As Tears Go By 旺角卡门 ~ Chinese Movies&TV

Today, I will introduce a Chinese film which called As Tears Go By (旺角卡门wàngjiǎo kǎ mén). So let us have a brief introduction.

As Tears Go By is a 1988 Hong Kong film that was the directorial debut of Wong Kar-wai (王家卫Wáng Jiāwèi). Critics have compared the film to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, as the central plot revolves around a small time gangster trying to keep his smaller-time gangster friend out of trouble.

Wong Kar Wai’s debut feature As Tears Go By is a visceral, idiosyncratic gangster picture, a raw and stylish film that balances gritty realism with bold stylization, colorful imagery and rapid leaps into frenzied action sequences or hazy, drifting slow motion. Violence in this film erupts suddenly, its impact heightened by Wong’s accelerated cutting, which signals the abrupt transition from ordinary reality to the bloody, brutal hyper-reality of the fight scenes. A fight scene at a pool hall is preceded by a slow, tense buildup as the inept Triad thug Fly (Jacky Cheung 张学友Zhāng Xuéyǒu) taunts a rival, mocking him by moving balls around on the pool table, brazenly cheating and essentially daring the other man to start a fight. The tension slowly mounts, mingled with uneasy humor, but when the fight itself erupts, Wong introduces the violence with a sudden shot of a pool table, a racked triangle of balls broken by the cue ball, and then a quick cut into the rapid-fire violence as Fly and the other gangsters initiate a brawl that eventually spills out into a chase through the streets.

This is a very fabulous film.