In the Mood for Love: New Standards in Asian Cinema

by Tyler Ruggeri
Emerson College

In recent years of American cinema, audiences have generally depended on one or two new artists per year to break the mold and present the public with something so new and fresh it can barely be linked to a predecessor. Last year, the culprit was probably Todd Field, whose In the Bedroom defied dramatic convention and made for the most realistic and probing movie of the year. However, while Americans yearn for a few good prodigies to come along and change the face of American cinema, a small revolution has been going on in Asia for nearly four years. Since the beginning of the new century, Asian filmmakers have been presenting work that surpasses anything Americans have done in at least the last half-decade.

Despite the success of the American-marketable Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Asian films have been widely ignored in the mainstream for years. These new films are inventive and artistically challenging, and require as much an eye for detail as a patience for subtitles. Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, released and moderately successful in the US in 2001 (and issued on a gorgeous Criterion Collection DVD), is the benchmark of this new sensation. Wang tells the story of two neighbors, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, who in 1960s Hong Kong, discover their spouses are having an affair. The two try and trace the beginnings of the affair and find themselves hopelessly linked with each other, lost in a wordless frenzy of loneliness and hopeless abandon.

In the Mood for Love is one of those revelatory experiences at the cinema, the kind where audiences watch the flicker of images on the screen and realize that with the shutter of the projector opening and closing twenty-four times per second, they spend half of their time at the movies in the dark. Each image is worthy of a picture frame, and the small physical intonations of the characters mean more than any line of dialogue (however, the title cards at the beginning and end of the film are not to be missed). Wong tells a story almost entirely through images of lush reds and deep hues, of glances exchanged and hands held, and experiences wasted. It is as knowledgeable in the ways of forbidden courtship as the cultural and political tumult of Hong Kong in the 1960s. In a way, this is Wong’ s Manhattan, a tribute to the city he loves in a time that is no more. It is more genuinely erotic than anything in Fatal Attraction, and acquires its sensuality through the abundance, rather than lack, of clothing. As Mrs. Chan, Maggie Cheung’s hourglass-shaped dresses cling to her like the moral standards imposed on her by a misunderstanding society. Tony Leung plays Mr. Chow with the kind of heavy eyelids and chic despair that invoke only one performance: Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. The soundtrack plays everything from archival Chinese recordings of the period to the cool rhythm of Nat King Cole singing in Spanish. At the end of the film, which climaxes in a gorgeous visual tour of the Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia, the viewer feels dizzy with the breathless spirit of the present and the regretful foreboding of the past.In contrast to Wong’s stylized visuals, Edward Yang presents an entirely naturalistic slice of life in Yi-Yi (A One and a Two), in a style that ironically brings to mind Field’s In the Bed-room. His film (completely intimate, but at epic three hours in length) focuses on a Taipei family over the course of a year and the mortal issues they encounter. The entire film is focused on aspects of life. It begins with a wedding and closes with a funeral. In between, it runs the gamut of every emotion from sweetness to failure, the reassuring appearance of a lost love to the heartbreak of teenage romanticism, silly superstitions to violent acts. Many of the new Asian directors let the camera linger on their subjects, provoking reactions never seen in a normal Hollywood take. Yang often photographs his characters from outside looking in through a window, with passersbys or city buildings reflecting on the glass over the subject. There is always life moving in and out of the frame, leaving the subject freeze-framed in the middle, wallowing in a brief moment of experience before moving on to the next inevitable mortality. (Another lingerer, Tsai Ming-liang, combines the static style of Yang with the deep color of Wong in his What Time Is It There?, a stylized yet real visual experience). The director’s alter ego in Yi-Yi, the aptly named Yang-Yang, is an eight-year-old boy with an eager fascination with cameras and capturing the point of view of others. His presence in the final scene encompasses all of the experience the audience has had with the characters thus far, and his uttering of the final line is nothing short of extraordinary. With this, Yang’s knowledge of the subtler aspects of existence and his intuitive shaping of visual convention elevates Yi-Yi to the uniqueness and expressiveness of his modern Asian counterparts.

