Wong Kar-wai, King Hu, and Auteur Theory: What Counts as the Highest Artistic Achievement in Hong Kong Cinema

This is a matter of personal opinion, but if we're talking about the film with the broadest consensus, most critics and audiences would point to _In the Mood for Love_ (2000).

This film is almost a culmination of Wong Kar-wai's aesthetic: Maggie Cheung's qipaos, Tony Leung's restraint, Zhou Xuan's “花样的年华” and Nat King Cole's songs, narrow corridors and ambiguous lighting, as well as the restrained emotions of “feelings arise, but propriety prevails.” Its international standing is also the most secure—ranked fifth in the 2022 British Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films in cinema history, making it one of the highest-ranked Chinese-language films, and Tony Leung also won the Best Actor award at Cannes for it.

That said, people have different answers to what counts as a “peak,” and several other films are worth mentioning:

Days of Being Wild (1990) is often considered the starting point at which Wong Kar-wai truly established his personal style. The “footless bird” monologue and Tony Leung's closing shot of combing his hair are regarded by many seasoned cinephiles as particular favorites.

Happy Together (1997) won him the Best Director award at Cannes. It is a high point of Chinese-language queer cinema, with an exceptionally intense emotional charge.

Chungking Express (1994), meanwhile, is his lightest and most vibrant film. “Pineapple cans” and “California Dreamin'”—many people got into Wong Kar-wai through this one.

If you're just starting to watch Wong Kar-wai, I usually recommend beginning with Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love. Which kind of mood do you prefer—something more passionate and freewheeling, or something slower and more restrained? I can help you arrange a viewing order.

That suggests your taste is pretty clear: you like the Wong Kar-wai who has a sense of everyday life, a brisk rhythm, a touch of bustling human warmth and humor, rather than the kind who twists emotions into a knot and keeps turning them over in a stifled, inward-looking way.

Following that preference, here's how I'd rank them for you:

Very likely to suit your taste:

Fallen Angels (1995) is essentially a companion piece to Chungking Express; the two were originally developed as parts of the same concept and then split apart. The male lead who ate expired pineapples, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, moves here and continues his manic antics. Wide-angle lenses, neon, black humor—it is wildly offbeat and deliriously energetic. If you love the lightness and oddball charm of Chungking Express, this is almost an essential extension.

My Blueberry Nights (2007) is his English-language film, structured as a road movie, with Norah Jones and Jude Law. Overall, it is relatively relaxed and gentle, without much emotional entanglement; more of a small-scale vignette. It is not considered one of his best, but it is comfortable to watch.

You can watch these, but be mentally prepared:

In the Mood for Love actually isn't “emotionally convoluted.” It is restrained and slow, but its emotions are clean and move in a single direction; it won't leave you feeling suffocated. If you can accept the slow pace, its beauty is worthwhile. And since you like The Blossoms, you'll notice that the two share a common lineage in their qipaos, Shanghai flavor, and sense of period texture—The Blossoms is, in a sense, Wong Kar-wai expanding the aesthetic of In the Mood for Love into an entire era.

I suggest putting these off for now:

Happy Together and 2046 are the quintessentially “emotionally convoluted” ones: emotionally tangled and repetitive, stifling, always moving inward. Though they are masterpieces, they may not fit the state of mind you're looking for right now. Days of Being Wild also leans a little melancholy and alienated.

So my suggested order is: _Fallen Angels_ → My Blueberry Nights → try In the Mood for Love if you're in the mood.

By the way, what part of The Blossoms do you like—is it the Shanghai flavor and period atmosphere, or the sense of rhythm in Hu Ge's business-war storyline? That will help me judge whether you might actually be able to get into In the Mood for Love too.

For this question, I want to give you some genuinely reliable assessments, rather than casually making up a few lines that merely sound beautiful, so let me first verify the exact sources of several widely circulated classic remarks.

Once I've checked them, I'll pick out a few assessments I consider truly “precise,” rather than vaguely lyrical, and sort them into several levels.

