impossible love
by
Douglas Messerli
Jeffrey
Lau and Wong Kar-wai (screenplay), Wong Kar-wai (director) 旺角卡門(Wàngjiǎo
Kǎmén) (As Tears Go By) / 1988
In this film the lovers are a handsome
young mob enforcer, Wah (Andy Lau), who is well-liked by the godfather and
other toughs who for him. However, Wah’s younger brother, Fly (Jacky Cheung),
as some of the other mobsters claim, is “out of control,” and Wah is forced to
spend most of his time getting his younger brother out of hot water, often after
brutal beatings from Tony (Alex Man) and his gang members.
Quietly, Ngor insinuates herself into
Wah’s world, cooking for him, cleaning up, and even buying him a new set of
glassware. Discovering that she is not ill after all, she departs, leaving a
note behind to tell him about the new glasses, suggesting that she knows all of
them will soon be destroyed, but that she has hidden one away for later use;
she also invites him to visit her someday.
Haunted by her quiet beauty, Wah follows
her back to her hometown, Lantau. She tells him that she is engaged to her
local doctor, and he begins the boat trip home before receiving a
message that he
should meet her by the quay. A love affair soon follows, but time and again the
pacific life they live together is interrupted by Fly’s disruptive actions back
in Hong Kong.
Although Wah has tried to find Fly a
normal job selling fish from a local cart, Fly hates his job, and returns to
Tony’s club, destroying the mobster’s car, and threatening him with a gun. This
time even the godfather will not intrude, and both Fly and Wah are severely
beaten by Tony and his gang.
Wah attempts to return to Ngor, but once
again he hears of even more serious difficulties: Fly has offered Tony to
assassinate a heavily guarded informer, if Tony agrees to release him from his
debt. The situation is clearly a suicide mission.
By the time Wah reaches him, Fly has
already shot the informer and several of his guards, but he himself has also
been killed. With true sacrifice, Wah finishes up the killing and is himself
shot to death.
In some respects, even in 1988, Wong’s
characters’ actions parallel the events upcoming 1990 transfer of the highly
westernized city to China. The love the former Colony might have for all things
western ultimately will clearly have to sacrificed to the new order. Love, in
short, is thwarted in this city, long of the cusp of transition from a culture
of openness to the dictatorship that the city faces, and which Wong’s
characters so obviously reflect.
Wong is not always sure of his focus in As Tears Go By, sometimes prettifying
the ugliest of human behavior, and at other moments sentimentalizing and even
fantasizing Wah’s and Ngor’s love (it’s unexplained, for example, how Wah,
already on the boat to Hong Kong could suddenly get back to the quay in time to
greet the waiting Ngor), and, even more seriously, creating plot strings that
go nowhere (why was Ngor so convinced of her nonexistent illness, and why?); we
can, nonetheless, see that the director’s instincts are spot-on. Besides, if
Ngor’s illness is a product of her hometown doctor’s imagination, by the end of
the film she has a deeper sickness to face for the rest of her life.
Los Angeles, May
24, 2017
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