Ouyang Feng (Cheung) makes a living as the proprietor of a desert inn, emotionally deadened following his lover's marriage to his elder brother, acting as an agent for penniless swordsmen or lost souls looking for revenge.
Huang Yaoshi (Leung Ka-fai) is a lethal blade whose cavalier attitude to life and love, plus a taste for a memory-wiping wine, has left a trail of recrimination.
Foremost amongst the vengeance seekers is Murong Yang (the incomparable Lin), a young man whose sister was rejected by Huang, and Murong Yin (also Lin), the sister who wants her brother dead for trying to harm the lusty Huang.
Other characters passing through the inn looking for peace of mind are Tony Leung Chiu-wai's near blind swordsman, Charlie Yeung’s peasant girl buying revenge with eggs and a mule, and Maggie Cheung as the object of Ouyang’s infatuation. Solace comes only through compromise as discovered by Jacky Cheung's kind-hearted assassin.
Like its protagonists Ashes of Time has spent years in the wilderness, legal wrangling keeping the film largely unseen save for bootleg quality DVDs and VCDs.
Original reviews were critical, but in any version Ashes of Time is an excellent wuxia pien (heroic swordplay movie). The elliptical season-chaptered plot grows clearer with subsequent viewings as a meditation on the curse of memory, the destructiveness of unrequited love, the cold comforts of chivalry, and the fleeting glory of battle.
Loosely based on Louis Cha’s four-volume saga The Eagle Shooting Heroes, director Wong creates an origins story for Cha's characters, travelling back to their formative years before they became supernatural warriors.
While the focus is on characters over Sammo Hung's spectacular action, Leung Chiu-wai's swordsman battling an army of bandits, Jacky Cheung slashing through a warehouse of villains, and Lin explosively tackling her reflection on a lake channel the energy of classic Hong Kong and Japanese swordplay movies from the 1960s and 70s.
Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle match the ambitious storytelling with astonishing burnished red and glowing yellow visuals, transforming the Chinese desert into a beautiful, threatening dreamscape, populated by an electric cast that, with Leslie Cheung now dead and Brigitte Lin retired, will never be repeated.
The Redux does not massively differ from Wong's original version, save a few digital tidy ups, a sonic makeover, and a tightened opening fifteen minutes (now minus one action scene), but despite the boom in Asian cinema since its first release Ashes of Time Redux is quite simply one of the best films of the year.
Rob Daniel
