Wong Kar Wai again and again and again

>> The Hong Kong auteur's work is highlighted in a trilogy

by WILL AITKEN

The films of Wong Kar Wai are based on the same thing happening over and over again. Today is my birthday and I have received no cards. Wong Kar Wai's movies deal in repetition and reversal. Although it is my birthday I have received no presents. The works of Wong Kar Wai strike repetition's gong ceaselessly. On one's birthday one has so many expectations. It could be said that Wong Kar Wai's fractured narratives play on the re-lived moment and the disappointment of movement without progress. It is my birthday today and I have received many presents although not the ones I had hoped for. Wong Kar Wai's characters ritualize emptiness, making it baroque with repetition and thwarted desire. Today, my birthday, I have received many cards although not the one I was waiting for. In the world of Wong Kar Wai repetition becomes what memory was--repetition remembers forward, memory recedes. It happens every year, my birthday, and each time I am filled anew with anticipatory disappointment. Wong Kar Wai has emphasized that he is "always distressed by the possible outcome" of the things he didn't do. Today I will sing "Happy Birthday" to myself, alone in a darkened room, rehearsing for next year.

Often Wong Kar Wai's films offer two stories not one. Sometimes they run separately: one story, then another. No connection, or maybe only enough connection to be frustrating. Other times the stories race along side by side, but not touching, the one never aware of the other except for the urgent breeze that blows out of nowhere. Sometimes, as in his sixth and most recent film, Happy Together (1997), there's only one story, the one the characters live. Watching their repetitions and disappointments you begin to see the ghost story that overlays all they do--it's the story of the life they meant to live.

Happy Together is one of three films--the most recent half of his output--in the truncated Wong Kar Wai retrospective that begins this week at the Parallèle. Fallen Angels (1995) is the only Montreal premiere in the trio. In the first of the picture's stories, an agent for professional hitmen falls in love with one of the killers she runs. He, a true professional, refuses to mix love with business. In the second story, a mute ex-con makes a living by re-opening stores that have been closed for the night and intimidating customers into buying his wares. Then he meets Cherry, who's just been dumped by her boyfriend.

If Fallen Angels sounds vaguely familiar, it's because it's a spin-off of Chungking Express (1995), Wong Kar Wai's first international arthouse success, which featured a glamourous, trenchcoated hitwoman and a timid snackbar waitress who spends all her time listening to the Mamas and Papas sing "California Dreaming." Happy Together, about a gay couple who can neither live together nor survive apart, won Wong Kar Wai the best director award at Cannes last year. All three films were shot by Chris Doyle, whose bold, smeared images perfectly capture Wong Kar Wai's sense "that most of the time I don't even know where I'm going. Rushing ahead without seeing."

The Wong Kar Wai retrospect opens this Friday, June 5 at the Parallèle. See repertory listings for showtimes