The sharpest one actually comes from Wong himself. When Wong Kar-wai discussed the recurring themes in his work, he once said that the feeling of being rejected was the thread running through all his films. This self-diagnosis is almost the key to understanding his entire body of work—Yuddy never dares to truly give himself to anyone; Faye follows someone in the name of love but never confesses; everyone in Fallen Angels remains in a state of near-contact and distance. The Chungking Express you've seen appears light on the surface, but underneath it is also built on this sense of “people being very close together in the city while their hearts remain very far apart,” except that he wraps it in pineapple cans and “California Dreamin'” to sweeten the package.

The most classic line used by the international critical establishment to define him comes from Cahiers du Cinéma critic Thierry Jousse. He first joked that none of the labels really fit—Chinese Godard? A local Tarantino? A John Woo who stayed at home?—none of them truly worked. He then offered a judgment that was almost the highest praise Cahiers du Cinéma could give a Chinese-language director: Wong Kar-wai created another way of watching and understanding Hong Kong cinema, and his subversiveness was equivalent to rewriting the craft of filmmaking itself single-handedly. Roger Ebert's angle was more emotional: he said Wong Kar-wai reminded him of Godard in the 1960s, “like watching a film that isn't afraid of its audience.” Those four words, “isn't afraid of its audience,” perfectly capture Wong's auteur-like stance of neither pandering nor explaining.

As for the idea that he has “spent his whole life making the same film,” this is a widely circulated saying, and his own response was wonderful: it's like taking your photograph—three shots today, ten more days later; your appearance changes a little, but it's still you, and that's what belongs to you. He acknowledged the repetition of his themes, while turning that repetition into an author's signature.

If you want a genuinely “barbed” criticism, this is the one I'd recommend most. It comes from a long essay analyzing his reception around the world: the author argues that after In the Mood for Love in 2000, Wong Kar-wai became increasingly refined and beautiful, but also “more beautiful, deeper, yet smaller and thinner.” What makes this so precise is that it neither simply praises nor condemns him, but points to a real turning point—early in his career, he could discover splendor in run-down, impoverished streets; later, his aestheticism became almost hollow, with private emotions dissolving the weight of history.

Incidentally, this criticism actually resonates with your taste. You like the down-to-earth, bustling side of Chungking Express and The Blossoms, and dislike things that are “emotionally convoluted”—in a sense, what you prefer is the Wong Kar-wai from before the “smaller and thinner” phase, or the one willing to return to the life of ordinary streets. The Blossoms won back a group of viewers who had originally found him affected (online, people even changed their nickname for him from the early, derogatory “The King of Cool” to the affectionate “Our Kar-wai”), precisely because he unusually returned the camera to the bustle of everyday life.

Would you like me to find you a few more brilliant critics' comments specifically on Chungking Express or The Blossoms? The quality of commentary on both is very high, and they align especially well with your preferences.

There is no single answer to this question, but there are certain rough consensuses that critics have arrived at through repeated voting over time. Let me look up the results of several relatively authoritative “best Hong Kong film” polls and use the data rather than relying only on my impression.

As with the question of a “greatest film,” there is no standard answer here, but Hong Kong critics have conducted several serious polls that give us a general sense of where the consensus lies. The most authoritative was in 2005—on the centenary of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong Film Awards Association organized it and the Hong Kong Film Critics Society coordinated it, inviting 101 directors, critics, and cultural workers to vote for the 100 best Chinese-language films of the century. The ranking on that list is highly revealing.

First, the films. The top film on that list was Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town, but it is a mainland film. The highest-ranking Hong Kong film was A Better Tomorrow at number two, regarded as the “number-one Hong Kong film”; Days of Being Wild was third, and this poll considered it Wong Kar-wai's best work. These two films happen to represent two of the highest peaks of Hong Kong cinema:

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986) is the peak of genre cinema—it elevated the “heroic-bloodshed/gunplay film” into an auteur film with ritualistic qualities and a tragic masculine aesthetic, with its influence spilling over into Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are both devotees). If “artistic achievement” includes genre innovation and global influence, it is nearly undisputed.

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990), by contrast, was a watershed for Hong Kong art cinema. It flopped at the box office, yet established an auteur aesthetic that would be repeatedly imitated, and is also considered by many to be “the most Hong Kong” film—a precise expression of the loneliness, confusion, and footless-bird-like drift felt by young people in Hong Kong at the time. It won five Hong Kong Film Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction.

