Kar Wai Wong is one of China’s most celebrated filmmakers and also one of the most mysterious directors because he doesn't have scripts for most of the time, or he writes scripts as he is shooting. But over time, his actors got used to his unique style. This articleis an analysis of four elements in Kar Wai Wong’s films.

Kar Wai Wong’s film titles are often made up of four Chinese characters. He answered that this is just a coincidence, but I don’t think so. In Chinese, many idioms are made up of four characters. Kar Wai Wong seems traditional in this way and it becomes a habit of his.

花样年华

In Kar Wai Wong’s films, high saturated scenes are everywhere. When we see high saturated pictures these days, we easily relate them to Kar Wai Wong’s style. Take yellow for example. Yellow makes the scenes look hazy, ambiguous, and nostalgic. Inthe film, Ashes of Time, yellow doesn’t seem warm.There is hidden restlessness and loneliness under the tone.

东邪西毒

Another color that Kar Wai Wong really likes to use is green. A large variety of green appears in his films such as ChungKing Express and Days of Being Wild. Green gives these scenes a gloomy, sorrowful, and depressed feeling, reflecting the character’s puzzled and decadent state of mind. It is almost like they are staying forever on a wet and dark day. For the film Days of Being Wild, the film crew prepared five different kinds of green filter paper and adjusted them throughout the film due to changes in environment or scenes.

重庆森林

Kar Wai Wong likes to shift tone in color to portray characters’ state of mind. In the film, Happy Together, black and white appear with scenes relating to memories and argument. Scenes shift from black and white to highly saturated colors when the characters reconcile. However, this is what we try to interpret from Kar Wai Wong’s films. He might have just changed the colors following his change in mood. After all, he is a freewheeling director.

春光乍泄

Numbers are everywhere in Kar Wai Wong’s films. Distance, dates, times, phone numbers… Repetition of the same number helps to enrich characters, showing their lasting memories. We can feel that these characters are sensitive and real; they are having a hard time forgetting and letting go of the past because they remember such a small thing. Actors’ lines are often made up of numbers too:“When we were closest, the distance between me and her was only 0.01 centimeter. After 57 hours, I fell in love with this woman”.

重庆森林

The characters Kar Wai Wong created are often lonely and self-centered. There is no better prop to show their characters than a mirror. The relationships between the characters in his films are just like the reflections in the mirrors; so close yet so fragile and they cannot touch it. There is an idiom in Chinese called: flowers in the mirror and moon in the water, which represents an illusion. We cannot reach flowers in the mirror and the moon in the water because they are fake. Many relationships in Kar Wai Wong’s films are just like this.

花样年华

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