Ashes of Time

From AsianWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

User Rating

Current user rating: 51/100 (2 votes)

You need to enable JavaScript to vote

Profile

Movie: Ashes of Time
Chinese: Dung che sai duk (東邪西毒)
Director: Kar Wai Wong
Writer: Louis Cha (novel), Kar Wai Wong
Producer: Kar Wai Wong
Cinematographer
Release Date: September 16, 1994
Runtime: 100 min
Language: Cantonese
Country: Hong Kong, China, Taiwan

Plot

Ouyang Feng runs a small inn at the edge of the desert, he is also known for being a problem solver, in other words he arranges murder for the right price. Every year during the season in which peach trees blossom a close friend visits him, Huang Yaoshi. This year Huang brought something for his friend Ouyang, a magical wine that would make one forget the past. Ouyang could not bring himself to drink the wine while Huang drank without worry. Over the next year many travellers pass by the inn each bringing their stories, many of them being about lost love and why would one wish to forget the past.

Directors Note

In the winter of 1992, someone suggested that I make a film adaptation of Louis Cha’s famous martial-arts novel The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. I re-read all four volumes of it and finally decided not to do an adaptation but instead to develop a new story about the early years of two of its main characters, Dongxie (Lord of the East) and Xidu (Lord of the West). In the book, both of them appear only in old age. I chose these two because they have exactly opposite personalities; you could think of one as the antithesis of the other. Martial-arts fiction has a long history in Chinese literature. It has generally been most popular in times of turmoil, such as during the civil war at the turn of the 20th century, or during the Sino-Japanese War, or in Hong Kong during the 1950s. This could be because the world in which the stories are set, the jianghu, is imaginary, and it’s a world in which values exist only in their absolute forms. It’s also a world in which the only law is the law of the sword. And the stories are about heroes.

I tried to depart a little from the traditional martial-arts genre. Instead of treating these characters as heroes, I wanted to see them as ordinary people – at the stage before they became heroes.

There’s also one significant difference between ASHES OF TIME and my other films. I generally start with the beginning of a story or with certain characters, and then gradually work out where the story is going and where it’s going to end as the shoot goes on. In this case, though, I knew where these characters were going to end up and there was nothing I could do to change it. This imbued both me and the film with a sense of fatalism. Now that the film is finished and I try to reflect on the whole experience of making it, I find myself remembering some lines from the Buddhist canon and I’ve decided to use them to preface the film: “The flag is still. The wind is calm. It’s the heart of man that is in turmoil!” --- Wong Kar Wai (1994)