ASHES OF TIME REDUX
Written & Directed by Wong Kar Wai, based on the story by Louis Cha
Produced by Jeffrey Lau, Jackie Pang Yee Wah & Wong
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
Mandarin & Cantonese with English subtitles
Hong Kong/China. 93 min. Rated R
With Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Carina Lau, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Charlie Young, Jackie Cheung, Bai Li, Collin Chou & Maggie Cheung
 

This should be the treat of the year for fans of the decidedly art-house Chinese director, who has reshaped his epic 1994 film Ashes of Time. For those completely new to the project, it’s often a brilliant achievement.

Leslie Cheung plays Ouyang Feng, who’s been in the desert for some years after leaving his home when the love of his life chose to marry his brother. He ends up as a secret agent, hiring swordsmen as assassins. There is also a tender love story, which involves Ouyang and a woman simply named Peach Blossom (Carina Lau), who is also the wife of a nearly blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). 

I could go on for a while trying to explain the story, but it would be futile. Ashes of Times Redux is a wonder in terms of a purely cinematic experience where we can sit and just completely immerse ourselves in the world that Wong Kar Wai splashes onto the screen. I hate to use the description, but a lot of the picture is just like a moving painting.

Much of it takes place in an unspecified desert, one not quite like what we have seen in modern film. Serenely surrealistic, the sights include a swordsman raising water hundreds of feet into the air with the swipe of a sword. Yet, there are moments when one feels immersed in an apocalyptic vision, divorced from any kind of real time frame. As a strange, ethereal fantasy, the movie’s almost one step away from anime in a lot of its visual grandeur. 

How much has been altered from the 1994 release or newly created for this version I can’t say, but I could not tell that it was the film’s 15^th anniversary. The wild action sequences move and careen and are amazingly successful considering it’s the director’s third film and his only martial-arts production. 

There remains the inevitable question: for all of the incredible achievement in production value, for all the painstaking detail in making the action violent but not too over the top, and for all of the skill Christopher Doyle displays in making this a quintessential achievement in cinematography, how is the substance? Sad to say, what story there is, while not confusing, occasionally becomes too muddled. The atypical (for Wong) narration helps usually, but it’s a little hard to follow, though the movie isn’t quite as confusing as some other style-heavy martial-arts pictures. And thankfully the romantic value one loves about Wong’s films remains intact. One scene, where Wong films a half-clothed man and woman laying close to each other, intimately side-by-side, may rank as one of the most sensual moments ever filmed. Jack Gattanella
October 10, 2008