The Inconstancy of Memory

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities carry with them the burden of memory, of the hopes and sorrows of their many denizens, of the surrender of ideologies to indifference, of shapes erected and consequently felled, of trees and trains that scratch against their backs; so well defined are they, yet to only exist in the minds of their inhabitants, each city a mere permutation of a different, imaginary city. For Kar-wai, these city-images converge into Hong Kong, the city he has called home since his exile from Shanghai at the age of five.

Since his family’s migration to Hong Kong, Kar-wai had been an avid cinemagoer in his childhood. Now considered an auteur of the New Wave Hong Kong cinema, he has produced eighteen films throughout his illustrious career, and when asked about his beginnings in the world of cinema, he has said “The only hobby I had as a child was watching movies”. Riding off the success of his debut, As Tears Go By, Kar-wai has established himself as a figurehead of the ‘Hollywood East’ with tours de force like In The Mood For Love and Chungking Express. Despite their volume, Kar-wai’s films have eluded the cinematic description that has so readily been the lot of many of his contemporaries, with Kar-wai himself admitting that he sees himself not as a director, but “an audience member who stepped behind a camera”.

There is perhaps no categorization of Kar-wai’s body of work because such a categorization would be contrary to the very subject of his films: the presence of an absence, an absence so completely tangible and humane so as to almost be considered in itself a presence. His films, recipients of innumerable international accolades, are visual depictions of loneliness, melancholy, unrequited love and intolerable nostalgia, with intersecting disjointed storylines painted by a kaleidoscope of colors and identities. However varying their subject matter might be, there exists in these films an inseparable solitude that seems distant, almost ethereal at first, and one wonders where one has felt this way before, but cannot remember.

As we stumble through the fantasies of Kar-wai’s characters drenched in the cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s vision, we begin to remember something. In Fallen Angels, as in the rest of his work, it is not entirely clear what it is but there is a vague sentiment that borders between familiarity and irrepressible longing - fragments of cities we have lived in or visited form an array of wilting dreams stitched together by a hope of revival. Despite the emotional connections or their absences, that are Kar-wai's main appeal to viewers, the stories pale before the indifferent background assumed by Hong Kong, and it is only in contrast to Kar-wai’s memory of this metropolis that the characters envision themselves, or desire to envision themselves to be free of this loneliness that has chased them all their lives. In a convergence of technical mastery and subtle cinematography, the feeling of isolation between the city and the characters is transfigured into constraints in their relationships—characters sway in and out of rigid frames within frames, windows are viewed through windows, reflections become indistinguishable from their sources. These are often physical in nature as well as circumstantial, framed by Kar-wai to produce an atmosphere of contrasting indifference, monotony, and seclusion. Conversely, Kar-wai also repeatedly employs distorted close-up shots to emphasize the abandonment and yearning felt by the characters. They each endeavor to attain an unattainable longing: Kar-wai’s own self-imposed exile from the present and his voyage into his memory of a city masqueraded as acceptance, love, and tension in relationships.

Kar-wai’s ode to Hong Kong would be tainted by localizing it in his lyrical frames and forlorn colors, as to the viewer these morph into narratives of their own, spinning tales of different cities and stories. Amidst this flood of emotions, we find ourselves detached from, yet nearer to the characters, separated by a film of belonging monopolized by Kar-wai’s own memories, but with slits that allow us to momentarily peer at our own fears and inadequacies embodied by characters acting out the drama of our lives. While particularly noticeable in the clashing of characters in Happy Together, this feeling persists more subtly in In The Mood For Love, where it is magnified not due to grandeur or repetition but the intense longing between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung.

Contrasting the suffocation or rigidity of the frame-in-frame shots, Kar-wai often employs his trademark close-up shot of the protagonists—here, against a remarkably normal Hong Kong underpass doused in a lonely sea of green. This shot would have pretensions towards a reconciliation between the characters in another film but in Kar-wai’s vision depicts the immense separation between two persons despite their physical intimacy, an intrinsic human detachment beyond the words and actions that tail us across the many plateaus of our meagre, never-ending life.

It is as if we have been in Hong Kong ourselves but all we remember of it are its tributaries, little parts of Hong Kong that have never found their way together in our minds, such that one cannot outwardly say “This film was a place, a mere shadow of a false memory, a dream!".

And as these films unfold slowly, like tea leaves swirling and dyeing the water shyly, we yearn to bring the characters closer to us, to whisper in their ear that the loneliness they feel will always follow them. Or to just stay silent with them and wallow in the resignation of our fate. The watch thrusted into our palms with severed hands ticks unceasingly between an aimless present and a hopeless past, the same limbo our characters find themselves in. Resting oddly in our fumbling hands, the watch bears a distorted image of ourselves staring hazily at its own reflection. In the background, tall buildings stand silhouetted against a setting sun. Apartment blocks tangled up in clotheslines glower at passers-by, half-obstructed by a towering tree. A man stretches his back while frying food at a stall, a sweat bead on his forehead rolling down to the tarmac. The overwhelming cacophony of lives not of one’s own rings strong, and though we know and understand fully that the remorse we feel will return, all our sorrow seems absolved in this fleeting moment, and our city and our life too appear bearable—delightful even.

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