If the standard is changed to “highest international artistic reputation,” the answer would lean toward In the Mood for Love (which we discussed earlier, ranked fifth in Sight & Sound's greatest-films poll); while if we're talking about the most classical film, and the one that first earned Chinese-language cinema world-class artistic status, we have to go back to King Hu—his A Touch of Zen won a technical award at Cannes in 1975, the first major Cannes award for Chinese-language cinema, turning the wuxia film into something approaching ink-wash painting and Zen art.

Now, the directors. If “greatest artistic achievement” means a combination of auteurism, historical standing, and global influence, the two most prominent names are:

Wong Kar-wai—a benchmark of modern Chinese-language art cinema, winner of the Cannes Best Director award, with the highest ranking among his works in international film-history polls, and someone who almost single-handedly rewrote the outside world's “way of watching Hong Kong cinema.” In terms of sheer auteurist aesthetic achievement, he usually ranks first.

King Hu—the grandmaster of classical wuxia, and the person who first brought Hong Kong/Chinese-language cinema into the international artistic pantheon. In terms of “founding a school + aesthetic completeness,” he and Wong Kar-wai are two peaks standing side by side, one classical and one modern.

Several others are also often included among the “greatest,” each in a different respect: John Woo (genre aesthetics and global influence), Ann Hui (the director with the most Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Director, a standard-bearer of humanist realism and the New Wave), Tsui Hark (a “mad genius” of imagination and technical innovation), Johnnie To (a master who distilled police/gangster films into austere auteur cinema in the new century), as well as the earlier Chang Cheh and Li Han-hsiang (foundational figures of a generation).

So if I absolutely had to give the most concise answer: in terms of a single auteur's artistic heights, Wong Kar-wai and King Hu stand equal at the top; in terms of individual films, Days of Being Wild and A Better Tomorrow are the two universally acknowledged peaks within Hong Kong cinema, while In the Mood for Love has the greatest international reputation. These answers coexist because they correspond to three different measures: “auteurist aesthetics,” “genre peak,” and “international reputation.”

Which standard do you identify with more? If you lean toward the “most Hong Kong” quality of Days of Being Wild and A Better Tomorrow, I can help you put together an essential viewing list along those lines—and it actually doesn't conflict with your dislike of things that are “emotionally convoluted.”

That's a good question, and your doubt is justified—A Better Tomorrow really doesn't possess a high degree of artistry in the sense of Days of Being Wild as an “art film.” If you measure it by standards of loneliness, negative space, and formal experimentation, it falls short: the plot is very conventional, even clichéd (a prodigal son turning over a new leaf, brothers turning against each other, cops versus criminals), the emotions are so intense they verge on melodrama, and some of the performances seem overplayed today. So the answer to “is it highly artistic?” depends on which ruler you use.

Its artistic achievement belongs to another category, and mainly lies in three areas:

First, the creation of “aesthetics of violence.” John Woo's genuine contribution was to elevate gunfights from “action scenes” into an audiovisual form with choreography and rhythm, almost like dance or opera—slow motion, dual-wielding pistols, churches, white doves (the white doves appear more prominently in his later The Killer), giving slaughter a sense of ritual and lyricism. This did not come from nowhere: he inherited the masculine wuxia tradition of Chang Cheh (he worked as Chang Cheh's assistant director, and the foundation of “brotherhood + heroic self-sacrifice” comes from the same lineage), while also absorbing the austere gangster honor of Jean-Pierre Melville and the slow-motion violence of Sam Peckinpah. He fused these influences into an entirely new, highly recognizable auteur style whose influence spread all the way to Hollywood. To “found a school” is itself a major artistic achievement.

Second, the operatic quality of its emotions. It does not pursue realism; instead, it pushes brotherhood, betrayal, and redemption to an almost mythic intensity. Mark Gor is not a “real person” but a tragic, romantic icon. This process of distilling and amplifying genre emotions to the extreme is connected to Peking opera and the classical tradition of chivalry—its “falseness” is deliberate stylization, not clumsiness.

Third, it created a cultural icon. Chow Yun-fat's Mark Gor—trench coat, sunglasses, toothpick in his mouth, dual pistols—became a collective memory for an entire generation. The ability of a film to turn a character into a cultural symbol that transcends time is also evidence of artistic energy. Moreover, released in 1986 on the eve of the 1997 handover, its underlying sense that “the old codes of honor in the underworld are collapsing and people are being cast adrift by history” made it an exceptionally precise expression of the mood of its era.

