PROOF Contents Introduction 1 Part I Time and Memory 1 Post-nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046 21 2 Cinematic Remembrances: Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung 43 3 Allegory, Kinship, and Redemption: Fu Bo and Isabella 66 Part II Schizophrenia, Amnesia, and Cinephilia 4 Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Johnnie To’s Urban Legends 87 5 The Kung Fu Hero in the Digital Age: Stephen Chow’s ‘Glocal’ Strategies 117 6 Karmic Redemption: Memory and Schizophrenia in Hong Kong Action Films 138 Part III In and Out 7 Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)Locating the China Imaginary 163 8 Outside the Nation: The Pan-Asian Trajectory of Applause Pictures 184 The Hong Kong Multiplex: An Unfolding Narrative 211 Notes 218 Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary 236 Bibliography 242 Index 250 vii PROOF 1 Post-nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046 Wong Kar-wai is probably the most rigorously studied auteur from Hong Kong. Described by Tony Rayns as a ‘poet of time’,1 Wong has been under considerable critical spotlight ever since his 1988 debut, As Tears Go By, and his name has become synonymous with Hong Kong’s auteur cinema in critical circles worldwide. With a collection of ten features to date, Wong has been the subject of three book-length studies in English, two monographs and numerous critical essays, not to say regu- lar reviews in printed and electronic media in different languages.2 This proliferation of writings on Wong testifies to his status as an auteur of Hong Kong cinema and world cinema as a whole. Peter Brunette, for example, sees in Wong’s films the ‘future of cinema’, while Ackbar Abbas, writing more than a decade ago, already gave credit to Wong’s idiosyncratic rewriting/destabilizing of genre that makes him a repre- sentative ‘Hong Kong filmmaker’.3 Wong’s credentials as Hong Kong’s unique ‘auteur of time’ are convincingly argued in Stephen Teo’s study on Wong, from his early stints as a television script-writer to his latest Chinese-language film, 2046 (2004). Teo’s book contextualizes Wong’s work within the Hong Kong film and television industries, noting the multiple influences from local genre films, Western cinematic tradi- tions, and in particular Chinese and Latin American literature.4 Shelly Kraicer, commenting on Brunette’s and Teo’s works, notes that while Wong’s films are no doubt amenable to the ‘internationalist’ approach of (art) film studies (c.f. Brunette), the richness and complexity of Wong’s cinema, and by extension much of Hong Kong cinema, cannot be fully grasped without accounting for the historical context from which Wong’s films emerge, both as a continuation of the genre-steeped tra- dition and as a departure from it.5 Wong’s background as a television script writer and his continuous involvement in commercial projects 21 PROOF 22 Time and Memory speak volumes about the blurry line between arthouse and commercial cinema in Hong Kong. Indeed, Wong’s career path shares a lot in com- mon with the Hong Kong New Wave, whose emergence in the early 1980s formally (and formalistically) gave birth to what Kraicer calls a ‘home-grown authentic genre’ that co-existed side-by-side with artistic melodrama, satirical comedy, and political commentary.6 These varied interpretations underscore the mutual embeddedness of local sensibilities and ‘internationalist’ aesthetics in Wong’s work. From the early films to the latest, the perennial themes of frustrated love, time, memory, and nostalgia have sustained a haunting presence in Wong’s cinematic imagination. His postmodernist aesthetics—the frag- mentation of time, memory, and narrative structure, and the emotional intensity invested in the cinematic image that frequently jettisons story- telling—is nonetheless traceable to an urban sensibility nurtured by the experience of growing up in a colonial city which ‘is not so much a place as a space of transit’.7 In Wong’s films, his fascination with the urban landscape is manifest in stunningly original images in which the city mutates in a fascinating variety of tones and textures, his charac- ters embodiments of the lost or displaced affect trying to reconnect past and present in a labyrinthine urban dreamscape in which they are per- petually caught. No doubt these qualities have global resonances (albeit mainly in arthouse circuits), but it is also true that this globality has a local origin: the time-bound specifics of colonial history, and the end of that history in 1997. Intensely personal and yet subtly allegorical, Wong’s films bear the imprint of the anxieties and disorientation of the (ex-)colonial city trying to come to terms with its identity, or lack of one thereof, at a critical historical juncture. In this way they also epitomize the cinema of Hong Kong, and