First of all, I would like to say that this movie is not easy to understand and it takes more than just one watch to get the idea of it. The director, Kar Wai Wong, is known as a very famous director with unique technique of shooting movies. It is always hard to understand his movie and he likes to use monologue as a special touch. I would like to review this movie from two perspectives: my understanding of the movie from the characters and the techniques the director used to achieve it. The story in the movie happened in a desert which represents city that has been devitalized by modern civilization. As a desert is lack of water, modern city is lack of spiritual pursuing. Every character in the movie is a representation of lack of spiritual aspiration. Modern civilization makes people pursue material possessions more than spiritual and makes people lack of communication and emotionally unstable and complicated. The movie has used a lot of monologue to express modernist's sadness and loss of the decline of classical-ism. Hong Qi's character in the movie is a represent of the peak of modern civilization. He is a simple and honest man that has to become an assassin to live; however, he still kept an honest heart to not kill for an egg (quote from the movie). Here the director is trying to say that even modern civilization is at a peak for modernists to chase, classical-ism is still fighting back. All characters in the movie represent a type of loneliness not because of being alone but emotionally shortage. Everyone is lost at some stage to the modern civilization. Take Mu Rongyan as an example, his/her loneliness drives him/her a split personality. She/he is too lost so that she/he becomes one another and started to talk to himself and becomes more alone. A lot of the monologues in the movie are from Ou Yangfeng's (Xi Du)'s view. His complicated love and hate for his brother and sister in law made him a perfect character on the contrary of classical-ism. Kar Wai Wong used Xi Du's character to represent modern civilization, a cold type full of hatred. The movie used a lot of cool tone to express the depression of classical-ism and the characters' loneliness. There are a lot of monologue used in the movie. We can hardly find any conversation between two characters. More than 100 minutes movie is too short to make an expression, so monologue becomes a good approach. This depression and loneliness we feel all the time from the movie by the monologues represent the complicated emotion of characters. Scenes and music used in the movie have perfectly expressed the loneliness and lose of modernists. Kar Wai Wong designed to shoot the movie from several different angels and edited carefully with music and scenes. Montage has been used very well in the movie. Ashes of time, differs from the traditional type of Kongfu movies. There are no really action scenes but a slow motion of a physical communication between the characters. Kar Wai Wong likes to use the scene of weather change of the desert and lights to be a contrary of modernist's lack of communication. It looks like that the movie shot 6 individual stories vertically; however, the 6 stories are all related. The characters of the stories are somehow overlapped. Even though people may have been hurt and live only in memory and feel vulnerable, it is not right to just escape because the alcohol that said to make people forget about everything is a symbol and it never really existed. Kar Wai Wong has created his own style and art of shooting movies. He is very sensitive about the age and place he lives. In the transition from classical-ism to modern civilization, he sensed this lost that people experience and the affects they get. He is from a unique era from a unique place, Hong Kong, a city that represents several types of cultures which has obviously advantages and disadvantages. The society get developed and lost at the same time. People are lost and lack of communication and unstable to survive. Kar Wai Wong has always been trying to express the loss of classical-ism in his movies. Kar Wai Wong shot a Kongfu movie that was not as a traditional one and tried to reflect the emotion world of modernists. He is very successful on achieving his goal on this particular movie.

Near the end, the proprietor of an inn perched on the windy edge of a sandy desert that stretches to the horizon has an epiphany; he has never before actually stopped to observe the desert, not as a transition, but as destination, as something that you don't calculate how to cross, but observe as a place you have crossed to reach. I have written the almost exact same idea (different setting) in one of my screenplays. This is the personal connection with a favourite film I value so much. Film becomes more than film, I see film as dream, a consciousness briefly shared then forgotten. It's that feeling of dreaming the same dream with a great artist that makes me tingle.This is a film like the best of novels, a web woven of fragmented image and word, drives and desires, rendered cinematically alive when the two coalesce to reveal yawning chasms of human experience, the one common shared human experience we all know. The film's opening serves as present tense and WKW builds fascinating removes from it to the point where the final story of the film climaxes in the past with shocking reverberations that make me rush through the entire film, clawing my way back to the present and previous past occurrences, to change my perspective.At the beginning of the film, a master swordsman arrives at an inn to offer the inn keeper a gulp from a wine that makes you forget the past. The inn keeper refuses. Throughout the film we happen upon characters, or characters happen upon the film as it passes time in that wind-torn inn by the desert, fixed in position by memory, by their inability or willinglessness to let go a human passion or folly, revenge or love however distant and impossible. We all need something to live for the inn keeper muses, and we know sometime we'll cling to the uglier most obsessive aspects of our nature to get us through the night. But this is all we have, not something to separate us from animals because even a dog will come to know the hand that strikes it, but all we have as humans to distinguish us from creation, being able to cling to that sad bitter memory of unfulfillment for years and make our unvanquished madness dear to us.This is all a bit of a game, life is through the remove of storytelling, it becomes myth and fabrication, but what wouldn't we give to go back and play it again. In the end we discover that the wine that makes you forget the past is regular wine and a character is only set free when he finds out his love, love he had and denied until he realized how precious it was to him and came back to find it gone, has died. But that was already two years ago and he's stood in place for those two years, allowing himself to be released from his selfimposed exile when a piece of paper reaches his hands, as though even absolution from guilt or shame or obligation can only properly come to pass in an official manner.WKW gives us swordplaying spectacle to go with this but he doesn't focus on it. Swords strike and fighters leap into the air in blurry shapes of color and motion yet the eye doesn't rest on the details of the fight but rather centers on facial expressions and the maddening ferocity of it all, like it's all a dance and we're dancing right in the middle of it. To say this is a wuxia is to set different expectations for it. Here poetry is not a poetry of appearances. As with his previous films, WKW tells us marvellous things about obsession and release, the yearning to remember and forget, and about letting ourselves go into new beginnings.

