“To treat these lovelorn films as abstract allegories of Hong Kong’s historical situation risks losing sight of W.Kar wai’s naked feelings about LOVE"

Wong Kar-Wai is a Second Wave director who is linked by his socially engaging attitude to young romance, his commitment to history, and his interest in the identity of Hong Kong as a place that during the years preceding and following the 1997 was handed over to Mainland China. His films often reflect the directors appeal which is “to recognise the past which has formed him but to bend it in the present to face his future, like Hong Kong”(Peter Brunette,2005:45) Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai,1994) In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai,2000) Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai,1997) and Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai,1991) are all lovelorn films that intermingle the characters relationships with the historical situation at the time: the pre and post 1997 handover. Wong Kar Wai films can not be viewed as romantic films without some form of nostalgia of Hong Kong’s historical situation.

Wong Kar Wai films have characters who embody loneliness and this is often paralleled with the way people of Hong Kong were separated from the people in Mainland China and the tensions this had caused during the 80’s. At the time that Chungking Express was being made, Hong Kong was undergoing changes and moving even closer towards the historical moment, its handover to China in 1997. The character of Wu the young cop in the film comments after dumping his girlfriend that “If my memory of her has an expiration date, let it be 10,000 years”. As a result every day he buys a tin of pineapple with an expiration date of the day he ended his relationship. The canned pineapples and romantic relationships share a reciprocal relationship themselves . Therefore this very lovelorn obsession that Wu has with his food and ex girlfriend is an allegory that had been very common among people in Hong Kong during the last few years before 1997: an expiration date was date stamped on the city of Hong Kong. The character of Wu is perplexed when he buys the cans of pineapples. It is as if he is experiencing the colonized cultures of the West. The symbols being music, food and many other products. These symbols appear within a lovelorn environment to highlight the history of Hong Kong. People thought that the day of handover would be the ‘expiration’ of the Hong Kong they were now in. Therefore the people in Chungking Express are uncertain about their love in the same way as Hong Kong citizens were unsure about their future.

Moreover young romance is explored further in the character of Faye in Chungking Express. Faye is a lonely young women who tells the audience in a voiceover that she is isolated from the rest of the crowd and is fearful of relationships; this is most obvious in the bar scene in which she resisted the young cop Wu’s flirtation. People in Hong Kong were just like her when it comes to her attitude towards the people of Mainland China, who were about to be united with them in one nation. People of Hong Kong have by and large high standards of living standards and expectations. Therefore it appears that young romance in Hong Kong was under threat as it was unclear whether they could ever form a relationship with a person from Mainland China, form a relationship with a foreigner. Faye’s uncertainty towards love plays into the hands of her historical situation.

Wong Kar Wai films, some would argue, struggle with issues of representations of sexuality, and culture within a post modern context. His films do however highlight representations of young love. Yet perhaps ironically, at the historical moment the Hong Kong film industry was finding and portraying specifically ‘Hong Kong identity’ and what is was to be a Hong Kongoer as seen in films such as Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau, Alan Mak,2002) and Who Am I (Benny Chan, Jackie Chan,1998). However Happy Together is a film that highlight the theme about young romance, and more so about young sexuality. It appears from the narrative that Wong Kar Wai saw homosexuality as wayward and even foreign. For Hong Kong cinema, the late 80s was also a period of social change signalled by more liberal attitudes towards film censorship and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, confirmed in 1990 through a majority vote in the legislative council. The very narrative of a homosexual relationship compliments Bordwell’s concept that Wong Kar Wai wanted to highlight that this film is more than an abstract allegory to the historical situation at the time, this being the laws passed in 1990. This film is a lovelorn film and it clearly establishes that in the opening scene of the film where they are making love.

Yet on the other hand Wong Kar Wai’s himself can be read as “the allegorist of post-modern urban culture”(David, Harvey,1990:103).Wong Kar wai’s films tend to depict in great detail the lives of Hong Kong residents as they struggle with issues of romantic and domestic love and the search for personal identity. The director very often pairs the themes of young romance with that of the landscape and mise en scene of Hong Kong in his films. The film Happy together is a clear allegory of Hong Kong’s historical situation. It becomes problematic when the film takes the route of a romantic lovelorn narrative yet only achieves this through constantly referencing Hong Kong’s political situation of immigration. The film deals with a couple who come from a pre-handover Hong Kong and they visit Argentina hoping to renew their ailing relationship. Here the director couples images of urban landscapes with the characters search for their identity and romantic journey. The opening shots of the film follow multiple shots of passports. These serve the dual purpose of emphasising travel , the characters romantic and physical journey by the two leads as well as hinting at a concept of identity. Shots of the passports also emphasise the crossing of national boundaries; the political situation at the time. Both characters are British Nationals (Overseas).This acts as a direct reminder of the omnipresence of 1997 for Hong Kong citizens. Therefore Wong Kar Wai uses the urban landscape as a back drop to his characters romantic journey, suggesting that the passports denote their identity, but more the passports denote their sexual identity. Wong thus acknowledges the significance of history, especially for Hong Kong citizens who are constantly in transition, the passports in Happy Together are allegories of the characters sexual and love journey.

