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Behind the majority of great Hong Kong films made within the last twenty years looms an angry resistance to the growing power of money as the cultural definition of value. Frequently, the cornmodification and depersonalization of Hong Kong life is directly associated with the United States and the American dollar. But few face the issue head-on. A great many Hong Kong directors venture into the realms of fantasy, the golden days of long ago, or various forms of idealization and exaggeration to break free of the late capitalist yolk weighing heavily on their necks. This kind of political passion is not generally associated with the films of Wong Kar-wai, but under their more obvious concerns with all kinds of marginalized love, they contain, in their passionate assertions of the independence of human beauty and importance from cash, a secret core of resistance to things American and dehumanized.
More recently, Wong too has ventured into fantasy-tentatively in In the Mood For Love (2000) and to the point of saturation in 2046 (2004)-but in his early films he steadfastly refused to leave the ordinary world of daily routine to evade the materialist trap. This becomes increasingly clear watching the five early films made by this sublime director that have been assembled for Kino Video's well produced Wong Kar-wai DVD Collection. The discs in the collection are uniformly beautiful in their letterboxed reproductions of the films and uniformly excellent in the graphic clarity of the subtitles and their literate English translation of the dialog. The only discs that provide 'extras' of interest are Chungking Express, which contains some brief commentary by Quentin Tarantino, and Happy Together, which features an interview with Wong Kar-wai and a 'making of documentary. The real center of interest is continuities and discontinuities in Wong's vision and esthetics that become visible when the collected films are viewed as a group.
As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and Happy Together cumulatively reveal Wong Kar-wai as a poet of quotidian alienation at its lowest ebb. In these films, we wander among characters on the fringes of society living in extremely basic circumstances who work, if they work at all, at drab food concessions, in garish dance halls, or as peripatetic...