that Wong made a movie that subverts what we think we know about three of its most important characters. Too, it makes sense for the action to be infrequent and difficult to follow, because all of that is an interruption.
It shouldn’t be the focus of the movie.
If anything, the problem with Ashes of Time as an adaptation or reflection of its source material is that it is rarely funny, because Jin Yong is often hilarious.
But this is a movie about heartbreak and regret and loss.
My favorite kind.
Next month we’re doing Fallen Angels, Wong Kar Wai’s return to noir. Full disclosure: I did not like this one when I watched it fifteen years ago and so it remains the one I’ve never revisited. We’ll see how I feel this time.
As always, I’d greatly appreciate you checking out Colony Collapse and reviewing it! And then my own love for Howl deserves more attention, so give it a read and a review.
I have stories and essays coming out in a few anthologies this summer, but I’ll point you towards those once they’re out.
Also, as a reminder, the first chapter of my serialized novel Emrys the Fool came out last week. The second chapter comes out tomorrow, though it’s only available for paying subscribers right away.
It will unlock in two weeks for everyone.
Also, I discussed this a bit a few weeks ago, but I’m finally recording a different serialized story for my son about a young boy named Carrot who becomes a pirate. I may eventually release these here as well.
I mean, it’s being written for a four year old so, um, adjust your expectations accordingly, but I think it’s pretty fun!
And now for some free books:
I will eventually write something about this series. Maybe I’ll read it again first, though.
Thank you for this very informative take. I actually had no idea that it was based on/served as a prequel to a novel!
'Ashes of Time' is a movie I first saw in film school on a not-so-great DVD copy.
To my regret, I fell asleep during the showing and woke up intermittently during it. I certainly remember a cool yet really weird action scene where a lone swordsman seemed to battle an army of enemies in artsy slow-motion. I appreciated the movie far more when I saw the Redux version on DVD a few years later, by which point my aesthetic taste was far more refined. (And if I'm correct, that action scene was actually cut from the new edition!)
I want to add a slight correction: Kar Wai didn't recut the movie solely because the original prints were not preserved. His interviews and statements indicate that he was interested in revisiting the film in part because there were extended distributor-created cuts out there that he did not approve and he didn't feel the film was finished or in a fixed form. So, he didn't set out initially to reconstruct the original theatrical cut, but rather to indeed create a new 'definitive' cut.
See: his original statement in 2008 (https://emanuellevy.com/interviews/ashes-of-time-redux-wong-kar-wais-motives-for-restoration-3/) and an interview with CHUD.com (https://chud.com/16553/exclusive-interview-wong-kar-wai-ashes-of-time-redux/)