Wong Kar Wai's First Film, As Tears Go By: A Western Review

As Tears Go By is Wong Kar Wai's first movie, and his inexperience shows in its formulaic plot construction and all too predictable climatic resolution. However, the director’s flair for employing inventive camerawork and successfully integrating music into emotionally critical scenes is clearly present in developmental form at the onset of his career. This is reason enough alone=to recommend the film (it is available through Netflix streaming).

For the uninitiated, the Hong Kong triad romance picture appears to be a popular cultural archetype. A subset of the triad film genre -- a pervasive Hong Kong cinematic plot -- the tragic intersection of love and triad-life is perhaps best expressed in A Moment of Romance (also starring Andy Lau). Of course, I am not a cultural authority here. However, the concept of romantic love doomed by the male protagonist’s external commitments is clearly universal.

As Tears Go By reflects this division of its protagonists external commitments to friend and lover  in its neat division of its narrative. After the introductory sequence in which Lau separates from a past flame and meets his  cousin, his scenes going forward fit into one of two categories: either Andy Lau is building his romantic relationship with his cousin (yes, you read that right), played by Maggie Cheung, or he is futilely trying to save his spark-plug triad brother Fly, played by Jackie Cheung, from self-destruction. While the narrative attempts to 

build the mystery of which commitment will ultimately rule Lau's behavior, viewers familiar with gangster film tropes of any culture know well in advance what the final scene holds in store. 

The gap in quality between the two narratives – the slow-cooking romance, anchored by Cheung’s demure seduction, is beautiful while Fly’s descent into self-immolation is mostly boring – reminds me of Henry James’s assessment of George Eliot’s similarly divided Daniel Deronda: one wishes that only the better half existed.

And yet, Fly’s folly, tedious as it may be, is essential to the romantic narrative. After all, if there was nothing to provoke the separation of our lovers, would we not miss observing Cheung's exquisite slow motion tearing up (a scene later repeated with Zhang Ziyi in 2046)?

It should be noted As Tears Go By appears to be best known for a somewhat bizarre, extended kiss scene (The Kiss, if you will)  between Lau and Cheung in a phone-booth as “Take My Breath Way” from Top Gun plays, non-ironically, for which I will attempt to mount a defense.

The scene certainly flirts precariously with schmaltz, or rather is schmaltz, but succeeds anyway. In context, the subversion of audience expectations (receding the scene, Cheung appears to choose a doctor over Lau) coupled with the sudden explosion of passion is thrilling rather than groan inducing. While Wai would go on to produce more fully developed artistic expressions, nothing in his later work that I've seen exceeds the slight of hand, followed by release of the above scene.

- lydgate