The Screengrab : maggie cheung

Screengrab Review: "Summer Hours"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The French filmmaker Olivier Assayas is probably best known for Irma Vep, a 1996 update of Day for Night, about the efforts of a movie director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his squad of technicians and assistants who were all trying to make a modern version of the silent movie serial Les Vampires, with Maggie Cheung, as herself, slinking about the set in a black cat suit. (My favorite detail may have been the lackey whose job was to hang around Maggie with a little squirt bottle to make sure her outfit stayed shiny.) Since then, Assayas has certainly established himself as a man of wide-ranging ambitions. His movies have ranged from the aging-friends ensemble drama Lat August, Early September and Les destinées sentimentales, a three-hour family drama set in the nineteenth century, to Demonlover, which ended with its anti-heroine, Connie Nielson, ensnared in a Videodrome-like S & M website, where she was last seen trussed up in fetish gear and waiting for her fate to be determined by some kid a million miles away who'd logged on using his dad's credit card, and the trash-fest Boarding Gate. Whatever their subject matter, Assayas's films are always intelligent, handsomely mounted, and intriguing; the one thing they generally lack is a pulse. They're not overly predetermined, like the work of some smart guys who make dull movies, but they do seem more thought-out than felt, and this can make the experience of being bored by them more frustrating than it is at sloppier movies. This is especially so in the case of his provocations, like Boarding Gate, which is like a self-conscious attempt to create the ultimate nightmare fantasy of rough sex and paranoid thrills; fighting to keep from falling asleep while Asia Argento is running around in her underwear executing people and being pursued by the agents of Kim Gordon can make you feel awfully jaded. Assayas's new one, Summer Hours, is as boring as anything he's ever done, but the nice thing about it is, it sounds as if it ought to be boring, thus restoring some of your faith in a logical universe.

The movie opens at a family gathering at the country home of the aged but still beautiful matriarch Hélène (played by the veteran actress Edith Scob). It's a beautiful day, and Hélène, her faithful housekeeper (Isabelle Sadoyan), her three adult kids (played by Assayas' favorite leading man, Charles Berling; Juliette Binoche, in a blonde dye job that takes some getting used to; and Jérémie Renier) and their kids sit in the bright sunshine or run around in the fields while Assayas and his cinematographer Eric Gautier (who also shot A Christmas Tale, a family-gathering movie that could eat this one for breakfast) do everything to make you feel wistful about it all short of parade in front of the camera wearing sandwich boards reading "Youth and Beauty Are as Fleeting as Summer Itself!" When the sunblock runs out, everybody can wander into the house and admire mom's vast collection of paintings, antique furniture, and other artworks, which include the sketchbooks of Hélène's uncle, an artist named Paul Berthier. After this long opening section introduces the actors and establishes whatever character traits they're going to have to work with, Hélène dies, and the movie can settle into the real dramatic work at hand: deciding what to do with mom's stash of collectibles.

You might think that the movie is so taken with the idea that a human being's life comes down to the hoarded belongings she's left behind has something to do with how French it is, and you wouldn't entirely be wrong. (It sure sounds classier, coming from Assayas and his characters, than it does from Nick Hornby's boyish men.) Actually, it was the starting point of the movie because the movie was originally commissioned as part of a plan to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Musée d'Orsay. (So was Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, which included scenes set inside the museum, and which also featured Juliette Binoche being especially lively in dubious-looking hair.) The actors get to express little irritations with those playing their siblings and to cry over the loss of mom and fret over their kids, but the core of the movie is in scenes where curators from the Musée d'Orsay stamp around the house and discuss how badly they want mom's knickknacks (which are in fact pieces on loan to the filmmakers from the museum) and set aside a moment to tear their hair out when they think about those barbarians at Christie's. (Bincohe, who lives in New York, has flirted with the idea of selling the sketchbooks to Christie's, before coming to her senses.) At the end, there's a set piece that's a sort of inverted version of the opening scene, with Berling's teenage daughter taking over grandma's all-but-abandoned house for a weekend party with all her little buddies, who have their whole lives ahead of them and seem very confused by this, maybe because they haven't yet begun to whole-heartedly devote themselves to building their own stockpile of objets d'art and attaching personal memories to them. But Assayas isn't fooling anybody: he's at least as much in his element when the curators are sitting around being huffy about the quality of Art Nouveau furniture they're being offered as when he's trying to stage scenes depicting intimate human behavior. Summer Hours is probably opening about three months too early: who wants to feel wistful about the dying of the light in May? But it is strongly recommended for those who are counting the seconds between episodes of Antiques Roadshow.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )

