Imagine having had as impeccable a cinematic run as filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. In the ’90s up through the beginning of the aughts, the Chinese auteur delivered “As Tears Go By,” “Chungking Express,” “The Days Of Being Wild,” “Ashes Of Time,” “Fallen Angels,” “Happy Together” and, the peak of it all, “In the Mood For Love.” The unlikely mesmerizing sci-fi sequel “2046” followed in 2004, but it’s been a bumpy, uneven road since then.
2007’s misbegotten English-language debut “My Blueberry Nights” played like an uninspired greatest hits, and “The Grandmaster,” a kung-fu action epic starring Ziyi Zhang, featured astounding visuals but a convoluted and unmemorable story. Reviews of both were mixed at best and it didn’t help that even Kar-Wai’s longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle suggested the director had been spinning his wheels and repeating himself. “You do realize that you have basically said what you needed to say, so why say more? I think you have to move on,” he told the Guardian a few years back. Yikes.
The filmmaker hasn’t left feature-length moviemaking behind because his next film will be an adaptation of Jin Yuchen’s novel “Blossoms.” According to outlet Ming Pao (via Coconuts), Wong says the film will tie into “in The Mood For Love” and “2046” to form a trilogy. “I’ve filmed a lot in Hong Kong. I’m from Shanghai, and I’ve never filmed in Shanghai, so I wanted to give it a try,” Wong said.
IndieWire describes the plot as “[following] the lives of Shanghai residents from the end of China’s Cultural Revolution in the early ‘60s through the end of the 20th century, with some scenes set in San Francisco.” The director further elaborated his personal connection to that film, saying, “Shanghai is my hometown and the time that the book describes is the time of my absence from Hong Kong because I went to Hong Kong when I was 19, in ’63, I hadn’t been back to Shanghai until the early nineties. This is my opportunity for me to fill in all the things that I have missed.”
Without Doyle shooting these films I do wonder how the filmmaker will deal with that immeasurable loss. Wong Kar-Wai just hasn’t been the same since Doyle decided to stop working with him. In a way, the critical success of their ‘90s and ‘00s films were very much due in part to the iconic cinematography.
I briefly mentioned Ben Affleck's "Animals" yesterday, but I need to get more into it, because this thing, now streaming on Netflix, is one of the most baffling efforts I've seen from a serious director in a long time.