With his lush and visuals, pitch-perfect soundtracks,
and soulful romanticism, Wong Kar Wai has established himself as
one of the defining auteurs of contemporary cinema. Joined by
such key collaborators as cinematographer Christopher Doyle;
editor and production and costume designer William Chang Suk
Ping; and actors Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung Man Yuk,
Wong (or WKW, as he is often known) has written and directed
films that have enraptured audiences and critics worldwide and
inspired countless other filmmakers with their poetic moods and
music, narrative and stylistic daring, and potent themes of
alienation and memory. Whether they’re tragically romantic,
soaked in blood, or quirkily comedic, the seven films collected
here are an invitation into the unique and wistful world of a
deeply influential artist. Seven-Blu-ray Special Edition
Collector’s Set Features • New 4K digital restorations of
Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for
Love and 2046, approved by director Wong Kar Wai, with 5.1
surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks • New 4K digital
restorations of As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild, with
uncompressed monaural soundtracks • New program in which Wong
answers questions submitted, at the invitation of the director,
by authors André Aciman and Jonathan Lethem; filmmakers Sofia
Cla, Rian Johnson, Lisa Joy, and Chloé Zhao; cinematographers
Philippe Le Sourd and Bradford Young; and filmmakers and
founders/creative directors of Rodarte Kate and Laura Mulleavy •
Alternate version of Days of Being Wild featuring different edits
of the film’s prologue and final scenes, on home video for the
first time • Hua yang de nian hua, a 2000 short film by Wong •
Extended version of The Hand, a 2004 short film by Wong,
available in the U.S. for the first time • Interview and “cinema
lesson” with Wong from the 2001 Cannes Film Festival • Three
making-of documentaries, featuring interviews with Wong; actors
Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Chang Chen, Faye
Wong, and Ziyi Zhang; and others • Episode of the television
series Moving Pictures from 1996 featuring Wong and
cinematographer Christopher Doyle • Interviews from 2002 and 2005
with Doyle • Excerpts from a 1994 British Film Institute audio
interview with Cheung on her work in Days of Being Wild • Program
from 2012 on In the Mood for Love’s soundtrack • Press conference
for In the Mood for Love from the 2000 Toronto International Film
Festival • Deleted scenes, alternate endings, behind-the-scenes
footage, a promo reel, music videos, and trailers • Plus: Deluxe
packaging, including a perfect-bound, French-fold book featuring
lavish photography, an essay by critic John Powers, a director’s
note, and six collectible art prints as tears go by Wong Kar
Wai’s scintillating debut feature is a kinetic, hypercool crime
thriller graced with flashes of the impressionistic, daydream
visual style for which he would become renowned. Set amid Hong
Kong’s ruthless, neon-lit gangland underworld, this operatic saga
of ambition, honor, and revenge stars Andy Lau Tak Wah as a
small-time mob enforcer who finds himself torn between a
burgeoning romance with his ailing cousin (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk,
in the first of her iconic collaborations with the director) and
his loyalty to his loose-cannon partner in crime (Jacky Cheung
Hok Yau), whose reckless attempts to make a name for himself
unleash a spiral of violence. Marrying the pulp pleasures of the
gritty Hong Kong action drama with hints of the head-rush
romanticism Wong would push to intoxicating heights throughout
the 1990s, As Tears Go By was a box-office smash that heralded
the arrival of one of contemporary cinema’s most electrifying
talents. Days of being wild the breakthrough sopre feature by
Wong Kar Wai represents the first full flowering of his swooning
signature style. The initial entry in a loosely connected,
ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046, this
ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the
Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twenty
somethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung Kwok
Wing) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie
Cheung Man Yuk) hopelessly enamored with him, and a man
(Andy Lau Tak Wah) caught in the middle of their turbulent
relationship—pull together and push apart in a dance of
frustrated desire. The director’s inaugural collaboration with
both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the film its
gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung
Chiu Wai, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a
never-realized sequel, Days of Being Wild is an exhilarating
first expression of Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing,
dislocation, and the restless search for human connection.
Chungking Express the whiplash, double-pronged Chungking Express
is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that
made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Two heart Hong Kong cops
(Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu Wai), both jilted by
ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express take out food
stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works.
Anything goes in Wong’s gloriously and utterly unexpected
charmer, which cemented the sex appeal of its gorgeous stars and
forever turned canned pineapple and the Mamas & the Papas’
“California Dreamin’” into tokens of romantic longing. Fallen
Angels Lost souls reach out for human connection amid a
glimmering Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s hallucinatory, neon-soaked
nocturne. Originally conceived as a segment of Chungking Express
only to spin off on its own woozy axis, Fallen Angels plays like
the dark, moody flip side of its predecessor as it charts the
subtly interlacing es of a handful of urban loners, including
a coolly detached hit man (Leon Lai Ming) looking to go straight;
his business partner (Michelle Reis), who secretly yearns for
him; and a mute delinquent (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who wreaks
mischief by night. Swinging between hard-boiled noir and
slapstick lunacy with giddy abandon, the film is both a dizzying,
dazzling city symphony and a poignant meditation on love, loss,
and longing in a metropolis that never s. Happy together one
of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s
emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in
breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and
Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing as a couple traveling through Argentina
and locked in a turbulent cycle of inuation and destructive
jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and
again. Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship
with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of
Hong Kong—when the country’s LGBTQ community suddenly faced an
uncertain future—Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of
a love affair that is by turns devastating and deliriously
romantic. by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both
luminous monochrome and luscious saturated color, Happy Together
is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that
swoons with the ache and exhilaration of love at its
heart-tearing extremes. In the mood for love Hong Kong, 1962:
Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung
Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their
encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their
spouses creates an bond between them. At once delicately
mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for
Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting
moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract
cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this
film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades
of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career. 2046
Wong Kar Wai’s loose sequel to In the Mood for Love combines that
film’s languorous air of romantic longing with a dizzying
time-hopping structure and avant-sci-fi twist. Tony Leung Chiu
Wai reprises his role as writer Chow Mo-Wan, whose numerous
failed relationships with women who drift in and out of his life
(and the one who goes in and out of room 2046, down the hall from
his apartment) inspire the delirious futuristic love story he
pens. 2046’s dazzling fantasy sequences give Wong and two of his
key collaborators—cinematographer Christopher Doyle and
editor/costume designer/production designer William Chang Suk
Ping—license, to let their imaginations run wild, propelling the
sumptuous visuals and operatic emotions skyward toward the
sublime.