As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay! We know you read this feature religiously! Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!) She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name: I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938 - )

You might have noticed that the first clip is in Italian sans subtitles. But I make no apologies for including it! Still, I love you, dear Screengrab reader, almost as much as I love Claudia Cardinale, so there’s a second clip, this time with subtitles, of Ms. Cardinale being charming. Now here’s an amazing fact: both of these films (The Leopard and 8 1/2, that is) are from the same year. You might have noticed that Cardinale is one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen. You might have noticed that these clips are from two of the finest films in Italian cinema. You are quite observant!

GENEVIEVE BUJOLD (1942 - )

Bujold got her first big break co-starring with Yves Montand in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie; that movie opened up possibilities in French films that she spurned to star in two godawful independent Canadian productions, Isabel and The Act of the Heart, that were directed by filmmaker and jackass Paul Almond, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973. This detail set the tone for much of her career: a great actress with the ability to make direct contact with an audience, Bujold spent the seventies being courted by Hollywood studios and touted in the press as a big star in the making, but she kept slipping away from the bonds of real fame by her insistence on doing the roles she wanted to do. (One big exception was Earthquake, in which she played Charlton Heston's girlfriend as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Universal Pictures for breach of contract.) During her ingenue period, she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in her first U.S. picture, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), then slipped away to Greece to contribute a stunning cameo as Cassandra in the Michael Cacoyannis film of The Trojan Women (1971), had a freak-out scene for the ages in Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and came as close as she would ever come to mainstream stardom in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978). In her mature-actress period, she stirred strange longings in Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984), stirred even stranger ones in Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988), and introduced some experience and earthiness to Alan Rudolph's soap-bubble worlds in Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), and The Moderns (1988). It's been a while since she was in anything that anybody saw, but she is never to be counted out and it's good to know that she's still out there, waiting for some young hotshot director who isn't afraid of writing a part for a strong woman to do himself a favor.

MAGGIE CHEUNG (1964 - )

Born in Hong Kong, Cheung later moved with her family to the U.K. when she was eight, which accounts for the British accent with which she spoke her English dialogue in the French film Irma Vep (1996), directed by her sometime husband Olivier Assayas. Her dry, witty performance in that movie as some version of herself, politely standing around between takes on a movie set while an assistant with a spray bottle applies the right sheen to her shiny black cat suit, was a measure of how far she'd come since her early days in movies: a former model and First Runner-Up in the Miss Hong Kong beauty contest (who beat her? who the fuck beat her!?), Cheung can be seen not doing much besides looking damned good in a number of HK films, including such Jackie Chan classics as Police Story and Project A Part II. Cheung has given credit for her emergence as an actress to Wong Kar-wei, master of all things beautiful, who brought her out in As Tears Go By and later used her in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. While developing her talent, Cheung has also managed to maintain a presence in the Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema, co-starring in such films as The Heroic Trio and Green Snake; both strands of her career came together triumphantly in Zhang Yimou's Hero, where she kicked ass and broke hearts with the best of them. She gave her finest dramatic performance to date in her most recent film, Assayas's Clean, for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. She has since announced that she's quitting acting to concentrate on her music. Her fans can be forgiven for hoping that she eventually finds composing to be insufficiently gratifying to her ego and comes slouching back.

MIA FARROW (1945)

The daughter of film director John Farrow (The Big Clock) and actress and Tarzan main squeeze Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow burst into the late '60s with a waif-like quality that, married to her china doll features, was at its best sexily androgynous and at its not-best borderline elfin. She became a star from her role in the TV series Peyton Place, which she quit at the behest of her new husband, Frank Sinatra; she then blew off the marriage to Sinatra by refusing to give up her starring role in Rosemary's Baby. That movie made her an even bigger star, but it also raised the possibility that she might wind up being exploited in picture after picture as the most defenselessly threatenable potential victim since the days of silent melodrama. Perhaps alert to this danger, she spent most of the next ten years alternating between very bad choices (Secret Ceremony, The Great Gatsby) and, so far as a movie career was concerned, making no choices at all. In 1978, she appeared as a member of ensemble casts in Robert Altman's A Wedding and the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile and, in both, revealed a new eagerness to subvert audience's sympathetic expectations of her and to use her own weirdness for comic effect. It wasn't long after that she took up with Woody Allen, and starting with 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, embarked on a ten-year stretch where she appeared almost exclusively in his movies. In the best of them, he examined every angle from which she could be charming, and she has him to thank for having broadened and solidified her enduring screen image. There's a whole lot of other stuff he did for which she has not been inclined to thank him, and when their professional and personal relationships both ended with an abrupt thud around the time of the release of 1992's Husbands and Wives, she hurtled out of his orbit and latched onto supporting roles in other people's movies with what looked an awful lot like relief. From the first of her post-Woody movies, John Irvin's Widow's Peak (1994) to the most recent, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, she can generally be counted on to serve as a delightful addition to any project that is salvageable and as something fascinatingly odd in any project that isn't. Last year, Time magazine named her as one of the world's most influential people for her various humanitarian endeavors.