The soundtracks that Wong Kar Wai uses in some of his films often reflect the emotional aspect of his narratives but also serve the multiple purpose of addressing Hong Kong

’s past. Days of Being Wild and In The Mood for Love are two films that explore the emotion of love through their soundtracks. The Cantonese language was widely used in both films. Contextually Cantonese was one of the two official languages in Hong Kong; the other being English. There was no Mandarin in either film. For In The Mood for Love this concludes that the language in Hong Kong was not largely influenced by Mainland China in post-1997 Hong Kong. Evidently In The Mood for Love also uses a celebrated traditional 1946 Chinese song. Therefore this shows that Wong implied that Mainland Hong Kong culture was gradually influenced by China after 1997. In terms of lovelorn romance this track was always played when the characters of Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung were alone. Ironically western tracks such as the track “I’m in The mood for love” by Nat King Cole was used and ran parallel when the two lovers were together. It appears that Wong Kar Wai does appeal to our feelings about young romance, examining how two individuals bond without actually kissing. He explores intimacy yet once again he is only able to achieve this by alluding to the historical situation at the time. He values the past memories of the day when Hong Kong was colonized by the British. He achieves this by using the track of Hua Yang De Nian Hua which is based on a song by famous singer Zhou Xuan from the Solitary Island period. The 1946 song, used in Wong's film, is a paean to a happy past and an indirect metaphor for the darkness of Japanese-Occupied Shanghai. In his film this track does not symbolise the Japanese Sino war but becomes more a substitute, an allegory for the past memories of the day when Hong Kong was colonized by Britain. Wong preferred to use Nat King Cole’s songs to accompany Chow Mo-Wan and So Lai Chun’s affair, but used the 1946 traditional Chinese song to portray the loneliness of two protagonists. Nat King Cole’s songs romanticized Chow and So’s love affair and seemed to convince them to run away from their respective marriage. Alternatively, traditional Chinese songs were played with an absolutely opposite purpose. These songs always appeared with the scenes that Chow and So missed each other and they were longing to be loved. It may be metaphorical that Wong applied cultural hybridity to present that Hong Kong enjoyed being influenced by Western cultures as well as Mainland Chinese cultures. The Chinese music no doubt reflects post 1997 Hong Kong despite being set in the 60’s. Wong Kar Wai suggests that the characters are happiest when they hear western music because they are comfortable with their way of life. However more significantly is the Chinese music. This music acts as exposition for how people in post 1997 Hong Kong were struggling to form a new relationship themselves with a new Country, Mainland China. It therefore appears that young romance was unable to flourish in a post handover Hong Kong because the Hong Kong residents had to brace themselves for their new allegorical affair with China, as people were unsure how their lives would change once Hong Kong returned to China in 1997. It becomes more about a future relationship between Hong Kong with China then about the characters themselves. Therefore the soundtrack in In The Mood for Love does

lose sight of Wong Kar wai’s naked appeal to our feelings about young romance as it juxtaposes the storyline with Hong Kong’s post handover anxieties.

To conclude its clear that Wong Kai Wai’s films show a desire to contrast a character’s narrow-minded consciousness with wider social repercussions of change, most notably the pre and post 1997 changes to Hong Kong society. The characters of Wong Kar Wai's films have adjusted from worrying over whether to leave Hong Kong or not . This was seen in Happy Together contemplating how they feel about the handover. The characters in Chungking Express feel happy, and through this film the director invites the Hong Kong audience to adopt an optimism about things they cannot control, such as the handover. In the last stressful years before 1997, such a portrait of hope must have brought inspiration for the frightened citizens who were about to experience the biggest political change in their lives. Wong attempts to bond the landscape of his lovelorn outsiders and inevitably as a post modern auteur he is seen in his films delving into melodramatic and romantic moments linking them both to the history and the personal, whether directly or indirectly. Notions of identity and the ever-present fusion between East and West find context in the themes of love, loneliness and alienation no better seen and heard than in the soundtrack of In The Mood for Love in which all these elements pervade his protagonists. Tension between the past and present is linked to desire, memory, time and environment. Happy Together blends the landscape of Hong Kong with objects such as passports to directly question Hong Kongers about their identity and where they will stand following the handover in 1997. Agreeably, “to treat these lovelorn films as abstract allegories of Hong Kong’s historical situation risks losing sight of Wong Kar wai’s naked appeal to our feelings about young romance”. Its clear that on screen we do not see young romance exist independently on screen but rather we witness ‘young romance’ take a form of itself and has paradoxically its own relationship with ‘history’.