Homeward, Angel
Today, we begin a series of random thoughts on the movies of Wong Kar-Wai and first of these is about the idea of home. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that you can’t go home again – in the sense that you would have changed in the interim and things at home would have also changed. Wong Kar-Wai takes this further and sounds a warning – bad things can happen to you when you leave home.
In Days of Being Wild, the protagonist Yuddy runs away from home in search of his real mother and dies in the process. The ill-starred lovers in Happy Together go on holiday and things begin to fall apart. In Ashes of Time, the narrator Ou-yang Feng is forced to flee from his ancestral home by scandal and has to eke out a living by arranging low life “hits” in the desert. Along the same lines, the neighbours in In the Mood for Love are driven out of their homes by their adulterous spouses and you just know there can be no happy ending to this story.
That said, home is not necessary a happy place for some of these characters. Yuddy has to deal with his adopted mother’s infidelities and inconsistencies, Ou-yang Feng leaves his hut in the desert amidst a standstorm and a deep sense of foreboding – all these make you wonder they had a “real” home to begin with.
Then there are the bit part players – the hotel keeper’s daughter in 2046 who spends her days on the roof of the hotel and the good time girl Lulu (she appears in a number of his films) who seems to have no fixed abode and only very loose attachments. Their lack of a conventional home is matched by their increasingly tenous grip on reality as things develop.
It’s been said that Wong makes movies about misfits but I’m not sure if that’s always the case – there are some very odd characters like the Canned Pineapple Man who appears both in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels – it might be more accurate to say the common thread that runs through these characters is not homelessness but a thwarted yearning to belong. If that can be also expressed as a search for a home then maybe that’s a little closer to the truth.
So why do they leave? In the words of Policeman 6117 in Days of Being Wild – “if you are bored and a little frustrated, it’s good to get away for a little while” … but you can never go home again.