DIANE KEATON (1946 - )

Keaton's warmth and talent, and her special ability to make neurosis seem cuddly, made her everybody's favorite screen comedienne in the seventies, when she starred with her off-screen partner Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper (where she did a mean Brando impression), Love and Death, Manhattan, and of course, Annie Hall, which made her not just a star but a zeitgeist figure. Although she's kept working since that peak -- unlike other actresses, such as Jill Clayburgh, who seemed to embody something very much of the moment for, well, a moment -- there's a sense that Keaton doesn't really get her full due, maybe because her moment is supposed to have passed. (She's always criticized for being too "contemporary" when she plays period roles, even though she's been brilliant in such movies as Mrs. Soffel, where she springs Mel Gibson from a Pittsburgh jail at the turn of the century, and, of course, Reds.) Even when her career was red-hot after her Oscar win for Best Actress in Annie Hall, her success in comedy and the relative dullness of her role in the Godfather movies led to a false impression that she's a funny woman wasted in heavy drama. This may have led to her being overpraised for her work in the strident Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which came out the same year as Annie Hall, but it also cost her full recognition for her greatest performance, in the stunning divorce drama Shoot the Moon in 1982. She also gave a wrenching performance in The Little Drummer Girl, reasserted her comedic chops carrying Baby Boom to the finish line, partnered beautifully with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek for Crimes of the Heart, re-teamed with Woody Allen for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and directed for TV (including episodes of Twin Peaks) and movies (including the oddball documentary Heaven and the underrated Unstrung Heroes). She also helped produce Gus Van Sant's Elephant and dabbled in real estate. Her biggest recent splash in movies was in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, where she has a nude scene, the point of which was the horror that the sight of a naked woman only a decade younger than him inspired in her co-star Jack Nicholson. In fact, she looked pretty good -- certainly better than Nicholson does with his clothes on -- and her performance (and unsurgically enhanced body) helped make the movie a hit among women who enjoyed seeing Keaton getting hit on by Keanu Reeves. She can now be seen in TV commercials as the face of L'Oreal.

MAE WEST (1893-1980)

Mae West was beautiful, talented, versatile, and groundbreaking. Big deal. So were a million other women who don’t have nearly the reputation she does in the history of Hollywood. The reason that we’re writing about Mae West is because she took what was implicit in showbiz and made it explicit: her career, from beginning to end, was all about sex. Never before had anyone become so famous speaking so openly about what goes on between men and women – and she didn’t limit it to that paradigm, either. West was sexually experimental and was rumored to have had affairs with a number of women; and, despite the greater fag-hag veneration of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, she was also one of the earliest advocates of gay rights, having written a sympathetic play about homosexual men as early as 1928. Oh, yeah: she was a writer, too. Always more than just a pretty face and a round set of hips, West was an engaging speaker, a witty and talented writer, and by all accounts, a legendarily adept improviser. (She said one of her greatest regrets is that she never got to share the screen with Groucho Marx, the only comic she considered her equal at thinking on one’s feet.) Like most people who considered sex a serious business, she couched much of her speculations about it in humor, but that didn’t save her from being repeatedly censored, censured, prosecuted (at least twice successfully) for obscenity, and banned from half the radio and television networks in the country. West never stopped working, and while her latter-day projects like Sextette are often considered more creepy than funny, considering that she kept her career going for some 70 years while pioneering gay rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom some thirty years before the rest of the country came around, we’d say she earned a little indulgence.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, & Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Movie Review: "Ashes of Time Redux"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A few years ago, a glitteringly restored version of Wong Kar-wai's second feature, Days of Being Wild (1991) was released in the U.S. to general ecstasy from American Wong fans who had only been able to catch the movie on videotape or Chinatown showings of well-worn prints. Now, inspired by the discovery that many prints of his Ashes of Time had been deteriorating, Wong has gone to great pains to buff that movie up and re-release it as Ashes of Time Redux. An odd, distinctively dreamy martial arts/swordplay film set in the desert, Ashes was Wong's third production but his fourth film released to theaters; he spent some two years working on it, taking time to dash off his masterpiece, Chungking Express, in quick order and having it ready for release while Ashes was still in post-production. Ashes never got much play in this country, either, though it's been seen just enough to be widely regarded as beautiful but bewildering. Looesly based on a novel, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, by Louis Cha--Wong' script is said to be along the lines of a prequel, using some of the book's characters--Ashes technically belongs to an historical action genre called wuxia, and some of its strangeness to Western eyes may relate to necessary adherence to genre conventions--though when Ashes was seen by Hong Kong audiences, they were reportedly scandalized by the degree to which Wong had bent the rules of the form to accommodate his personal vision.

