As claimed in their mission statement, Gateway Film Center is committed to showing films from around the world, such as those from Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai. Credit: Allie Fehr | Lantern Reporter
The sensual colors, echoing music and avant-garde storytelling of Hong Kong’s acclaimed filmmaker Wong Kar-wai made it to Columbus across 7,989 miles of land and sea.
As of Friday, the World of Wong Kar-wai at Gateway Film Center has allowed audiences to witness the work of one of the most famous foreign auteurs –– or filmmaker –– in their own backyard. The program has featured seven of Wong’s pieces, spanning from 1988 to 2004. “In The Mood For Love,” playing for the second time Thursday, will be the last showing of the series.
The news of Wong’s spotlight at Gateway stunned and stirred excitement in several local cinephiles, including in Luis Salas, a first-year in international business who said he has a particular interest in foreign language movies.
“I never thought I would see [Wong Kar-wai] in theaters,” Salas said. “It’s a very rare thing.”
Although streaming services, which Salas said allowed him to familiarize himself with Wong’s work, have made international content more accessible in recent years, Salas said the movie theater viewing experience cannot be rivaled when it comes to presenting Wong’s films.
“It’s just so much easier to get into it, to really appreciate it,” Salas said.
Allie Mickle, a third-year graduate student specializing in contemporary art and moving image in East Asia, said Wong’s artistic filmmaking style stood out to her the first time she saw “In The Mood For Love.”
“It’s the tragic story of love that isn’t meant to be,” Mickle said in an email. “The way he conveys the repressed emotions of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow through visuals and editing — their mirrored actions, the use of the color red, the repetition of music — always makes me feel like I’m in that same emotional state.”
The benefits of experiencing foreign films like Wong’s not only include unique approaches to filmmaking, but also presentations of different world perspectives, Salas said.
“It’s a shame that most Americans rarely watch foreign films,” Kirk Denton, a professor of Chinese language and literature, said in an email. “Foreign films open windows to other cultures and histories, and, though it’s a bit of cliché, this is more important than ever in a rapidly globalizing world.”
In Wong’s films, viewers can see how he reflects the complex nature of the Hong Kong identity, influenced by its history with Britain and mainland China, Denton said. This is portrayed subtly in “Happy Together,” the Wong film he said he chose to include in his Chinese film course at Ohio State.
“On the surface, it appears to be a story about a turbulent and troubled relationship between two gay men,” Denton said. “But the diasporic lives of the two main characters may say a lot about the particular history of Hong Kong and the ‘floating’ identity of Hong Kong people, many of whom had immigrated from the mainland, often to avoid wars or political persecution.”
Unlike what viewers are accustomed to in the United States, Salas said Wong’s films do not follow the fast pace of a typical action movie.
“You definitely need to have patience because they’re not fast-paced, usually,” Salas said. “They are slower than usual, than most modern blockbusters and stuff like that. Then you have to be willing to read subtitles.”
In the eyes of Wong fans like Salas, though, the films are worth the slower pace.
“There’s nothing like one of his films,” he said. “It’s a Wong Kar-wai film for a reason.”
