Abstract:
Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai has been embraced by the “West” in recent years, from his Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, to the European co-financing of his films In the Mood for Love and 2046, to his commercials for Western corporations BMW and Lacoste and the music video he has directed for recording artist DJ Shadow. Wong also enjoys an enthusiastic reception in many Asian countries, with the conspicuous exception of Hong Kong itself. The popularity of his films abroad is parallelled in the films themselves by a tendency to draw upon “foreign” cultural referents: from film noir to Japanese fiction to Argentinian novels. In this environment, questions of cultural translation leap to the fore. What happens to the articulation of Hong Kong “identity” in these processes of intertextual appropriation and international reception? In order to answer these questions, I have selected those Wong Kar-wai films which deal most specifically with cultural translation and travel: Chungking Express (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). Arguably, Wong’s earlier film Days of Being Wild (1990) treads similar territory, as it incorporates transcultural references along with one character’s journey from Hong Kong to the Philippines to search for his mother. I am focussing on Wong’s more recent films, however, because they tackle the relationship between culture and travel in a more sustained and complex fashion. Each of the films discussed here charts different trajectories of identification, plotted along divergent axes defined in spatial and temporal terms. Overlaying this body of work is a broader trajectory pointing tentatively towards a qualified regionalism. Amongst recent work on the director, Stephen Teo’s book-length study Wong Kar-wai stands out in its attempt to map the cinematic and literary references that inform the director’s work.[1] [open footnotes in new window] Yet whereas Teo seems most concerned with establishing the aesthetic value of Wong’s oeuvre, I would argue that more work remains to be done in showing how these films orchestrate their intertextual vectors in relation to the characters' global movements. In doing so, the films' narratives articulate the possibilities and the limits of transcultural identification. Furthermore, these films emerge within the context of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, highlighting the territory’s status as both postcolonial and neocolonial. Against this backdrop, Wong Kar-wai’s films frame global culture and territorial identity in terms of travel, and bring into doubt critical approaches founded on straightforward notions of either cultural hegemony or resistance.