Hong Kong, 1994
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
With Leslie Cheung (Ouyang Feng), Brigitte Lin (Murong Yin/Murong Yang/the Failure-Seeking Woman), Tony Ka Fai Leung (Huang Yao-shi), Tony Leung Chiu-wai (The Half-blind Swordsman), Jacky Cheung (Hung Chi), Maggie Cheung (Feng’s Lover)
The four seasons of a year, a year in the life of Ouyang Feng: this is the time frame of a story set in ancient China. Ouyang Feng has left his home region to put down his roots in a house at the edge of a desert and makes a living as a troubleshooter for the local community and people who feel they need him. His job comes down to make sure whoever is deemed a troublemaker is done away by hiring swordsmen to carry out the desired assassination. He lives on his own, barely gazing the impressive landscape around him but browsing the traditional almanac.
The spring brings to his door a strange man named Murong Yang. He vows to kill a man who failed to marry his sister, Murong Yin, but the troubleshooter realizes the demand has two difficulties: the man is Ouyang Feng’s only friend, Huang Yao-shi, and the sister cannot countenance her brother’s cruelty and wants him to be killed. The outcome of this family clash of wills is the disturbing realization by Ouyang Feng that the brother and the sister are in fact the same person whose insanity eventually drives them to embrace another identity, an errant lady seeking fights and love.
Summertime welcomes a swordsman slowly becoming blind and looking for money to go back to his native land. The contract he signs demands he fights a posse of bandits who are so numerous and so brutal he eventually loses his life in the epic fight.
With autumn another lonesome but younger and less experienced fighter comes. He also fights the bandits, with more success, but at the end chooses to leave the place because he is afraid to look like Ouyang Feng and wants to offer his wife another, better life.
Winter unfolds in stark contrast with the three other parts. No one pays visit to the troubleshooter and actually that section of “Dung che sai duk – Ashes of Time” looks like a walk down the memory lane seemingly starting with a journey to find more about the half-blind swordsman but featuring mainly the woman Ouyang Feng used to love until she instead married his brother, as well as Huang Yao-shi, the good pal who used to be the lady’s confidant, carefully listening to her reminiscences, regrets and sorrows, till she dies out of sadness.
Actually, no summary can properly reflect an intricate narrative involving many supporting characters who make an appearance in the film’s various parts, figures from past and present, close and distant, bobbing over the stream of the seasons and events. The narrative is still firmly centered on Ouyang Feng’s feelings and puts the emphasis on the haunting memories of the lead character. Being obsessed with the past is also the distinctive trait of many other characters, from the half-blind swordsman hoping to see again peach trees (and a wife) to a poor peasant girl keen on avenging her brother, from Huang Yao-shi thinking of his past lovers and friends (a lot which includes the half-blind swordsman) to Ouyang Feng’s lover who refused to marry him but was always thinking about him.
The anecdote that anchors the first sequence, the usual spring meeting between Ouyang Feng and Huang Yao-shi, showcases this narrative thread in a discreet but clever way: Huang Yao-shi brings a gift from a common friend (who turns out to be the woman the troubleshooter vowed to marry), a jar of wine that has the ability to make the drinker forget everything. Would it not be great to forget all one’s past so as to make a fresh start every morning? Ouyang Feng is unconvinced and the winter episode reveals the truth about the wine and the friend in a poignant development highlighting how memories are impossible to cast away and regrets pervade our minds (a fact that Ouyang Feng, as a perfectly hard-headed and cynic man, embraces his own way, by claiming the best way not to be rejected by other people is first to reject them and then by abruptly changing his life a second time, burning his desert house at the end to go back to where he used to be).
A fragmented montage and a carefully worded, first person-based text let the melancholy feelings seep through the successive plots and color this bold take on the wu xia pian genre with a nostalgic and romantic mood rather unexpected for the genre, whose stylistic features are also challenged by the singular environment where the story takes place. Sand and dust, sun and heat, scarcity and cruelty, all these elements give the shots an air of American western plumped down in China’s majestic landscapes, which still retain their magical power (see the recurring images of ripples on the surface of a lake or of people waiting with their feet inside water, fueling a sense of poetry and mystery that has not much to do with a western flick but fits well with Chinese tales). These elements also shaped the cinematography which in turn highlights the distinctive atmosphere and the passions at play: here come wonderfully incandescent images, a stunning yellowish and burning vision of the world that is regularly contrasted with duller images where nevertheless bright lights can suddenly illuminate and dramatize.
Sword fights get a bold but unusual visual stylization, with slow-motion, slightly out of focus shots, images that avoid purposefully to be clear and pristine. In another departure both from the rest of the film’s narration and from many films of the kind, they are actually bewildering brushstrokes with an eerie abstract quality. The wu xia pian director Wong Kar-wai is making feels like a riff on a genre allowing him to explore further personal themes that appear in his other films, especially “A fei zheng chuan – Days of Being Wild” (1990), and stands out as an unorthodox and beautiful feature, where swordplay is transcended by lyricism as deeply emotional characters get lost in landscapes and images that look like so excitingly unparalleled. It was not really loved by the audience when it was first released but Wong remained attached to “Dung che sai duk – Ashes of Time” and even made a redux version fourteen years later, in 2008 (this is the version reviewed here).