While the Chinese and Taiwanese have focused mostly on internal exper-iences and the emotional complexities of life, Japanese directors have gone the opposite way, making extremely graphic and external films about pain and violence. One of them, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, will probably never be seen commercially in America. While obtainable on cheap DVD imports and VCDs, Battle Royale’s subject matter keeps it from the interest of any American distributor. It concerns a futuristic Japan in which middle school-age children are confined on an island to fight to the death until all of them are killed. As such, it is less than likely that any American film company in the modern age would distribute such a work. But in spite of one semi-ridiculous plot element at the end, Battle Royale is a more daring and innovative thriller than this year’s American darling, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. It depicts an Orwellian world in which adults attempt to suppress children by shocking them into submission through death and brutality on an island “playground.” The children are each given a weapon and must kill each other until only one is left standing. The game is no-holds-barred and permits any kind of physical aggression necessary. Naturally, Fukasaku’s film is extremely violent, one of the most desensitizing and brutal to come along in years. The actors playing the adolescents are of that age, unlike American films, which often commission twenty-somethings to play teenagers. The killings are graphic, real, and appropriately creative. There are even touches of dark humor, as when one child is given a pot lid as a weapon against a sea of Uzis and bushido blades. Twists and turns are provided along the way for added adventure, but the violence is more jarringly disturbing than Tarantino-cool. One amazing set piece involves a clique of girls taking in an injured boy. Their attempt to poison the boy leaves the entire group dead. With Battle Royale, Fukasaku pulls no punches in depicting the brutality of the deaths with the knowing resonance of their senselessness.Another Japanese filmmaker pushing the envelope in terms of gore and exhibition is Takashi Miike. His film Audition, Audition is mostly a calm, reflective film, taking a turn in its final half hour that makes it an indescribably painful viewing experience that even the least-nauseated viewer is unlikely to forget. It begins as an amiable mid-life romance, as a widower played by Ryo Ishibashi holds a fake audition for a TV series to find a potential second wife. His choice, the sweet and submissive Asami, falls for his grayish good looks and proves to be good spousal material. That is of course until she is revealed to be as psychotic as the spawn of Norman Bates of Psycho and Annie Wilkes of Misery. The climactic torture sequence is as sickening and perverse as anything John Waters and Marilyn Manson could come up with if only they put their heads together. The trick of Audition is how easygoing and natural its first ninety minutes are. The blossoming romance between the widower and Asami is genuinely sweet, despite a few nudges at the darkness of her past. When Asami reveals her true nature, the film turns into a betrayal, a shocking revolution and a slap in the face to the involved audience. Miike’s film turns all expectations around and ravages the viewer again and again, until they consider the true nature of the film and, ultimately, of themselves. Just when Audition could not be more surprising or abhorrent, it is. Miike takes the audiences back and forth and back again during the final act (those looking for details will have to see for themselves), leaving the kind of permanent stain that tells a person they have seen a truly affecting film.

The final significant Asian import belongs in a category all by itself. It is Chunhyang, South Korean director Im Kwon Tack’s masterful and unique adaptation of a national folk legend about the son of a governor who falls for a courtesan’s daughter. What makes Chunhyang so unusual is its framing of the tale with the device of pansori, South Korea’s most common form of oral storytelling. A pansori performer stands on a stage in front of an audience screaming and contorting his voice to tell the story with great emphasis. This makes for either an alienating or enlightening experience for a film audience, as Im often cuts between the storyteller and the story itself. The first five minutes of the film, which feature only the pansori narrator, are intentionally not subtitled, so that the audience may get a feel for the style before having to pay attention to what the speaker is saying. Throughout the film, his voice stretches and moans in uncomfortable fashions that may prove equally uncomfortable for the filmgoer. Nevertheless, this proves for a rare cultural experience that cannot be had in any other film in the history of cinema. The love story of Chunhyang is simply but eloquently told, and Im’s pleasant visuals contribute greatly to the mood of the piece, softening the sometimes harsh tones of the pansori speaker’s contorted voice. When noble son Mongryong first sees the young Chunhyang from a distance, the aesthetics, characters, and unorthodox narration combine to produce a new kind of effect molded from ancient traditions and new-world style. Chunhyang’s greatness does not equal that of other “new Asian” films such as In the Mood for Love, but it is more than substantial in exposing an audience to other forms of storytelling with which they may not be familiar.

These films signify an emerging trend in world film, a move towards new approaches and feelings evoked from traditional yet modem themes in cinematic storytelling. While other nationalities such as the French (Amelie), Mexican (Y Tu Mama Tambien), and Australian (Lantana) have made worthwhile and challenging films over the past few years, Asians have the market cornered on thoughtful, artistic cinema that strives to convey more than what is on the surface. The work they have done will hopefully open up the art of film to future generations and inspire more filmmakers to create works that are emotionally and humanly relevant to society.