Ashes of Time Redux

Wong Kar Wai is to "unrequited love" as Alfred Hitchcock is to "the wrong man."

Kar Wai is extremely consistent thematically thoughout his body of work, but also consistently innovative and different in the way he tackles his recurring themes. It's like he's telling the same story from many different angles, perspectives, contexts and points of reference as he can. In this case we have a film he made in 1994 about swordsman, bandits, jilted lovers, revenge, regret, and most importantly; time.

I was stoked to see that Samo Hung was the man responsible for the fight choreography. He's a talented actor, director, and choreographer, responsible for many of Jackie Chan's Golden Harvest production films. That's his fucking golden age, man. Anyway, there was a decent amount of swordplay and even a little magic thrown in, but Kar Wai treated a lot of the fight scenes to make them look almost comic book like. He doesn't do anything straight-forward, and that's quite alright.

The Redux version of this film actually came out in 2008. To cut a long story short, Kar Wai needed to restore the original masters after the company who housed them went bankrupt. Upon seeing the state of the masters it turned out they needed to more than a simple restoration. So Kar Wai had Yo-Yo Ma cut a new score, and re-did some of the other audio that had degenerated over the years. I think he monkeyed with the editing a bit, too, but it wasn't a radical change. I haven't seen the 94 version so I don't know the true extent of the changes, but I don't think they were huge.

Of course, Chris Doyle was the cinematographer tapped for this film and it has his signature (amazing) look. Sometimes I really don't know where Kar Wai would be without Doyle. He's so integral to making a Wong Kar Wai film come across as a Wong Kar Wai film. But this had a different avant garde approach to the cinematography at times. I felt like you were looking at a hand-tinted painting of the dessert, rather than a photographed image of the dessert. It was weird. But it's all good.

The story was twisty, and even though the characters are sort of introduced one at a time and their stories are told individually, they start to overlap as the movie goes on. You start piecing together who they are and how they're related. It's slightly complicated but I didn't get totally lost.

Visually it was great, it's got my favorite theme for any story, and the acting was top notch. But I can't recommend this film. I think there are more accessible Kar Wai films to get into first before you watch this. It's a strong film and it has its place as part of Kar Wai's oeuvre, but there's probably a reason it didn't receive instant critical acclaim like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love. It's a film for nerds who like to wallow in the agony of lost love. I dug it.