The most-recognisable Hong Kong director in international cinema. Twelve features in thirty-six years, each one looking like nothing else.
Wong Kar-wai began as a screenwriter for Hong Kong television in the 1980s. His first feature as director, As Tears Go By (1988), was a triad-genre film that already showed the visual interests his later films would develop. By Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), he had established himself as one of the most-distinctive voices in international cinema.
His filmography includes In the Mood for Love (2000), widely considered the greatest romance film of the 21st century; Happy Together (1997), one of the most-respected gay-themed films in non-Anglophone cinema; the Grandmaster (2013), a Wong-style Bruce Lee origin story. He has worked repeatedly with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and actress Maggie Cheung; the recurring collaborations are the foundation of his visual identity.
He has not won at the Academy Awards (most of his films do not pursue Oscar campaigns). He has won Best Director at Cannes (Happy Together, 1997) and a long list of festival prizes worldwide. His influence on contemporary filmmaking — visible in everything from Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation to Barry Jenkins's Moonlight to Park Chan-wook's recent work — is significant beyond what his commercial track record would suggest.
Wong's films are unimaginable without cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who shot most of Wong's films from Days of Being Wild (1990) through 2046 (2004). The Doyle-Wong visual approach — slow shutter speeds producing motion smear in handheld shots, neon-saturated colour palettes, asymmetrical compositions, the use of mirrors and reflective surfaces — has been one of the most-imitated visual styles in 21st-century international cinema.
What's striking is how much of the Wong look is, on close inspection, Doyle's. Most of the famous Chungking Express compositions — the stop-motion-in-fluid-motion sequences, the corner-of-the-frame characters watching from the edge — are Doyle's specific visual instincts. The Wong-Doyle partnership ended after 2046; subsequent Wong films have used other DPs and look visibly different.
Wong's films are heavily structured around first-person voiceover, often from multiple characters reflecting on private internal states the action does not externalise. The voiceovers are usually delivered in a quiet, near-whispered register — the audience is being invited into a private confession. The technique is borrowed in part from French New Wave (Truffaut, particularly) and in part from Hong Kong literary tradition.
Food and the small private rituals of urban living are also recurring concerns. Chungking Express opens with a cop eating expired canned pineapple at a midnight noodle stand. In the Mood for Love is structurally organised around the food deliveries between two apartments. The films are interested in what urban people do to maintain themselves when they are alone.
Almost every Wong film is structured around connections that almost happen and do not quite. In the Mood for Love's central couple love each other and do not act on it. Happy Together's central couple keep returning to each other and keep failing. 2046 is openly built around the central character's attempt to recover a past relationship that he cannot get back to.
What this gives Wong's films, cumulatively, is the texture of memory. The films feel like they are remembering themselves as they happen. The voiceover, the slow-motion, the recurring music cues, the same actors in slightly different roles across films — all contribute to the cumulative feeling that Wong's filmography is one continuous text about the ways human connection slips.
If you've never watched a Kar-wai film:
Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Krzysztof Kieślowski, the Hong Kong literary tradition (particularly Liu Yichang's 1972 novel Intersection, which Wong has cited as the foundational text for In the Mood for Love), and 1960s Hong Kong film noir.