THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY

THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY is a fascinating documentary about the collaboration between Vogue magazine and the Costume Institute at the Met - as embodied in the iconic American Vogue editor Anna Wintour and the Met's Curator Andrew Bolton.  While he is an unknown quantity at the start of the film, you soon learn to respect him. He has a passion for costume, and an understanding of how applied art is as important as a means of creative expression, and as a reflection of our economic social and political times.  He also shares an obsessive eye for detail and a faith in his own taste with Wintour.  Together, we see them shape a new exhibition and fund-raising ball, to be themed China: Through The Looking Glass.  For the curator, this is an opportunity to showcase haute couture that has been influenced not just by China, but by the fantasy of China shown to the West through movies and stars such as Anna Mae Wong or Wong Kar Wai.  Indeed, the latter is a designer of the exhibition and helps pull together the sound and visual design of the work.  For Wintour, the main task is to organise the now iconic Met Ball, balancing egos and red carpet stars and their entourages.  We realise that the money raised by this one event keeps the Costume Institute in business for the entire year.  

Together the pair work against tight deadlines and pull of a fantastic show and event.  They battle naysayers.  At the Met, the head of the Asian galleries is justifiably concerned that the fashion and showmanship is going to overshadow his works of art.  And in China, there are concerns that the exhibition is showing a fantasy rather than the reality of engagement with China, and reflecting years of Western appropriation and exploitation. But no-one seems more conscious of those debates than Bolton himself, who is keen to unpack those issues and explore those debates.

I came out of this documentary conscious that it was partly produced by Conde Nast, and so unlikely to show the protagonists in a bad light. Nonetheless, I was surprised at how far it was willing to engage with, and honestly depict the real controversies around the West's engagement with China, and indeed other issues in fashion. For instance, the show uses pieces from a John Galliano show, and the designer explains candidly what drew him back to fashion after he became, in his own words, an outcast, for an anti-semitic rant.  In general, it's the time spent with the designers that's the most fascinating. I loved touring the galleries with John Paul Gaultier - seeing him reminisce about different collections and explain why they worked.  And I guess that reflects the real strength of this doc - which is its access to people.  I loved hearing Galliano and Gaultier comment on design, or being taken inside Wintour's home. All of this makes THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY essential viewing for anyone interesting in art or fashion or the combination of the two.

THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie was released in the USA on streaming services in April and is currently on release in the UK in cinemas and on streaming services.

Wong Kar Wai Retrospective - DAYS OF BEING WILD

Continuing with our sporadic Wong Kar Wai retrospective, we come to his 1991 feature, DAYS OF BEING WILD. A critical success but a commercial failure, the movie has all the hallmarks of Wong Kar Wai's particular brand of cinema: love-lorn urban men; women unable to move on from heart-break; the beautiful, evocative camera-work of Christopher Doyle; kitsch American popular music; and a plot that is less event-driven than an exploration of character and mood.

We are Hong Kong in the 1960s. It's monsoon season and the colour-scape of the film is lush green and brooding blue. Tragic pop-star Leslie Cheung takes on the lead role of Yuddy - an emotionally jaded young man who seems unable to maintain a stable relationship with the many girls who fall in love with him. The first of these is a naive, whimpering girl called Su Lizhen, played by Wong Kar Wai regular, Maggie Cheung in a "typical" role. The second is a ballsy show-girl called Leung Fung-Ying, played brilliantly by Carina Lau. Possibly a third is Yuddy's controlling, intimidating, ex-whore mother (Rebecca Pan). In some ways, she is the most interesting character, given her decision to cruelly reveal to Yuddy that she is actually his adoptive mother, and that his real mother is living in the Philippines.

In contrast to Yuddy, Wong Kar Wai presents one of his classic policeman characters. Andy Lau plays a decent neighbourhood copper, who comes across Su Lizhen stalking Yuddy's apartment. He takes pity on her, and is so emotionally affected by their encounters that he leaves Hong Kong for the Philippines. There he will come across Yuddy, who is now searching for his birth-mother.

DAYS OF BEING WILD is far from a masterpiece and viewers not familiar with Wong Kar Wai's patient mood pieces may be frustrated by its longueurs. However, it's a rewarding film for fans not least because it takes us further on the journey to the most perfect expression of Wong Kar Wai's style - IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE - a movie presaged by the brief, irrelevant and yet lovely little cameo of Tony Leung at the end of the film.

DAYS OF BEING WILD played Berlin and Toronto 1991 and was released that year. It is available on DVD.