So why did it rank first among Hong Kong films on that 2005 list? To be honest, that poll's criteria were “the finest and most representative,” with representativeness and influence carrying considerable weight; it did not entirely equal “the most formally refined.” In terms of pure formal artistic achievement, Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love are actually above it; A Better Tomorrow's “first place” is more because it represents the genre peak and spiritual symbol of Hong Kong cinema's golden age.

Ultimately, this is a dispute between two traditions of “artistry.” The French Cahiers du Cinéma school itself once used auteur theory to elevate Hollywood genre directors (Hitchcock and Hawks) into the artistic pantheon—with this perspective, John Woo is unquestionably an artist. But under the narrower definition of “art cinema,” A Better Tomorrow is more a monument of popular cinema than a refined work of art. Both statements are valid; the ruler is simply different.

As an aside, something relevant to your taste: the strength of A Better Tomorrow lies precisely in the fact that it is not emotionally convoluted—its emotions are direct, cathartic, and exhilarating, the exact opposite of the stifled, inward-moving tone you dislike. And if you want to see John Woo at his “most restrained and polished,” the generally accepted choice is The Killer (1989). It is colder and more controlled than A Better Tomorrow, and its aesthetics of violence are more mature. Shall I arrange John Woo's films for you in a viewing order of “exhilarating first, refined later”?

The core claim of auteur theory (French: la politique des auteurs; English: auteur theory) can be summed up in one sentence: in cinema, a collaborative art form, the director is the true “author”—just as the author of a book or the painter of a picture is. The soul and creative signature of a film should belong to its director.

It was born in 1950s France in the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. A group of young critics at the time—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol, the people who would later become the French New Wave—used it to launch a critical debate. The spark was a fierce 1954 article by Truffaut attacking the dominant French “tradition of quality”: script above all, adaptations of classic works, polished but without personality. Their opposing proposition was that a true cinematic artist leaves a recognizable personal imprint across film after film—themes, motifs, and visual styles that recur.

The most “provocative,” and most important, aspect of the theory is that it rehabilitated popular genre films. Before this, directors who made commercial genre films in Hollywood—Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford—were considered mere entertainment craftsmen, unworthy of the realm of art. The Cahiers du Cinéma critics insisted otherwise: precisely these filmmakers expressed highly personal worldviews within the frameworks of thrillers, westerns, and gangster films; they were artists in every sense. In other words, auteur theory shifted the criterion for “artistic value” from “Is the subject matter highbrow?” to “Does the director have a personal style and vision?”

This is the ruler I was using when I mentioned John Woo in my previous message. Through an auteurist lens, A Better Tomorrow is about popular brotherhood and vengeance, but John Woo runs a highly consistent and instantly recognizable aesthetics of violence and motif of brotherhood through it—so he is unquestionably an “auteur,” an artist. Conversely, under the narrower standard of “art cinema,” it is simply a popular film. The disagreement between these two rulers is essentially what auteur theory brought about.

Later, the American critic Andrew Sarris introduced it to the English-speaking world in the 1960s, translating it as auteur theory and proposing three criteria for evaluation: technical competence, distinctive personal style, and the deeper “interior meaning” of the works. Of course, it also faced considerable criticism—the most famous came from Pauline Kael, who mocked the theory as liable to become a form of “hero worship,” causing people to overrate bad films out of reverence for the director while erasing the contributions of screenwriters, cinematographers, and actors.

But regardless of the controversy, auteur theory completely changed the way we talk about film. Today we naturally say “a Wong Kar-wai film” or “a Tarantino film,” discuss a director “making the same film his whole life,” and ask which work is their “peak”—these expressions are themselves part of auteur theory's legacy. Wong Kar-wai is an auteur in the textbook sense: motifs of missed connections, time, and memory reverberate repeatedly; Christopher Doyle's cinematography, voice-over, and music form a signature recognizable at a glance. This entire conversation has, in fact, been operating within the framework of auteur theory all along.

Would you like me to recommend one or two introductory films from the French New Wave? They are both “practical versions” of auteur theory, and their styles tend to be light and nimble—not necessarily the kind of stifling films you're worried about.