AS TEARS GO BY (102’)
by Wong Kar-wai
with Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung
Hong Kong, 1988
Restored by L’immagine Ritrovata and The Criterion Collection
With thanks to Tucker Film
Introduced by Marco Dalla Gassa
Screening in original language with subtitles in Italian.
“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)
Salizada de la Chiesa o del Teatro
San Marco 3997/A
30124 Venice
Tel. +39 041 2417274
“The public was struck by the sincerity of the work, a mirror of the era: Rome under construction where buildings steal space, wages that are not enough, strikes, scabs, union leaders who don't listen, the only salvation lying in the sense of belonging”. (Gianluca Farinelli)
