Ashes of Time Redux

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Back in 1994, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s (2046, Fallen Angels) wuxia film Ashes of Time was seen as a debacle. It famously took over a year to shoot, a problem that was compounded by the fact that the majority was filmed in a remote Chinese desert. Production was so delayed that Wong was able to start and finish Chungking Express while Ashes quietly simmered in production hell. When Ashes did finally see the light of day, it was a commercial disaster. Behind all of the troubles, though, was a challenging, nuanced film and a jaw-dropping visual delight.

In 2008, Wong chose to re-cut the film as Ashes of Time: Redux. The new version consists of several minor changes and a run-time 10 minutes shorter than the original. More importantly, the gorgeous visuals and intricate storyline have stood the test of time.

Loosely related to Louis Cha’s novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes, the plot of Ashes of Time can be difficult to pinpoint. In a way, the film can be seen as a series of vignettes centred on Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), a middleman between assassins and those who require their services, and his friend Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai). Around these two swirl a series of characters including an assassin slowly losing his vision (Tony Leung Chui Wai), a woman who poses as her own brother (Brigitte Lin), a shoeless swordsman (Jackie Cheung) and a lovely, nameless woman in red (Li Bai). Each of these characters forces Feng and Yaoshi to confront elements of their unwittingly shared memories and to deal with their respective loss and isolation

While the narrative threads can occasionally be difficult to tie together, the gobsmackingly beautiful imagery Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle concoct make plot a secondary concern. The colours of the desert are heavily saturated, creating vivid reds in the surrounding landscape that are starkly contrasted by the lush green of foliage and beatific blues of scattered oases. Wong allows the camera to linger on his characters’ faces and to sweep languidly over, around and through his sets. During the film’s sporadic martial arts scenes, the camera either flits around like a single pair of eyes desperately trying to keep up with the lightning-quick chaos or slows the action down into deadly, impressionistic dances.

In bringing Ashes of Time back to the editing room floor, Wong hasn’t made the complex story more direct or easier to understand. What he has done is bring the film to a new set of eyes and removed it from the trying circumstances from which it was originally birthed. In 1994, Ashes of Time was a debacle. In 2009, Ashes of Time: Redux is a stunning example of visual artistry in film.