As Tears Go By Review (page 2)

Essentially, the film is split between its worlds of gangsters and romance, a split mirrored in the dilemma facing Andy. As has been mentioned, for me at least, it is not the gangster side of the story which grips the imagination. When in the world of the hoodlum, we see characters with vastly exaggerated mannerisms - no doubt as it really is in such a subculture - but apart from Andy’s character, we take these facades to be the whole of the personae of the other gangsters, which is disappointing considering WKW’s ability to extract complex layers of characterisation, as proved in later films. In fact, it is possible to discern something of the essence of later WKW by comparing what he does in parts of Tears, but avoids in later films: beyond Andy and Maggie’s relationship, all dialogue in this film is quite uncharacteristic of WKW - often plot-driven, with surface significance but little else. Such dialogue is normal for the majority of filmmakers simply because all that is needed to be communicated is present: there is gestural clarity, something all the more important in an urban culture where one struggles to be heard. But since Tears, WKW has obsessed over miscommunication, whereby dialogue becomes an introverted device which often only hints at motives and desires, more important as self-expression of a concept than any attempt to communicate clearly. It is no surprise that later WKW characters often largely abandon dialogue in favour of monologue.

With Maggie, Andy’s changing feelings force him to reappraise his mode of communication from the ground up. Initially he doesn’t treat her as anything special, and so addresses her with the same mix of casualness shading into contempt which is the norm for him. But, in the section of the film which marks a diversion from Kowloon gangland brutality, we see Andy on Lantau Island, suddenly struggling to find a sufficient manner of expression. For WKW, the usage of the song, Take My Breath Away, is enough to hint at his feelings, and such alternative means of communication have found favour with later WKW characters (for example, Leon Lai’s jukebox song in Fallen Angels, or the coded boarding pass in Chungking Express). But for Andy, he must make do with building on language from scratch. And so we find him traipsing across the island to find her, and then waiting at the port all day until her ferry arrives. Then, seeing her with her doctor ‘boyfriend’ in tow, he hesitates before she notices him, the handheld camera swinging from his point of view to hers. In a classic moment of WKW humour, when asked how long he had been waiting, Andy lies, saying he just arrived. However, where words fail him, actions take over. After being prompted by Maggie’s pager message the pair are reunited, Andy literally dragging Maggie to a phone box for a defining scene of the film.

From this point on, the romance is resolved as ‘in being’, and WKW leaves it at that until circumstances intervene to end it at the end of the film. Once again, this shows how WKW is less interested in the state of a continuing relationship than its beginning or end. However, compared to other WKW films, the portrayal of the change of feeling in Tears is far more simple than, say, the tentative manoeuvres in the second half of Chungking, where WKW manages to extract the maximum potentiality and expectation from the story, arguably without even fully resolving a relationship by the end of the film. But anyhow, Tears still impresses in invoking a compelling relationship which pulls the audience in despite being quite economical on narrative.

Of course, we are talking about WKW’s first film as director, so of course there is much which doesn’t withstand the test of time and, most importantly, there is much in the way of technique and theme that the director doesn’t resurrect in his later work. Note, for example, the mass crowd scene in downtown Mongkok where Jacky is chased out onto the streets and given a beating. The crowds - shot in long shot from a high vantage point - are clearly out to see a film being made. In later films, WKW would either give an artificially depopulated Hong Kong (Days of Being Wild), or some other technique which would separate the characters of the film from the ‘human backdrop’ (e.g., the first half of Chungking with its roving handheld and blurred stop motion, or the second half of that film with its telephoto long shot, or Fallen Angels with its ‘liquid’ lens and blurry fast-forward crowd). Also, WKW has since minimised his use of scenes featuring more than two characters interacting - Tears has several of these such scenes, all in the gangster parts of the film: like the marriage scene where Jacky’s character is unable to provide his ‘little brother’ with a suitable ceremony. Tellingly, the multiple character scenes lack the feel of later WKW, and concentrate on matters such as pride and status: issues of surface importance in a society of the many, but lacking the intimacy of WKW’s more introverted themes.

In terms of genre and plotting, as has been mentioned, Tears is ‘influenced’ by Mean Streets. Compared to later WKW works though, there is a narrowness and inflexibility of genre which serves to limit the film somewhat. Tears is not the only WKW film to have influences from other stories - Happy Together draws inspiration from Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair, and Ashes Of Time is supposed to be an extrapolation of Jin Yong’s Eagle Shooting Heroes - but in those later films, WKW only has the source material as a basis, and he largely jettisons the responsibility of following the source closely. But in Tears, the attempts to follow the story coherently (something which would seem not to matter to later WKW), result in the film veering near to the territory of melodrama.

In fact, the success of Tears (critically and commercially) meant that the film inspired many other Hong Kong filmmakers of the period, resulting in a raft of street level gangster movies, often with a smattering of tragic romance, but employing more melodrama to cover up their lack of charm or style. The likes of A Moment Of Romance - a movie also featuring Andy Lau as a cool but troubled and not very successful low-level gangster who falls for an otherwise reticent and frankly boring Wu Chien Lien - became typical of an entire genre of Hong Kong movie output from the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s, where the combination of doomed violence and doomed love was extended to near-hysterical levels. In this sense, Tears has a lot to answer for, not least when one considers how the faults of movies influenced by Tears are often merely magnifications of Tears’s own weaknesses. For instance, consider Maggie’s character who, though she ‘flowers’ later on in the story, is still very much secondary in characterisation: waiting for Andy, living by Andy, we never see her own thought or independence. This fault would be addressed by WKW later in his career, like when we see Maggie in Days Of Being Wild learning to live without the central character, or when we learn that Tony Leung’s air hostess girlfriend in Chungking has moved way beyond his memories of her.