Wong Kar-Wai’s Trilogy of Love….

February 20, 2010 (Saturday) 1pm onwards...

(Free Admission)

Days of Being Wild  (Hong Kong, 1990)

Written and Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Cinematography by Christopher Doyle

Running Time: 94 minutes, in Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin, Filipino and English with English subtitles

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu Wai

Synopsis: Set in 1960, the film centres on the young, boyishly handsome Yuddy, who learns from the drunken ex-prostitute who raised him that she is not his real mother. Hoping to hold onto him, she refuses to divulge the name of his real birth mother. The revelation shakes Yuddy to his very core, unleashing a cascade of conflicting emotions. Two women have the bad luck to fall for Yuddy. One is a quiet lass named Su Lizhen who works at a sports arena, while the other is a glitzy showgirl named Mimi. Perhaps due to his unresolved Oedipal issues, he passively lets the two compete for him, unable or unwilling to make a choice. As Lizhen slowly confides her frustration to a cop named Tide, he falls for her. The same is true for Yuddy's friend Zeb, who falls for Mimi. Later, Yuddy learns of his birth mother's whereabouts and heads out to the Philippines.

Awards/Nominations:1991 Hong Kong Film Awards - Won: Best Picture, Best Director (Wong Kar-wai), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography / Nominated: Best Actress (Carina Lau), Best Film Editing, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress); 1991 Asia Pacific Film Festival - Nominated: Best Actor (Leslie Cheung); 1997 Golden Bauhinia Awards - Won: Special Award (Best Hong Kong film of the last 10 years); 2005 Hong Kong Film Awards - Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures (#3), Top 100 Favorite movies of Chinese Cinema (#2)

In The Mood for Love  (Hong Kong, 2000)

Written and Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Cinematography by Christopher Doyle

Running Time: 98 minutes, in Cantonese, Shanghainese, French with English Subtitles

Cast: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu Wai

Synopsis: Set in Hong Kong, 1962, Chow Mo-Wan is a newspaper editor who moves into a new building with his wife. At approximately the same time, Su Li-zhen, a beautiful secretary and her executive husband also move in to the crowded building. With their spouses often away, Chow and Li-zhen spend most of their time together as friends. They have everything in common from noodle shops to martial arts. Soon, they are shocked to discover that their spouses are having an affair. Hurt and angry, they find comfort in their growing friendship even as they resolve not to be like their unfaithful mates.

The film holds the top spot on They Shoot Pictures Don't They list of The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films and the 246th spot on The 1,000 Greatest Films by They Shoot Pictures Don't They. It was ranked 95th on 100 Best Films from 1983 to 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the fifth-best of the decade, calling it the "consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium."

Awards/Nominations: 2000 Cannes Film Festival - Won: Best Actor (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), Technical Grand Prize (Christopher Doyle, Lee Ping-bing, William Chang), Nominated: Palme d'Or; 2001 Hong Kong Film Awards - Won: Best Actor (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), Best Actress (Maggie Cheung), Best Art Direction, Best Costume and Make-up Design, Best Film Editing (William Chang), Nominated: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay, Best New Performer, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score; 2001 Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards - Won: Best Director (Wong Kar-wai), Film of merit; 2002 National Society of Film Critics (USA) - Won: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography; 2001 Cesar Awards - Won: Best Foreign Film; 2001 German Film Awards - Won: Best Foreign Film; 2001 New York Film Critics Circle Awards - Won: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography; 2001 BAFTA Awards - Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film; 2002 Argentinian Film Critics Association Awards - Won: Best Foreign Language Film; 2000 Asia-Pacific Film Festival - Won: Best Cinematography, Best Editing; 2001 Australian Film Institute Awards - Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film; 2001 British Independent Film Awards - Won: Best Foreign Language Film; 2002 Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards - Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film

2046  (Hong Kong, 2004)

Written and Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Cinematography by Christopher Doyle

Running Time: 129 minutes, in Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin with English Subtitles

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Takuya Kimura, Zhang Ziyi, Carina Lau, Chang Chen, Bird Thongchai McIntyre, Dong Jie and Maggie Cheung

Synopsis: He was a writer. He thought he wrote about the future but it really was the past. In his novel, a mysterious train left for 2046 every once in a while. Everyone who went there had the same intention.....to recapture their lost memories. It was said that in 2046, nothing ever changed. Nobody knew for sure if it was true, because nobody who went there had ever come back- except for one. He was there. He chose to leave. He wanted to change.