There are movies that, by dint of their measured mood alone, can draw the viewer in and hold the attention. VAMPYR comes to mind, as does RASHOMON; SEVEN SAMURAI; STRAY DOG; HIGH AND LOW; THE WINDOW; REAR WINDOW; CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS; ERASERHEAD; THE BLACK STALLION; TROUBLE IN MIND; others. Add to that select list ASHES OF TIME. Like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON after it, ASHES OF TIME comes across as a profound meditation on Love Lost, of opportunity missed. The performances are all of the highest caliber- as is the direction. The cinematography by Christopher Doyle is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The music wrings the heart. (And, lest one forget: the fight choreography by Sammo Hung is absolutely spectacular.) I read somewhere, once, that it's not the Love we've lost that's important: what's important is the fact that we Love at all. I think that's about right. It sure feels right.

My own memory is scattered in the ashes of time, and I really need to re-view the original to see if my memory holds, but here is my impression. I'd give the original a 10. This one rates an 8. The two together are probably a 12.I personally didn't like the amped up color. I gather that one of the things that happened when the filmmaker rediscovered a warehouse full of bootlegs was that there were some terrible copies that distorted the color, and he liked and played with that. This version also seemed more static than I remember--a lot of shots seem to have been done with still or very short segments of film. I have to see the original again to see if that's really the case, or if it is just my memory that there were more frames of action in the original. This often felt like it was cut from snippets. For example, the shifting sands under the title was a pair of superimposed images moving in different directions. Was that the case originally as well?I loved the original but also could never quite follow the plot. Redux slices and dices (or-rather-unslices) so that each story is parceled together and the blurring that is going on in the interactions on-screen (for example, the Yin/Yang sibs) does not spill over quite as much into the interaction between viewer and screen. Redux shakes out the story lines so you can parse them. I miss the mystification, and don't think it's a net gain. I also think something else may be going on here... If you remember the original (or have a copy to view), tell me what you think of this reading: The point of view of the story seems to have shifted from Huang Yaoshi to Ouyang Feng--although because of how the movie mixes action, memory and stories it is hard to tell. In the original, we followed the wandering Huang as his memory unspooled. Part of the difficulty for a viewer in understanding was the difficulty that his point of view had, because he was moving through a world of consequences without his memory to root understanding. The story flowed in pieces which might have been his splintered memories-ashes of time- or might have been others'. Things that he is told by unreliable narrators are accepted at face value until experience tells him otherwise. Events are repeated in variation as his understanding of them waxes and wanes.In this version, the narrator (Huang Yaoshi) is fixed and the world comes to him. Things enacted in the first movie (for example, the encounter between Huang and Murong) with all the attendant ambiguity of living sequence, are instead recounted, with the flattening filters of narrator and listener. Unlike Huang, Ouyang accepts nothing at face value. So each event is more clearly arranged in a narrative, but all the narratives are filtered in the same way by a mind that rejects nuances that it can't fit to its particular ego. It is only at the end that Ouyang gains an insight that he may have missed things as important as his life's love as a result of his fear and pride.The story consists of interlocking circles,organized around male-female pairs. Ouyang and his true love are separated because of mutual pride and unwillingness to be the first to declare love; Huang plays messenger between them, never telling the woman his own love for her. This story of two men and a woman is mirrored in a minor key in another triangle which engages Huang. In this one, passion was realized with unhappy consequences for all. Huang seduced his best friend's bride. At the time of the story, the blind husband encounters the memoryless Huang. Just as the moment to tell love had gone by for the lovers in the first triangle, the moment to enact revenge has slipped past the rivals. The subsidiary stories also have evenly balanced male and female parts. The balance of male and female is concentrated to a point in Murong, who manifests that experience as a spinning latticed cage, sexual identity as a trap. Hong Qi, the natural, is steadfastly pursued by his wife, who ignores his rejection and simply acts to do what she thinks is right. The girl who wants revenge for her brother mirrors Ouyang. Each believes they have only one thing to sell, and each expects to be able to withhold the self from the exchange. For each, it takes another person's wound to break the trance of transactions. Whatever is going on Wong Kar Wai and Christopher Doyle are gods.