Let's focus on Wong produced and Jeff Lau directed A Chinese Odyssey 2002. This film contains indeed many typical Wong Kar-wai's themes, which  are probably more obvious here than in any of the films he's directed himself.

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A lot has been written about Wong Kar-wai, the most internationally well-known Chinese director, side-by-side with Zhang Yimou. A critical essay concerning the whole of a director's work tends to be based on the "auteur theory", isolating common themes and imagery on a given filmography, something that generates some difficulties on critics that try to analyse the films of people that always try to reinvent themselves, like Takeshi Kitano. Wong has also varying his approach on cinema, making contemporary and period pieces, gangster films or drama. But this labelling is a mere abstraction, since "genre" has no relevance concerning this director's oeuvre.

Wong makes love stories shot in unconventional ways. One common theme on his work is the failure of his characters to take the appropriate action at the "right moment". The missed opportunity can be forever regret and that's where an apparent obsession with Time is born. Time can't be stopped. People and opportunities may pass by us like a train that only stops for some seconds; if we miss it, we might not be able to get in again. This is illustrated by the close ups of clocks or by the way some characters feel the passing of time, like Takeshi Kaneshiro's character on Chungking Express, obsessed with validity terms on cans of food, or taking note of the precise time, to the second, of an important event on his live.

Instead of travelling across Wong Kar-wai's films and identifying the different ways in which his themes are developed, we will instead focus on Jeff Lau Chun-wai's A Chinese Odyssey 2002, arguing that this film is, in many ways, more characteristically a Wong film than the films he himself directed.

Chinese Odyssey 2002
A Chinese Odyssey 2002 (2002) is, at its starting point, a silly, nonsense comedy ('mo lei-tau') made for the lucrative Chinese New Year season, a period when families go to theatres to watch something "fun" and "light". The film shoots in all directions, and has a lot of humour that will require some open-mindness, if you're not used to silly comedies (of course, if you're a Stephen Chow fan, you're used to much worse), and spoofs Ashes of Time, as Eagle Shooting Heroes, also directed by Lau and produced by Wong. Later, the film walks another path, while assimilating the plot from several classic Huangmei Opera films, with the added bonus of a couple of folk songs with a modern approach, ending on a more dramatic note. But we soon understand that the film is not merely making fun of Wong Kar-wai's films, with similar characters or the resource to an intense use of the voice-over to express their inner trouble, but is, in fact, developing some of his themes and pushing them far, something which is helped by the sort no-limits no-holds-barred kind of narrative, that this type of films allows. It should be obvious, for anyone that knows his work well, that Wong was more than a producer watching from afar. For some, the film would appear to be unbalanced, switching tone abruptly, but that's something not exactly rare on a certain Asian cinema directed to the masses, trying to give something for everyone. It requires talent to be able to deal with the material in a way that makes it work, so that the viewer would laugh along the way but would still be able to fell moved (well, a bit, at least) at the end.

Identity
In this film, Wong's concept of "becoming the other" is taken further and this is illustrated both on a lighter note, on the first part of the film, and with a darker tone, when we enter a more dramatic realm, and Princess Wushuang (Faye Wang Fei) is on a state that borders insanity. The narrative is pretty much based on identity issues, starting with emperors and princesses that disguise themselves as commoners (the narrative core of The Kingdom and the Beauty, 1959). Another level is added with gender-bending, with Wang Fei in men's clothes - and failing miserably to convince anyone, but that's part of the joke. Of course, this is not rare on Chinese cinema, but here the reference is another Huangmei diao film, The Love Eterne (1962), from where the segment in which Yingtai is trying to hint he's actually a girl is adapted into the song "Zui Yi Chang".

On Lau's film we have the reuniting of one of the couples from Chungking Express (1994), Wang Fei and Tony Leung Chiu-wai , but the identity theme is also present on the character of Fengjian or Phoenix (Vicky Zhao Wei), on a somewhat inverted way, since she starts dressed as a man, because, well, she feels lonely and longs for one, but no-one gets near her because their fear her "crazy" brother, and starts gradually recovering her feminine ways when she fells in love for Yilong's friend, unknowingly he's a she. Maybe this is not as "inverted" as we said; after all, even though Fengjian doesn't know it, she's in love with another girl, so she'd be in fact "becoming" her (Wushuang) true (feminine) self. As for Wang's character, it's not when she longs for Yilong that she starts to absorb his identity but when she faces a situation where she thinks she can't be with him. And there she is, roaming around a tree, raving mad, and reproducing his dialogues from earlier in the film.

The concept of identity is developed on a different way on Chungking Express and Fallen Angels (1995), where we're more near straight quests for love, with characters travelling on the direction of others too much immersed on their own worlds to be able to acknowledge they’re on a receiving hand of those feelings, but we probably only enter on the level of a true "identity crisis" on A Chinese Odyssey 2002, where a character in love starts gradually "becoming the other" – her loved one.

The only one under Heaven
A Chinese Odyssey 2002 highlights another aspect of Wong Kar-wai's cinema: the relation with the "right person", a common item on conventional love stories. Here the concept is quite in-your-face, starting with the film's title ("Tianxia Wushuang", in Mandarin) and Wang Fei's character name: Wushuang means "unique", "without match". A literal translation for the film title could be something like "the only one under Heaven", though it can also have a more wuxia-like meaning of "undefeatable". The rings, used near the end, as a way to test Yilong’s self-confidence and to express that pure feelings come from the inside, and a "perfect match" shouldn’t rely on anything exterior to the couple, are also called "Tianxia Wushuang" (translated, on a slightly more focused way, by "Unique Destiny Rings").

The quest or longing for the fulfilment of the romantic ideal is present on all central characters in Wong's films, with the exception of Days of Being Wild, whose protagonist is not in search of his "true love", but of his mother and identity. This, of course, wouldn't be exactly that way, if we'd prefer to centre our attention on Maggie Cheung character, taking the film as the first part of In the Mood For Love, with the young Lizhen losing her way before meeting Chen (Tony Leung's character only appears briefly in the end).

 

Written by Luis Canau, 22/09/2003

-On the writer:
Luis Canau has been writing on films since 1997 for his Portuguese website Cinedie. In the end of 2002 he created a site focused on Asian cinema (Cinedie Asia in Portuguese with some bits in English).
He currently contributes for the monthly Portuguese magazine DVD-Review (since January), where, besides regular reviews, he writes a column about Asian films. Luis likes the dynamism and inventiveness of a certain Hong Kong cinema, even if that's hard to find on current productions.

-Read another review by Thomas Podvin:
Chinese Odyssey 2002 review in Best of 2002 film feature

 

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