‘Wasted Times’ lays bare debauchery of old Shanghai
‘ THE WASTED TIMES’ comes in the same mould as movies starring Hong Kong stars like Chow Yun-fatt and Tony Leung, harking back to a time when Shanghai was imploding in complex gangland and partisan politics and allegiances of the Sino- Japanese War and World War II.
The movie, written and directed by Cheng Er, stars Zhang Ziyi and Ge You in the main roles.
Beginning in 1937, on the eve of Japan’s invasion of Shanghai, Cheng’s fractured storytelling follows a fearsome crime boss ( Ge You) plotting against a friend and advisor, the Japanese brother-in-law he no longer trusts ( Tadanobu Asano). “Japanese people give me a headache,” Asano protests. “I’m Shanghainese.” It’s an oldfashioned commercial picture with sumptuous production values, two of China’s biggest stars alongside one of Japan’s, and the shimmer of high art.
An intimate epic, the film bears down on the personal fates of Ge, Asano, and Zhang Ziyi as a high- strung, promiscuous film star who is married to Ge’s boss, while larger forces contend in the background— an approach and tone, with its stately pacing, over-lush ambience and baroque eruptions of violence and emotion, that taps a vein of Italian sensibility mined memorably in films by Visconti, Leone, and Bertolucci.
Where this pays off is in the director’s focus on the consequences of violence, the danger of relationships transacted in threats. His characters move through the film’s cities (wartime Hong Kong and Chongqing, in addition to Shanghai) and pale fields like ghosts. Depopulated sets make the events seem more
Universal love is merely the safest and most convenient name for you to hide behind while living your lazy, selfish, and petty life. Lives are wasted because of men like you.
dreamlike. Even in wide shots that put characters against bold architecture, there’s no bustle, just the vulgar whisper of criminal commerce.
While the design draws on bold colour palettes, close-ups of strong faces like those in Zhang Yimou’s films, and the weight of interior spaces in Hou’s work, these gangsters don’t well up with world-weary melancholy like those in Hou; they kill, there’s blood, and there’s really no apologising for their lifestyle and their death- dealing: “You should kill me with a sense of righteousness,” a woman says in the deadest of deadpan.
But when the drama fails to engage, the colours, texture, and visual style make up for a lot. The level of technical skill exhibited by Cheng and his cinematographer and designers (who include Hong Kong’s Yee Chung-man, a disciple of Wong Kar-Wai’s production designer/ costumer, William Chang) is some of the best China has to offer: even the play of half-light on Zhang Ziyi’s cheekbones as she rides in the backseat of a car, moving toward an unknown fate at the story’s outset, casts a spell that continues throughout the film. And it is from Zhang that most of the film’s emotional impact comes: scenes depicting her abuse at the hands of Asano, and her life as an actress prior to his abduction of her.
“Universal love is merely the safest and most convenient name for you to hide behind while living your lazy, selfish, and petty life. Lives are wasted because of men like you,” she enunciates with a calm both classic and modern, “What I want is a man who is capable of love and hatred.”
Zhang Ziyi, in part of the dialogue from ‘The Wasted Times’