Ashes of Time
So protracted was the production period of Ashes of Time, that not only did Wong Kar-wai find time to produce Eagle Shooting Heroes, he also managed to squeeze a masterpiece into a break in editing in the form of Chungking Express (1994). He was still tinkering with the film a dozen years later, tightening and wholly reshaping his oblique epic into the blazing restoration of the more widely-seen redux cut.
A dazzlingly impressionistic ode to wuxia, it’s the most elliptical and narratively challenging of Wong’s films. Taking little from Louis Cha’s source novel beyond its solitary archetypes, Ashes of Time offers a temporally fragmented vision of lost loves, glinting blades and sand-blasted faces, all refracted through Wong’s singular prism of passion and longing. With fight sequences by the great Sammo Hung and jaw-dropping photography from Christopher Doyle, it’s a hyper-sensory, elemental trip of a film, grounded in genre and elevated in style.