The cinema of Wong Kar-wai: style, form and narrative meaning

The following study provides detailed critical analyses of several films by Hong Kong filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai. These analyses centre most broadly upon the organisational principles that underpin Wong’s stylistic and narrative systems, and examine how such intentional strategies function to generate narrative meaning and elicit particular responses from the spectator. In reaction to a body of criticism that subsumes the textual features of Wong’s cinema to an overarching socio-allegorical framework, this study concentrates analysis principally upon the immediate, filmic ‘surface’ of the films, i.e. their primary materials of style, plot, and character. To this end, the project aims to show that allegorical interpretations are not the only means by which to disclose the richness and complexity of Wong’s cinema. By attending to specifically textual features, moreover, the project seeks to situate Wong’s formal procedures within demonstrable modes and traditions. Analysing the films’ style, form, and narrative meaning therefore points us toward the key historical and cultural factors that bear most pertinently upon Wong’s cinema.

Collectively, the main chapters serve to tackle some broad critical assumptions pertaining to Wong’s oeuvre - for example, the critical perspective that casts Wong as a pure aesthete, preoccupied exclusively with stylistic sensuousness. A corollary assumption - that the erotic texture of the work ‘seduces’ the spectator into critical passivity - is also explicitly challenged throughout the chapters that follow. This study argues that, though Wong’s films indeed furnish a palpable and sensual audio-visual design, they are not reducible exclusively to this aesthetic principle; often we find that stylistic sensuousness is explicable at the level of story action. The chapters in this study also contend that Wong’s spectator, far from being seduced away from critical reasoning, is routinely challenged by textual strategies that undercut the films’ sensuous style and jolt the viewer from her habitual modes of perception.