Ashes of Time Redux--A Modern Epic

The flag is still.  The wind is calm.  It is the heart of man which is in turmoil!.

I just came out of a screening of "Ashes of Time Redux", the film that Wong Kar Wai reworked more than a decade after the initial release of "Ashes of Time", that legendary (though little seen) film set in the world of jianghu (martial arts fantasy).  Before I even made it out of the theater, a word was already swirling in my brain, stabbing at my consciousness:  epic.  Yes, epic!  I kept thinking of Homer’s Iliad, his tale of the heroic deeds of worthy men who proved their valor on the plains of Troy, and whose bravery and deeds were the stuff of legend for hundreds of years before being crystallized in the mouth of that great Greek poet.

China has its own tradition of the tales of heroism at the hands of great warriors, guided by a rarefied code of honor, able to perform feats that to the ordinary eye appear superhuman.  These heroes carry, embodied in these tales, the highest values of the people who celebrate their deeds, real and imagined, to this day.

Wong Kar Wai takes this epic tradition of warriors and their tales of valor and turns it on its ear.  The epic scale is still present—Chris Doyle’s cinematography leaves no doubt there—but Wong’s concerns trace the internal epic we are all engaged in, be we legendary heroes of myth and story, or ordinary folk who will never be singled out for our valor in feats of arms.  This universal epic, of all times and places, belonging to every one born on this earth, is the tragedy of love.  The path of love, its twists and turns as crystallized and focused in the lives of extraordinary heroes, is the tale of heroism and ignominious defeat sung in "Ashes of Time Redux".  Love here joins hands with fate in its inscrutability, its unique unfolding in each individual’s life.  Yet each individual tale of love is universal, despite its specificity.  Love only has so many tropes, and most of us, if we are honest, will experience them all.  How many have come to the end of their lives and have not known the doubt and uncertainty of love, the pain of unrequited love, or of love fully returned but forbidden by outside forces?  

"Ashes of Time Redux" is an inner epic, one that betrays little of itself on first acquaintance.  But the misfortunes of love become the dominating force that, in the end, we see direct the lives of even legendary heroes.  Madness, disappointment, regret, defeat—these are the fruits of this epic struggle.  As with the tale of Troy, this epic is deeply tragic.  But, instead of the fall of a great civilization (for the love of a woman, we are reminded by the poet), it is the loss of love, the existential loneliness of human-beings who live without love, that is the great tragedy at the heart of "Ashes of Time Redux".

This new version of "Ashes of Tim"e works on all levels to tell this epic story.  The visuals are positively swoon-inducing.  The sands of the desert are now a lurid turmeric yellow.  Light is a creature with a life of its own that, on occasion, deigns to interact with the landscape and the beautiful faces of those trapped by love.  Emotion is stronger than words, often giving lie to words as they are spoken.  This emotion is conveyed on screen through image and sound over the treacherous medium of language.  Images and sound often contradict the glib words spoken by the main protagonist and narrator of this epic, Ouyang Feng.  It is not only music, but also the sound of the wind, the trickling of water, a woman’s weeping (or her stony silence) that reveals the emotions at play beneath the verbiage that adorns this film like a delicate filigree.  The music has been rescored and reorchestrated to seamlessly serve the poet/director’s purpose.  The story now unfolds more linearly, but this only serves to heighten the tragic tone of the film as it builds, scene by scene, to an emotionally devastating climax.  

The flag is still.  The wind is calm.  It is the heart of man which is in turmoil!  So begins this modern epoch, so ends this modern epoch--"Ashes of Time Reux".