Wong Kar Wai retrospective - AS TEARS GO BY/WONG GOK KA MOON

AS TEARS GO BY sees Wong Kar Wai's essentially romantic, fanciful nature shoe-horned into a conventional Hong Kong traid movie, reminiscent of MEAN STREETS. The result is a movie that is occasionally surprising but which has dated badly. Indeed, to modern eyes, it can sometimes feel like a pastiche. Having said all that, the movie opens in classic WKW territory. We're in a cramped flat in Kowloon and a young man (Andy Lau of INFERNAL AFFAIRS fame) is about to fall in love with a woman he has barely met. Instead of the femmes fatales of later flms, AS TEARS GO BY features a young Maggie Cheung as a milk-sop provincial who simpers in a hugely under-powered role. Naturally, this new relationship will force Brother Wah to reconsider his future as a gangster. It doesn't take much: he was already getting tired of bailing out his volatile, useless side-kick, Fly (classic Joe Pesci territory).

The movie oozes eighties stylings. There's a deeply annoying synthesizer sound-track; everyone looks like they trying to be extras in TOP GUN; the plot is pretty conventional and the denouement utterly unsurprising. Jacky Cheung over-acts horribly as Fly and Andy Lay isn't given a chance to display the talent he shows in INFERNAL AFFAIRS. So, pretty much the only reason to watch this film is to trace out the developing style of Wong Kar Wai. We can see it in superficial things like the use of cheesy songs and stroboscopic photography from DP Wai-Keung Lau. But we can see it in the substance of the film and the scenes that sit around the obligatory set-piece action sequences: lovers are thwarted and romantic life is squeezed between the petty obligations of real life.

AS TEARS GO BY was originally released in 1988 and played Toronto 1989. It is available on DVD.

*Thanks to the old lag, Berko, for clueing me in to the correct terminology for this maddening effect that so marred my enjoyment of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS.

Wong Kar Wai Retrospective - CHUNG KING EXPRESS

CHUNG KING EXPRESS is a wonderful film from Wong Kar Wai. Originally released in 1994 to critical acclaim, it foreshadowed much of the thematic material of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and 2046 and some of the stylistic mannerisms of the disastrous MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS.

The movie takes the form of two loosely connected stories set in contemporary Hong Kong. As in later films, Wong Kar Wai takes us into cheap diners in dingy, crowded cities. Bus terminals have lockers that are dented and covered in grafitti and the floor is strewn with litter. The protagonists live in cluttered filthy apartments with mould in the shower and subsist on canned food bought in grubby 7-11s. The great thing about this film is, however, that it doesn't judge any of this. Indeed, it rather revels in the accidental beauty of such scenes. The key to these films is to uncover the romantic leanings of the ordinary people who inhabit these locales - the people one might pass on the street and assume, rather patronisingly, were leading drab uninteresting lives. So, in sharp contrast to his later films, the characters in the film look "normal". They aren't dressed to perfection, hovering in a state of delicate beauty: girls wear normal clothes, but even when they dress up, it's in a rather grubby mac and blonde wig.

But there are other elements that form a straight line through to MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS. The use of popular, almost cheesy, Western pop songs on almost continuous loop; the love of neon signs; a femme fatale; a camera that follows its prey with a voyeuristic, intimate glee; and in the first section the use of slow-mo and distorted vision to try and capture the frenetic pace of city life.

My preference is for the scenes where the camera is fluid but not "interefered with" in the style so irritating in the first scenes of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS. And it's hard to know whether my weaker response to the first story is due to the shooting style. Still, even apart from that, the story is lyrical, compelling and beautiful. A lonely police officer (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is mourning a failed relationship, creating bizarre little rituals involving out-of-date canned food to focus his mind. He runs across a mysterious blonde, who turns out to be a drug smuggler. (Note the fantastically fast-paced, beautifully edited scene in which she suits up and organises the Indian mules.) As we come to expect in a Wong Kar Wai film, when the two finally meet their relationship is fleeting and muted - and is valued mostly for the memories it will generate.

The second story takes similar material. Another lonely cop (a very young Tony Leung) is mourning another failed relationship, in another cramped apartment. He strikes up a bizarre relationship with another quirky girl, who expresses a desire for intimacy by secretly cleaning his flat! It sounds bizarre and it is bizarre but it's never cheap or crudely funny. Rather, it's sweet, strange and wonderfully fresh. This is largely down to Tony Leung's superbly melancholy presence and a rightly award-winning performance by Faye Wong - the stand-out actor in this film. It just goes to show how important it is to cast actors and indeed locations that can make the most surreal and unabashedly romantic material seem real and natural. That is the key difference between a pantheon film like CHUNG KING EXPRESS and a disappointment like MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS.

