Classici fuori Mostra - As Tears Go By

“The Chinese director’s film debut was an impetuously free re-interpretation of Scorsese’s masterpiece Mean Streets, set in a dislocated cultural system and performed with a fully post-modern sensibility. The geographical and chronological transference produces a violent aesthetic deformation: the sulphureous hyper-realism of Scorsese’s film is stretched thin, in highly stressed iconic surfaces, to the point of laceration. Phosphorescent screens, reflecting panes, artificial glow: a glassy universe with no depth, in which artificial light pulsates, flashes, bounces never to rest. The narrative material undergoes a similar thematic tension: Wong spills the crackling religious component over into mélo, describing the sentimental relationship between Wah (Andy Lau) and Ngor (Maggie Cheung) as a potential saving grace and thus endowing it with dazzling purity, such that the emotional voltage skyrockets”. (Alessandro Baratti)