The movie is episodic, with a series of vignettes linked by the character of Feng (Leslie Cheung), an embittered former swordsman who works as a kind of manager to other swordsmen working as assassins or bounty hunters. For much of the film, Feng is heard on the soundtrack sharing his insights into the transient nature of love and happiness and the self-destructive effects of pride and blindness--most metaphorical and, in the case of a fighter who is losing his sight (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), literal--while flashbacks relate stories of his encounters with various clients and hirelings. Ashes was an all-star affair--others in the cast include Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Jacky Cheung, and Tony Leung Ka Fai--and with the importance of these figures in the busy, star-conscious Hong Kong film industry, Wong's tying up so many of them with a location shoot that went on for six months was something of a scandal in itself. (The shooting schedule became a juggling act, with different actors coming and going to keep up with their other commitments.) A recent piece in The New York Times described a moment from the "round-the-clock" production: "One day the shooting in a grotto stretched into evening, and a scene with Ms. Lin, delivering lines of an intense dialogue while staring into a spinning bird cage, headed into 40-plus takes. More than a dozen crew members were crammed into the small space, made stuffier when smoke was fanned in for atmosphere. Mr. Wong was in a corner watching on a monitor. Every so often, in his measured way, he made a suggestion to Ms. Lin or called out to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, 'Is that all you can do?' Mr. Doyle, now a longtime collaborator of Mr. Wong’s, said in a recent telephone interview that he heard that question as a constant challenge. 'It should be the mantra for all people in the arts.' ”

In the Times piece, Lin acknowledges that when she saw the finished film she didn't understand it, but "Now, 14 years later, I do. Each image is like a painting. The camera is his brush, and it’s only when he picks up the camera that he knows what the film’s about.” Which is true, and is both the movie's glory and its limitation. The movie's fast cutting and use of slow motion so slow that it breaks the action down into a series of frames streaking by now look like a dress rehearsal for some of the effects that Wong, shooting fast and dirty, brought off in Chungking Express, but that movie's humor and urban energy are missing from Ashes, which mostly settles into one languorous, broken-hearted mood. What's remarkable is the way that Wong and Doyle caught that mood in the movie's look and sustained it to feature length, but without any conflicting tones or a strong storyline, it can see like an awful lot of one thing. Still, if any movie deserved to be judged on the basis of how it looks at its best, it's Ashes of Time. The digital remastering is sumptuous, and it's been augmented by a superb new score by Yo-Yo Ma, who does as much as Wong ever did to tie the movie's images together. After a busy first ten years as a director, Wong's production has fallen way off in this past decade, and recently his reputation has taken a few dents to go with it; after getting perhaps the best reviews of his career with 2000's In the Mood for Love--like Ashes of Time, a title that could fit neatly onto just about any of his movies--his follow-up, 2046, played to mixed reactions, and this year's English-language My Blueberry Nights has shaped up as his biggest bomb since, well, Ashes of Time. The movie will always be a little baffling and too intensely personal to be fully satisfying to a mass audience, but Ashes of Time Redux makes it clearer than ever that it's an amazing achievement and an important step in the development of a major filmmaker. A movie about the pain of pleasures lost and reduced to shards of memory has been rescued from turning into an example of it.

