Chance Encounters and Compulsive Returns
Chance Encounters and Compulsive Returns
This chapter examines the films of Wong Kar-wai. The echoes and refrains that arise across the sets of films—Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, on the one hand, and In the Mood for Love and 2046, on the other hand—elicit a reflexive awareness of their narrative intricacies and of their coexistence within an authorial corpus. Rather than a series of events stitched into a self-contained causal chain, these films consist of fractured diegetic strands that connect at a meta-narrative level to produce an intertextual web of meaning from film to film. The unhinging of time in Wong's films, many critics have noted, conveys the historic mood of Hong Kong at the turn of the century, with the 1997 handover signaling a moment of extreme uncertainty, a rupture between past and future, and a crisis in identity.
Keywords: Wong Kar-wai, Chungking Express, Hong Kong, Fallen Angels, 2046
Hong Kong Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
