Happy birthday Wong Kar-wai!

Considering Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s dual status as a living legend and a gold standard of cool, working on one of his sets reads as nightmarish. In his book, The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (2014), film studies lecturer Gary Bettinson clocks Wong’s shooting ratio at up to 40 takes per scene. Tony Leung himself, a longtime Wong collaborator and one of the actors most commonly associated with his filmography, is said to have described the director’s work ethic as “taxing” in Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover’s City on Fire (1999). Tight control over every aspect of the filmmaking process, plus long shoots, plus underreliance on scripts; is this artistry, or is it tyranny?

Honestly: it doesn’t matter. His audiences aren’t having dinner with him. They’re in the theater for his visual storytelling prowess. His actors don’t seem to mind the strain that his creative approach places on them, either—likely because the outcome justifies all the sweat and suffering. Wong wasn’t always Wong Kar-wai™. Once upon a time, he was just another filmmaker in the Hong Kong New Wave, a protege of his fellow director and elder, Patrick Tam. Having achieved clout, developed a persona, and built a reputation, and each of those having risen to high esteem, it makes sense that his recurring stable of cast members—not only Leung, but also Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Faye Wong, Leslie Cheung, and Takeshi Kaneshiro—would willingly subject themselves to the rigors of his productions. Wong is worth it all. He’s an institution, though one overdue for greater scrutiny than critics, particularly in Western media, care to pay him: claims of abuse and maltreatment demand attention, institution or no.

Wong is also an enigma, despite serving as a cornerstone of Hong Kong cinema for the last four decades and change. The average high-profile arthouse filmmaker will happily talk about their cinematic influences; Wong famously hesitates to talk about his own, though this of course doesn’t stop critics from making educated guesses. Maybe no one needs to know which directors have shaped his directing sensibilities in order to appreciate them. Still, it’s rare for a filmmaker to keep mum about his favorite peers, especially when he’s so open about his favorite authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Manuel Puig. The effect of their writing is structural. Wong’s movies simultaneously feel firmly grounded and patchwork, as if his stream of consciousness is cured in concrete.

Likewise set in stone is the sum total of Wong’s inspirations with his own personal ticks as an artist. His movies are, again, capital “C” cool, rich in atmosphere and mood, those dual traits that relate to one another like close cousins. One is the oxygen that characters in a narrative breathe; the other, the carbon dioxide they exhale. A Wong film, especially among his latter-day work, is at once the chicest and most melancholic party you’ve ever attended. Everyone is beautiful in Wong’s worlds, but nobody’s terribly happy—captured best in the five films synonymous with his name, in honor of his birthday.

Chungking Express (1994)