Cannes. Ashes of Time Redux.

"For Hong Kong, it was the decade from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, when directors like Tsui Hark and John Woo were revitalizing the crime film, and when young Wong Kar-wai was revolutionizing the misty romance. At the time, Hong Kong also had perhaps the world's greatest roster of glamorous stars, and prominent among them were Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, the two Tony Leungs, Jacky Cheung, Carina Lau and Charlie Young. All of them are in Wong's 1994 martial-arts reverie Ashes of Time, which had a special screening last night in a version revised by the director."

Updated through 5/25.

"The first surprise about Wong Kar-wai's revamped, re-edited and rescored version of his 1994 cult wuxia classic Ashes of Time is just how little has been changed," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "The second is how much these minor tweaks still have helped clarify the Hong Kong auteur's interpretation of Louis Cha's historical fantasy novel The Eagle-Shooting Hero, confirming that his most poetic, experimental film belongs not in the curiosity cabinet but on the big screen."

"Wong was not content merely to repeat or reinvigorate the genre when he began shooting Ashes of Time more than 15 years ago, but decided to reinvent it completely," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "[O]ne wonders what fecundity of imagination - or perversity of artistic willfulness - it took to shoot a costume epic that is made up almost entirely of dark rooms, close-ups and tightly constricted long shots... Wong's obsessive themes of memory, the irretrievability of the past and the impossibility of love, trump those of the traditional wuxia film, which tend to deal more with honor and the indomitability of the spirit."

"The original 1994 Ashes, which I haven't seen (it's available in a poorly done DVD version) apparently didn't make much sense, and it certainly doesn't now, but, lord, is it a vision to behold - a wuxia film turned into an abstract expressionist action painting," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Patrick Frater has a brief report on the emotionally charged screening - and a pick of Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, together - at the Circuit.

Updates, 5/20: "Culled from prints gathered from around the world, this newly re-edited and digitally tweaked iteration runs about 10 minutes shorter than the original, and rather more coherently," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Drenched in shocking color - the desert shifts from egg-yolk yellow to burnt orange under a cerulean sky - the film is Mr Wong's most abstract endeavor, a bold excursion into the realm of pure cinema. It also now seems like one of his most important. Ashes of Time Redux will be released by Sony Pictures Classics in September."

The Guardian's Xan Brooks gets a few words with Wong.

Ray Pride's found the poster.

Update, 5/23: "Insanely gorgeous, filled with poses and ecstasies, and always trembling on the brink of self-parody, this tale of medieval warriors and the women who can't forget (or remember) them evokes the most extreme mannerism of the 60s - Last Year at Marienbad, Flaming Creatures, Once Upon a Time in the West," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Memories should be made of this."

Update, 5/25: "Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly described Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man as an 'acid western,' but I wonder if he had known that Wong Kar-wai beat Jarmusch to the punch in 1994 with his acid wuxia, Ashes of Time," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Messy, intoxicatingly insular and obsessive, and painfully tortured by a kind of ecstatic regret, Ashes of Time has re-emerged as one of cinema’s greatest films."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 1:05 PM