Anyone who has spent any time in Film Twitter – that strange social media subdivision where critics, cinephiles and industry folk are united by a medium, but little else – knows that it doesn’t take much to spark a heated argument there. Earlier this month, revered Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-Wai was at the centre of one, as stills from a new Criterion restoration of his 2000 film In the Mood for Love were passed around. The new images, it seemed, had a greener tint than in previous editions: had the colour grade been altered? And given that the restoration had been supervised by Wong himself, was this an experiment on his part or an assertion of his original vision? Back and forth the tweets went, with no one much the wiser.
Happily, we can see for ourselves this week, with a streaming event that offers much more to savour than technical debate. Seven of Wong’s films have been given glistening new 4K restorations for the World of Wong Kar-Wai retrospective, which also includes a number of unrestored titles. Launching on the ICA’s new online Cinema 3 platform on Monday, the retrospective extends to the BFI Player from 8 February.
Cinema screenings at the ICA and BFI Southbank will follow whenever the pandemic permits – but for now, in the midst of a wintry lockdown, a Wong feast feels just right. Whatever the precise grade, his work is reliably hot with colour and sensual detail – be it the steam rising off a pot of noodles, or the slick of sweat between entangled limbs. His very best films invite not simple viewing, but complete inhalation.
The ICA’s programme effectively offers a Wong a day for the coming week, with all the films available to stream there for a fortnight after their debut. Monday kicks things off, obviously enough, with his 1988 debut As Tears Go By. It’s his most conventional film, given its hoary narrative throughline of a Chinese triad gangster torn between love and honour, but enlivened with nascent, skittering flashes of his woozy signature style.
Tuesday brings Days of Being Wild, the film that christened Wong’s key partnership with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and it’s a clear step up – a dazzling whirl through the bright lights of 1960s Hong Kong, tracking a reckless playboy through personal and familial crisis. The glittering Chungking Express, his spiky, neon-soaked, multi-stranded tangle of crime romp and romcom, follows on Wednesday. On Thursday, his hour-long, Gong Li-starring erotic miniature The Hand. Fallen Angels, another seductive torrent of lowlifes and impossibly high style that almost plays as the dark-mode version of Chungking Express, is on Friday.
But my own favourites land on the weekend: very different individually, Happy Together and In the Mood for Love make for a swoonsomely romantic pair. The former’s portrait of a vacationing gay couple drifting, in more than one sense, through the unfamiliar playground of Buenos Aires is streaked with a raw grime you won’t find in the latter, which is a viable candidate for the most purely ravishing film ever made.
Returning to 1960s Hong Kong, its story of two neighbours who oh-so-slowly fall for each other upon realising their spouses are lovers contrasts Brief Encounter levels of contained heartbreak with intoxicatingly saturated imagery and music. Together with its heady, oblique follow-up 2046 (the final title to hit the ICA platform on 9 February), it’ll make for a dreamy lockdown Valentine’s Day treat a few days later. Not that this kind of indulgence needs any occasion at all.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Saint Maud
(StudioCanal, 15)
British writer-director Rose Glass’s debut has been heaped with plaudits and superlatives since its cinema release last year, but its brittle, jittery shoulders can carry them. Low-key and slow-burning until its great gasp of a finale, this stylishly spooked chiller about an obsessively pious carer out to save the soul of her hedonistic patient enriches its smoky claret atmosphere with actual philosophical curiosity.
The Capote Tapes
(Altitude)
You’d expect a really substantial documentary about Truman Capote to have been made by now – he had a brace of biopics 15 years ago, after all – but Ebs Burnough’s slick film surprisingly has that turf to itself. Which isn’t to say that it contains many revelations for Capote-heads, but its exploration of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, via archival interviews with many of the high-society friends it was about, is lively, gossipy stuff.
Muscle
(Dazzler, 18)
For those of us whose January self-improvement plan already lies in tatters, Gerard Johnson’s grimly comic psychodrama provides a warning against such goals, as a schlubby office drone (the superb Cavan Clerkin) finds his hyper-macho new personal trainer (Craig Fairbrass, slyly sending himself up) taking over every facet of his life. The setup is stronger than the resolution, but it’s a clever, bracing new angle on toxic masculinity.
Possessor
(Signature, 18)
The poisoned apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree in the case of Brandon Cronenberg, who shares his father David’s dark fixation with bodily invasion, but his icily accomplished second feature announces him as a dark artist in his own right. Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott are astonishing as, respectively, a hired assassin who works through the bodies of others, and her latest hapless avatar – their fight for corporeal control going to bloody, breathtaking extremes.