Awards/Nominations: April 2004, the film was nominated for the Golden Palm at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; November 2004, it won awards for Best Art Direction and Best Original Film Score at the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan; March 2005, it was nominated in numerous categories at the Hong Kong Film Awards, winning Best Actor (Tony Leung), Best Actress (Zhang Ziyi), Best Cinematography (Christopher Doyle), Best Costume Design and Make-Up, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Film Score.

Who is Wong Kar-Wai?

Wong Kar-Wai is an award-winning Hong Kong filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylized films. Wong was listed at number three on the respected Sight & Sound Top Ten Directors list of modern times.

He made his directing debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By, also produced by Alan Tang. A crime melodrama of the kind then hugely popular, it heavily borrowed from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1974), but already displayed one of Wong's principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes expressionistic color palette. It is his only box office hit to date.

His next film, Days of Being Wild (1991), produced by Alan Tang, a drama about aimless youth set in the early 1960s, established his trademark form: elliptically plotted mood pieces, with lush visuals and music, about the burden of memory on melancholy, misfit characters. Days was a box office failure but now regularly tops Hong Kong critics' polls of the best local films ever made. It has been described as a sort of Cantonese Rebel Without a Cause.

He also established his own independent production company, called Jet Tone Films Ltd. in English. His partner in the company is Jeffrey Lau, a director and producer who tends to work closer to the populist vein of mainstream Hong Kong film.

Wong went on to direct several more feature films in the 1990s produced by Jet Tone, which allowed him to work at his own pace. Among these were Chungking Express (1994), which follows the lives of two love-struck cops in Hong Kong and the mysterious women they meet and fall in love with. Originally intended to be a distraction piece for him to get his mind off of the heavily delayed Ashes of Time, it ended up being one of his most popular films, if not the most popular. Fallen Angels (1995), was originally intended to be the third act of Chungking Express, but when the tone didn't fit with the other two parts, he cut it out and made it a standalone movie instead; it is seen as a semi-sequel to Chungking Express as is a neo-noir film about on a disillusioned killer trying to overcome the affections of his partner, a strange drifter looking for her ex-boyfriend, and a mute trying to get the world's attention in his own ways, all set against a sordid and surreal urban nightscape.

Wong's fourth movie, Ashes of Time (1994), released between Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, applied his approach to a star-studded wuxia (martial arts swordplay) story; the desert shoot in Mainland China dragged on for over a year and resulted in one of contemporary Hong Kong cinema's most notorious commercial disasters.

His first major international recognition was at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for Happy Together (1997).[3] A film that "uses gorgeous, saturated images set to an eclectic soundtrack of tango by Argentinian maestro Astor Piazolla, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso and Frank Zappa instrumentals to chronicle the stormy affair of a gay couple living as expatriates in Buenos Aires."

Despite his background as a screenwriter, one of Wong's trademarks as a director is that he works largely through improvisation and experimentation involving the actors and crew rather than adhering to a fixed screenplay. This has been a frequent source of trouble for his actors, his financial backers and many other people connected with his films, including sometimes himself.

The filming of In the Mood for Love (2000) had to be shifted from Beijing to Macau after the China Film Bureau demanded to see the completed script. This was all in all a minor setback in the "very complicated evolution" of the project which goes as far back as 1997. It was Wong's intention to make two films, one of which would be titled Beijing Summer, the plot unclear at the time, but eventually taking form in Macau. Here Wong planned to call it Three Stories About Food, but saw it better to settle for only one story, A Story About Food, that centers on a writer. Together with scenes shot in Bangkok and Angkor Wat, the filming took as long as 15 months. This was an especially arduous time for lead actress Maggie Cheung whose hair and makeup reportedly took a daily five hours, and who appeared in a different cheongsam in each scene. She famously compared the lengthy shoot to a cold she couldn't get rid of. Working without deadlines, the film's upcoming premier at Cannes nonetheless put some pressure on Wong to finish editing. Intending to name the film Secrets he was dissuaded by Cannes, and finally named it In the Mood for Love after Bryan Ferry's cover of the song "I'm in the Mood for Love" he was listening to.

Wong's 2046 (2004), a film about capturing lost memories, was the third chapter of a shared story that began with Days of Being Wild and continued with In the Mood for Love. Infamous for long drawn out shoots without any real regards to deadlines, a running joke amongst the crew was that he would finish in the year 2046.

In 2006, he became the first Chinese director to preside the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

Wong Kar-wai's first full English-language film, My Blueberry Nights, opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of 22 films in competition. The lead, American singer-songwriter Norah Jones, made her acting debut in the film.

Wong Kar-wai was the jury president of the 2008 Shanghai International Film Festival which was held from June 14-22, 2008. 

"There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably happy to hear him breathing at her side......"