A partial review of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Wong Kar Wai has made some great movies in the past, not least the pantheon film, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. His movies are known for their lavish attention to production design; beautiful women in stunning dresses and the mesmerising control of Christopher Doyle's cinematography. They also contain some out the great performances of Asian cinema, not least Tony Leung in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and 2046. Sadly, MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS, his first English-language, American-set movie, is a travesty. In fact. I walked out of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS after forty-five minutes. I had wanted to leave after ten minutes, but willed myself to keep sitting there, hoping that the movie would pick up. It didn't.

The problems are manifold. The script has no narrative drive; characters speak in banalities; Norah Jones, Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn over-act; one suspects that Norah Jones actually cannot act; Jude Law can't maintain a Northern English accent; Rachel Weisz can't do a Southern American accent; Darius Khondji's cinematography is deliberately stylised but looks cheap and amateurish (how many ways can you film someone through a window or reflected in glass, or shot from a CCTV camera?).....Net result: I had zero interest in continuing to watch Norah Jones' heartbroken waitress drifting through different bars, moping at various uninteresting characters.

Essentially, this is a movie that is badly written, badly acted and badly filmed.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS opened Cannes 2007 and was released in Canada, Finland, France, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Greece, China, Singapore and Estonia in 2007. It opened earlier in 2008 in Hong Kong, Latvia, Turkey, Russia, Switzerland and Bulgaria. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in March in South Korea, Colombia, Argentina, Italy, Brazil and Japan. Finally, it gets a limited release in the US on April 4th.

Wong Kar Wai retrospective - 2046

After the perfection of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE came the sequel, 2046 - a reflexive, rambling film that was ultimately a failure despite its ravishing visuals. Tony Leung reprised his role as Chow, now living in the Hong Kong of the late 1960s. He lives in a seedy hotel, next to room 2046 - a metaphor and focus for all his regrets and sexual yearnings. At the same time, he's writing a sci-fi novel set in 2046 - a place where you can relive your dreams in perpetuity. In this strange world of past, present and future, Chow meets a parade of beautiful, mysterious women, each dressed to perfection and photographed in a state of heightened beauty. If all these themes and striking images had been harnessed to empathetic characters and a proper story, Wong Kar Wai might have given his fans a film to treasure. Instead, the movie feels self-indulgent and unsatisfying. And, to paraphrase an interview with DP Christopher Doyle during a retrospective at the National Film Theatre, somewhat redundant. Wong Kar Wai said everything he needed to in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE.

2046 played Cannes and London 2004 and is widely available on DVD.

Pantheon movie/Wong Kar Wai retrospective - IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE/FA YEUNG NIN WA

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is one of the most beautiful and touching movies of recent years. It is quite simply a story of unconsummated love between a man, Chow, and a woman, Li-zhen, who decide to rise above the pettiness of the world that surrounds them. They first meet in the cramped apartment building that they share - surrounded by nosy neighbours and the noise and fast pace of Hong Kong in the 1960s. Tony Leung plays Chow as a weary, hard-bitten newspaper man. The emotional range he conveys and the empathy he evokes in the audience won him the Best Actor prize at Cannes in 2000. Though a married man, he becomes transfixed by his glamourous new neighbour. They spend time together and the sexual tension is evident. The discovery that his wife and her husband are having an affair changes everything. At once, the tension is heightened as they play-act the roles of their spouses - indulging in dialogue they would so dearly love to be for real. And yet, they cannot now consummate their relationship because that would be as cheap as the world that surrounds them.

The story is reminiscent of BRIEF ENCOUNTER, but the resulting film couldn't be more different. The movie feels like a lament to a lost age. Wong Kar Wai delights in the fashion, interior decor and music of the 1960s. The movie is quite self-consciously retro, whereas BRIEF ENCOUNTER is delightful because it is so definitely of its time. The feeling of self-indulgence in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is heightened by the fact that Wong Kar Wai seems content to meander through his sets and linger in places he has no business being. So, Christopher Doyle's camera will gently move through corridors, into bedrooms and cramped kitchenettes. Sometimes, the action will be off screen or reflected in mirrors. The whole movie seems to live in a world where colours are brighter, movement is slower and emotions are inescapable. And that's what transforms a basically simple story into an unforgettable tragedy, making IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE a true pantheon movie.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE was released in 2000 and won Best Actor and the Technical Prize at Cannes. It is widely available on DVD, but if you ever have the chance to see it on the big screen you should definitely avail yourself of the opportunity.