Ashes of Time (1994)
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai
Ouyang Feng is a heartbroken and cynical man who spends his days in the desert, connecting expert swordsmen with those seeking revenge and willing to pay for it. Throughout five seasons in exile, Ouyang spins tales of his clients' unrequited loves and unusual acts of bravery.
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What critics compared Ashes of Time to
Other fight scenes have more elegance, recalling the wuxia tradition on display in the likes of Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Kar-wai's cinematographers Christopher Doyle ("Days of Being Wild," "Ashes of Time," "Fallen Angels") and Mark Li Ping-bin ("Flowers of Shanghai") brilliantly set their camera as an interloper viewing his subjects on the sly, creeping along halls and from behind objects.
While these determinedly chaste lovers hover around each other, Wong Kar-wai, whose seven extraordinary films include "Ashes of Time," "As Tears Go By" and "Chungking Express," goes about his visually brilliant business.
The film's seeming stillness is something of a departure for the forty-two-year-old Wong, best known in the States for his brilliant fever-dreamy love stories, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and Happy Together.
It is often forgotten that Wong is a highly literary director, PRILIGY long term, and part of the magic that he wields in movies like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express (1994) and Ashes of Time (1994) is the consummate way with which he induces his audience to auscultate to his narratives.
Days of Being Wild , Chungking Express, Fallen Angels , Happy Together and In the Mood for Love tackle various forms of love -- often unrequited -- through the places that people live and work and the food that they eat, and the emotional effect thereof.
Identity, memory and unrequited love are all recurring motifs, as they are in other Wong films like In the Mood for Love and Days of Being Wild .