Wong Kar Wai’s Borrowed Time

Near the end of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, there’s a shot of Tony Leung silhouetted in a doorway. It echoes the famous framing of John Wayne that ends The Searchers, except that when the door shuts on Wayne, he’s outside, in the sun, stranded in the film’s mythic Western landscape, which will always keep him apart. In Wong’s movie, Leung walks toward us, away from the sunlight, his silhouette joining with the darkness, almost blocking out the landscape of Angkor Wat behind him. It’s as if, at the end of a film about the impossibility of retrieving lost time, he’s crossing over to join those of us who are sitting in the dark, trying to hold onto the images that have washed over us. We already know that what he seeks to recapture is long gone.

That sense of loss pervades World of Wong Kar Wai, the seven-disc collection of director-approved restorations (and in some cases alterations) released by Criterion (also available to stream). Wong’s world is one in which people mourn not just for their past, but for the present they know is soon to be past, like moviegoers who know the lights will inevitably come up. Much of his work takes place in a historic era—the dream evocations of the Hong Kong and Shanghai of the 1960s in Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and The Hand—and nostalgia is the characters’ constant state.

But this world is not completely idealized. As captured by his great cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and later by Ping Bin Lee, Lai Yiu-Fai, Kwan Pun Leung, and Darius Khondji, the colors of Wong’s movies are a variation of the look Vittorio Storaro gave Last Tango in Paris—late afternoon reds and browns and golds and greens, colors just past the point where ripeness gives way to rot. The apartments and rented rooms Wong’s characters inhabit all show signs of wear, with cracked, flaking paint and light that doesn’t reach the dim corners; all the marks of use are disguised by human touches, like a sleek table lamp or graphic-print curtains. Sad as they are, the rooms are never depressing or seedy. Though they look as if they are ready to be left behind.

It’s the encounters that take place—social calls that mask the desire beneath the surface, assignations that try to deny the deeper feelings they provoke, the solitary mourning of lost romance—that are worth holding onto. Wong’s characters are both at the mercy of their heartbreak and wrapped in it like a cloak. They resemble Frank Sinatra on the cover of No One Cares, sitting alone at the bar amid happy couples taking no notice of him, protected from the smoke, the noise, the smell of spilled drinks. His sadness seems richer than other people’s happiness.

Memory calls up a distant world in these films, but Wong’s movies remind us that memory can be even more piercing than the present, because hindsight allows us to see what we were blind to at the time, especially about ourselves. (Related to memory, the restorations in the Criterion set are, in some cases, also alterations, with some films changed back to their original aspect ratios and monaural soundtracks. To my eye, nothing seemed startling or jarred my memories of the films I’d seen.) “That era has passed,” Tony Leung’s character says at the end of 2046. “Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore.” Of course it does, right there in front of us, but only as long as the memories last for the one remembering, only as long as the film runs through the projector.

If, in 1994, you had told Western moviegoers having their first exposure to Wong with Chungking Express that his movies would be described in the tones of melancholy I sounded above, they likely wouldn’t have believed you. Chungking Express is, like Breathless, one of those movies that seems to speak in a new language—a marvelous...