So seeing Everything Everywhere All at Once made me want to watch more Wong Kar Wai, and this is the next movie of his in the boxed set. Like all the Blu-rays in that set, this is a remastered version, and I guess the big change he made on this one was to really go hard at the green color grading (which I guess thematically fits with how green the WKW segment in EEAaO was).

The focus of this one is around a nexus of characters who come together in different ways. There’s this asshole dude who is apparently irresistible to women, who he is charming to and then treats like shit; the girl who falls for him and then leaves him; the next girl who falls for him; and the cop who patrols the area outside this guy’s apartment, and ends up having a big conversation with the first girl while she is sad. Oh, and the dude’s adopted mother, and his quest to find his birth mother.

It’s mostly a movie about these characters being variously kind or horrible to each other, with the kind of languid feel that WKW and cinematographer Christopher Doyle are known for. Except then also there’s a few scenes of completely random gangster violence. It’s like a transitional fossil between his earlier Scorsese-influenced As Tears Go By and In the Mood for Love — but closer to the latter, which it’s technically in a quasi-trilogy with.

(So the trilogy thing: The first girl is Maggie Cheung, playing a character with the same name as her protagonist in In the Mood for Love, and Tony Leung shows up at the end as an unnamed character seemingly disconnected from anything else. There’s nothing in either of these movies to say that they’re the same characters in both movies… but there’s also nothing saying that they’re not. The third movie, 2046, I haven’t yet seen, so I have no idea how it fits in.)

This is one of those movies where the plot isn’t particularly noteworthy, and the male lead is such an unpleasant guy that it’s annoying focusing so much on him. But it really does capture a sort of feeling well, and the longer I get from watching it — I’m late on writing this up, and actually watched it last week — the fonder I grow of it. It’s still not up to the standard of his later masterpieces, but this no longer feels like an “early work” in the same way As Tears Go By did. Recommended.