In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

98 CHAPTER 4 Liu Yichang and Wong Kar-wai The Class Trap in In the Mood for Love A key representative of the Hong Kong Second Wave,1 Wong Kar-wai (Wang Jiawei, b. 1956) stands out as one of the hippest and most critically acclaimed directors in the world. He experiments with different genres, makes complex and beautiful movies, and can generally be taken as a pure example of why Hong Kong cinema has become popular in theWest. From As Tears Go By (1988) to My Blueberry Nights (2007), he has innovated in genres as diverse as gangster and martial arts films, melodrama and road films. Combining fast editing, superimposed slow motion, parallel narrative structures, expansion of off-screen space, and angled shots, his virtuoso styles and fluid narratives have generated a loyal following around the world. One excellent illustration of his restless, composite vision is his adaptation in 2000 of LiuYichang’s 1972 novella Intersection into In the Mood for Love.2 Liu’s story is hailed as representative of Chinese modernist writings—in part because it captures the impressionistic movement of character consciousness —while Wong’s film is usually considered a romantic melodrama (Stephen Teo 2001c).3 This chapter is an example unlike any other in the book, for the novel and the film tell completely different stories. In fact, the point must be put more firmly: the film has very little plot, and the novel almost none at all. Thus, instead of inviting the usual set of questions about how the plot and narrative perspectives change in adaptation,Wong’s movie raises new ones about the commensurability of things like structure, form, mood, and ideology . In particular, he privileges two broadly nonnarrative ways that cinema can intersect with literature: formalism and historicism. His formal experiments include invoking multiple parallels between text and film (on the level of image, character, and motif, among others), while his historical emphasis Liu Yichang and Wong Kar-wai: In the Mood for Love 99 lies on the contrasts between Hong Kong’s burgeoning capitalist culture and fading traditional Chinese values. These few remarks are already enough to suggest why Wong has been hailed as a director’s director. Ackbar Abbas uses postcolonial theory to argue that Wong has rendered visible an ephemeral Hong Kong, one that is becoming “a space of the déjà disparu, of disappearance” (1997: 48); from a more formalist perspective, David Bordwell salutes him for brilliantly balancing aesthetic experimentalism and popular entertainment (2000: 281); Peter Brunette celebrates his use of sound and visuals in his “‘mysterization ’ of everyday life” (2005: xvi). Few critics, however, have made much of Wong’s attachment to literature. In fact, Brunette argues explicitly that Wong’s art cannot be reduced to the literary techniques of “narration, dialogue , and conventional drama” per se (2005: xvi). For many ordinary viewers also,Wong’s genius lies precisely in his ability to construct spellbinding and seductive cinematic moods while muting or dispensing with traditional narrative-based film practices. Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 are three well-known examples in which Wong creates alternative styles of storytelling that exploit phenomena such as ambiance, beat, and the look of moving images. His unflagging desire for innovation helps explain why he prefers to rely on improvisation rather than finished scripts on the set, and a practical result of this technique is that key scenes in his films often convey an edgy, open-ended narrative feel, a sense that anything could happen (Stephen Teo 2001c; Bordwell 2000; Brunette 2005). A related theoretical result is that his narratives are made to depend upon categories far beyond the “plot, character, and diction” bestowed upon us by Aristotle’s Poetics. These are all good reasons to think of Wong as a postliterary director , an auteur who thrives in the audiovisual medium of cinema.And yet I argue that we must also interpret Wong as a preeminently literary director, one whose films cannot be understood outside their relationship to Hong Kong’s broader cultural milieu and literary contexts.Like StephenTeo—one of the few critics to emphasize Wong’s literary sensibility—I see written fiction as the source not only ofWong’s plots but also of many of his stylistic and structural choices, and I think his interest in adaptation is especially crucial (Stephen Teo 2005b: 3). It is no accident that all three of the films mentioned above as examples of a postliterary imagination are actually adaptations of...

Share