Take Five: Wong Kar-Wai

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:45:00 GMT

With My Blueberry Nights getting a limited-release opening in major cities across the country this weekend, Hong Kong legend Wong Kar-Wai will finally make his English-language feature film debut, and, after twenty years of building his reputation as a filmmaker, get a shot at the cherished American audience that can make or break a director. The only question is, will My Blueberry Nights be his Fritz Lang moment or his John Woo moment? Early reviews indicate that it might be the latter; the movie wasn't especially well-received when it opened Cannes last year, and producer Harvey Weinstein's drastic cut is said not to have helped matters any. The jury, likewise, is still out on whether or not Norah Jones can act, but the testimony onscreen is said to be pretty damning. If it turns out that it's a stiff, it might be all to the good and he can return to the environment in which he did his greatest work; and regardless of its quality, we're all geeked about his upcoming remake of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. We'll have to wait and see, but even if it turns out that My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-Wai's first major dud, he's still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film. Here's five movies that prove it.

CHUNG KING EXPRESS (1994)

Although he'd shown flickers of brilliance before (and already begun his tradition of naming his films after pop songs with his 1988 directorial debut, As Tears Go By), Chung King Express is the movie that established Wong Kar-Wai as a director capable of legitimate greatness. The highly stylized film, about a heartbroken Hong Kong cop on the prowl who falls in with a gorgeous and mysterious young woman in a drug gang, so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he invested a chunk of his own money to get this and Wong Kar-Wai's other films released in the United States. Even now, after he's stretched substantially, this is still a stunning film, chock full of quirky moments, philosophical speculation on the mediated life, and his ability to coax stellar performances out of his actors. A Godardian triumph.

ASHES OF TIME (1994)

Years in the making, and based on a highly popular Asian epic novel, it would have been easy for Ashes of Time to be a major step back in the career of Wong Kar-Wai. (Some critics, indeed, think it was.) After having established that he was a director of skill, ambition and daring, it seemed unusual for him to take on that classic Hong Kong trope, the martial arts epic — but as it happened, there was nothing to fear. He approached it with his typical attitude, sacrificing not a whit of artistic integrity, and the result is one of the most thoughtful, surreal, philosophical action epics ever put on screen. Wong Kar-Wai takes what could be a by-the-numbers swordplay drama and turns it into something bizarre, achronal, and transcendental — a wonderful movie that's hard to follow, but impossible to forget.

HAPPY TOGETHER (1997)

Althought it wasn't quite as well received as his previous spate of films — at least partly because of the controversial nature of its subject matter in his homeland of Hong Kong — Happy Together is still a highly rewarding addition to Wong Kar-Wai's body of work, and the first movie in which he begins to seriously mine the themes of thwarted passion and self-nullifying ennui that would shape his finest work to come. Bouyed by two fantastic performances in the lead roles by Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, Happy Together follows the unconventional relationship between two expatriates from Hong Kong as they take a typically surreal and eventful road trip through Argentina. It's a passionate, sexy, and sometimes ridiculous movie, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Doyle, and a taste of greatness to come.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000)

Finally putting to bed his penchant for hip-pocket surrealism, Wong-Kar Wei finally plays it straight with this utterly beautiful, incredibly heartbreaking story of doomed romance set in the Hong Kong of the 1960s. Everything about it is pitch-perfect, from the stunning cinematography to the breathtaking costumes to the quiet, naturalistic screenplay, which makes its points with subtlety and grace rather than noise and distraction. The lead performances by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung — some of the most controlled, precise, and yet emotionally engaging screen acting in decades — help further elevate the story of two unrequited lovers who, alone in a city of millions, reenact a sort of sham shadowplay of the illicit affair their spouses are having with one another, from good to great.

2046 (2004)

It was a risky move to create a sequel to a movie as distinct and delicately perfect as In the Mood for Love. It was an even riskier move to create a sequel that returned the more avant-garde elements of Wong Kar-Wai's filmmaking style — chronological jumps, elements of surrealism, non-linear storytelling, and bits and pieces of science fiction and fantasy — to the mix. But if anyone could pull it off, he could, and he did, with a sequel that may not precisely follow the tone of the previous film, but captures its mood and spirit exactly. In 2046, we follow Tony Leung's character from In the Mood for Love after Maggie Cheung has left his life — he's a more bitter figure than before, but still filled with romantic longing, which he now attempts to sublimate into a science fiction novel he's writing. While it's not quite the instant classic that its predecessor was, it's still a very worthy film that shows how adept Wong-Kar Wei is at blending his ruling passions as a filmmaker.