A good movie

Not so long ago, I saw Wong Kar-wai’s last directing effort, ‘Yi dai zong shi’, but even though it was rather promising, I thought it was ultimately rather disappointing. Still, the guy remains a very interesting director so I decided to check one of his older movies as well. Apparently, even though it is a rather short feature, Wong Kar-wai struggled so much while making this movie that, during the post-production, he actually stopped working on it and made in the mean time ‘Chung hing sam lam’. Eventually, he still couldn’t let it go and, 14 years later, he came up with another version called ‘Ashes of Time Redux’ which was the version I saw. Anyway, even though I admired this movie just like most of the other work delivered by this director, I had a really hard time to connect with the damned thing. I mean, as usual, it looked quite gorgeous, I loved the soundtrack and the general mood created but the plot was seriously murky. Indeed, as a result, it was probably his most difficult movie to follow and I thought it was rather frustrating to watch. I mean, even though it was presented as an ancient martial arts feature (the official name for this genre is ‘wuxia’), in fact, there was barely any action scene at all, which wasn’t really a problem, but the characters came in and went away without any explanation and the whole thing remained as a result terribly obscure. Anyway, to conclude, even though I had a hard time with the damned thing, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Wong Kar-wai’s work.