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The Eternal Minute, cf. Godard (Bande à part) or Bergman (Hour of the Wolf), for Wong Kar-wai a lothario's trick for a shared memory, "you can't deny it, it's already happened." Hong Kong 1960, humid as can be. The ladykiller (Leslie Cheung) assures the shopgirl (Maggie Cheung) she will see him in her dreams, she dozes off and smiles, seduction is funny like that. He tends to his foster mother's (Rebecca Pan) stupor and negotiates a gigolo with hammer in hand, and without missing a beat scoops up the nightclub wriggler (Carina Lau). "Do you treat all women like this?" Tangible yearning, like a heat wave or a loaded cloud, just the state for drifters too languid to drift. The best friend (Jacky Cheung) loves the dancer, the clerk wanders the street under a downpour so the tenderly taciturn cop (Andy Lau) lends an ear, Ophülsian pirouettes in slow-motion. (One of the many privileged compositions has the watchman waiting by a phone booth as Xavier Cugat's "Perfidia" plays in the distance, "soon after that my mother passed away, and I became a sailor.") Coke bottles and neon reflections have their role to play in Wong's impressionism, the tick-tock of clocks is attuned to the heartbeats of people hanging on to emotional mementos in a world in flux. Real mothers and bogus passports in the Philippines, the camera set to "Siboney" tracks from sidewalk to cavernous restaurant for a swift send-up of John Woo melees. The hero's avian parable ("This bird can only land once in its whole life, that's the moment it dies") might be Mallarmé's swan except that the sailor sees through it, the soul slips away like a train chugging on a bridge. The sublime rumba is picked up a decade later in In the Mood for Love, and there's Tony Leung at the end, getting into character before the mirror. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle.
--- Fernando F. Croce |