As Tears Go By (1998)

Stuart's Nite

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece via Popmatters:

Fluid and erratic, viscous and elusive, Wong Kar-Wai's films are feats of dream logic. Scattered across genres and generations, they reveal that, despite their strangeness, they concern familiar human experiences: loyalty, sadness, obsession, and, of course, love. Wong Kar-Wai's genre reference and twisting brings to mind other cinematic masters, from Jean-Luc Godard in Chungking Express (Chong Qing Sen Lin, 1994) to Martin Scorcese in As Tears Go By (Wong Gok Ka Moon, 1988). But Wong also creates a filmic space entirely his own, with his signature use of bright colors, strobe effects, handheld camerawork, pop music, and broad themes.
In nearly all of Wong's work, vibrant color hints at bottled up emotions or unexpressed desire. At the end of As Tears Go By, just before Wah (Andy Lau) is shot, the camera peers at the foreboding parking lot where he is to meet his fate through orange plastic curtain flaps. In this sudden glimpse of color, we see the location of Wah's death before he even arrives. It is both distancing and shocking distancing because we are forced to take a step back, to examine the establishing shot through a filter, and shocking because the color is unlike any other we have seen yet in the film. Up to this point, it's been all neon blue and muddy browns, and now with a simple switch in foreground color, Wong Kar-Wai eerily sets the stage for an equally shocking ending.
Such sentiment drives all of Wong Kar-Wai's films, the desire to live in a dream, to make the external world as beautiful as the internal one. His dreams evoke the splendor of the everyday. At the end of Chungking Express, when Faye (Faye Wong) takes a job as a flight attendant in order to see California, she bringing her dreams into real life. And that is Wong Kar-Wai's gift to his audiences, bringing his dreams into our real lives.