perhaps Hong Kong itself, as a point of intersection, between global currents and local realities, city and nation, ‘high art’ and popular culture, affections and disaffections, memory and the loss of memory. In Wong’s films, one sees a creative symbiosis of local subject matter and a ‘universal’ film style that nonetheless borrows heavily from local genre films. Among the perennial themes of time, memory, and the imperma- nence of human relations, time is always the central obsession and propellant of the main action, or more frequently action-as-stasis. From the young rebel Yuddy in Days of Being Wild to the nameless lovelorn cops in Chungking Express to the melancholy middle-aged swordsman Ouyang Feng in Ashes of Time, to name a few, Wong’s characters indulge themselves in obsessive reveries as an alternative to living in the present. This nostalgic impulse is present in much of Wong’s work, in which PROOF Post-nostalgia 23 time is deliberately fragmented into blurry images so that time itself becomes an expression and agent of subjectivity in its most vulnerable and fluid form. While these motifs are always interlocked and hardly exist in isolation in Wong’s filmic universe, in his more recent films nostalgia assumes more intriguing properties. In the Mood for Love and 2046, Stephen Teo points out, form a trilogy of ‘nostalgia films’ about the 1960s together with Days of Being Wild.8 While nostalgia is the defin- ing ‘mood’ in these films, nostalgia also stands on its own as a subject, as the film self-reflexively contemplates the nature of its own nostalgia, which in turn is woven into the broader cultural imagination of the local in the post-1997 era. In the last two nostalgia films, Wong’s inter- rogation of generic modes, this time the wenyipian (or roughly called Chinese melodrama), takes the form of a profusion of signs, colours, and objects that constitute a certain ‘period code’ through which nostalgia is powerfully evoked in the film image. If, in his earlier films, the study of genre involves ‘destabilizing the clichés’,9 that is, a playful distortion of conventions to obtain a ‘new practice of the image’, I argue that Wong’s cinematic re-creations of 1960s Hong Kong in Mood and 2046 extends this deconstructive impulse and turns nostalgia into a field of interrogation by an aesthetic of visual indulgence, a strategy that works to critique the nostalgic as a predica- ment of the present. Situating Wong’s films within the cultural nostalgia that has swept through Hong Kong and parts of China in the 1990s, the rest of this chapter will show how this critique undercuts not only the characters’ indulgence in time past, but also the nostalgic desire aroused in the audience by the carefully designed mise-en-scène, char- acterization, and cinematography. I propose to read Wong’s films less as ‘nostalgia films’ than as ‘films about nostalgia’, in the sense that they recast the nostalgic within an original film medium that goes beyond the nostalgic. In this respect, the post-nostalgic imagination in Mood and 2046 provides a vantage point to approach Wong’s ongoing dialogue with the local cultural imagination oftentimes couched in an interna- tionalist cinematic form. The rich and tantalizing visual texture of the two films, moreover, serves as a prologue to the discussion of inter- textuality and self-referentiality in the production of the local in the following chapters. Nostalgia in 1990s Hong Kong films Prior to the handover, Hong Kong filmmakers sought to capture the elu- sive, fin-de-siècle qualities of the colonial city. The distinctive texture PROOF 24 Time and Memory of the city as a fluid, mutant, dizzying postmodern space is the hall- mark of Wong Kar-wai’s films, in which identities and subjectivities are in a constant flux. In Chungking Express/Chongqing senlin (1993) and Days of Being Wild/A fei zhengzhuan (1990), for instance, repeated ref- erences to specific dates and times heighten the tension between the characters’ desire to hold on to their memories and their subconscious fear/anxiety of remembering. As a ‘poet of time’ and Hong Kong auteur, Wong is also a ‘director-flaneur’ fascinated by the complex and problem- atic global space of Hong Kong.10 History, in Wong’s cinema, is situated within the fissure of remembering and forgetting, or exists in a void that annihilates all effort to locate time.11 Sometimes classified under the ‘second wave’ of the Hong Kong New Wave, Wong’s thematic pref- erences are traceable in the works of his immediate predecessors in the 1980s, in whose works new interpretations are given to the past/present, nation/city dynamics; for instance, Tsui Hark (the Once Upon a Time in China series), Ann Hui (Song of the Exile, 1990), and Yim Ho (Homecom- ing, 1984), and fellow ‘second wave’ director, Stanley Kwan (Rouge, 1987; Center Stage, 1992).