Endless Journey in Wong Kar Wai’s Cinema : Rethinking Space and Memory

Emotional Cartography in Wong Kar Wai’s Cinema

In a map, there are roads, cities, highways, borders, countries, and metropolises—numerous signs pointing to other places. Wong Kar Wai rejects all forms of description. No defined path connects one place to the next; no wide shot enables the construction of a plausible route. What remain are characters (usually more than one), acting as markers for the paths they’ve traversed.

Wong Kar Wai and the Removal of Physical Infrastructure from Cinema

Cinema is an illusion of seeing space, time, and physicality. Wong  accepts this and treats cinema as a container devoid of a physical foundation (with Fallen Angels being the clearest evidence). Consequently, the act of cartography is transferred into an emotional realm. The psychological and the purely physical levels live in close proximity: the physical is an illusion—and so is the psychological. Thus, they are essentially of the same nature, though different in their material expression. Geographers teach us that units of measurement (such as distance) only make sense when considered in relation to their human use.

Today, Los Angeles and New York are in fact closer than Los Angeles and the Mexican border. Wong’s cinema starts from this mental map—the only model that ultimately shapes our behavior—and halts at defining the borders of individual characters. He discovers that their rootless wandering stems from the absence of a beginning and an end. Without a start or finish, no movement can be made, leading to human drift. His characters are lost in the horror of the moment—a moment often depicted at the very instant it disappears. This forms the rhizomatic, plural, and omnidirectional foundation that Deleuze and Guattari identified as the dominant pattern of contemporary society.

Journeys Without Origins or Destinations: The Experience of Movement in Wong Kar Wai’s Cinema

The rhizome or network dissolves distances. It enables teleportation and juxtaposes disparate elements without allowing them time to harmonize. In this structure, classical concepts of travel—with defined beginnings, middles, and ends—lose their place.

In such a world, Argentina and Taiwan can coexist in the same frame. In the age of digital communication, it makes no difference whether a film is made in Hong Kong or Buenos Aires. A rhizomatic image of a wall filled with TV screens, first seen in As Tears Go By and repeated in Happy Together, confirms this.
 

In this context, travel as a temporal experience is the only remnant in a boundless spatial continuum—some journeys can be imagined as endless. Time, as a chain of interconnected moments, anchors itself on this final isolated island and from there throws bottles containing messages into a flat and uniform sea.

Days of Being Wild begins with a longitudinal movement through the forests of the Philippines. This opening combines visual ambiguity with nostalgic sound—a melancholic tune with a haunting rhythm—conjuring the atmosphere of a distant memory or fading dream. Wong ties the notion of travel to this ultimate dimension: his city is like an immense ocean. Everything happens within it, but everything remains beneath the surface. What is seen is a series of islands—isolated moments with no clear links to one another.

Days of Being Wild is a static film; its stillness derives from the fact that it narrates a journey. But in Wong Kar Wai’s cinema, travel is always emptied of structure, leaving behind only a trace. In Wong’s world, a journey from point A to point B no longer makes sense, because A and B coexist in the same frame.

Blurry slow-motion sequences, prevalent from As Tears Go By to Fallen Angels in action scenes, are employed to capture this experience: a stretched moment that leaves the trace of movement in a double image. The line—cartography’s fundamental shape—denies travel itself, because travel implies leaving a place to explore another. But a line suggests a perceivable beginning and end, even if illusory. Yet in Days of Being Wild and Happy Together, the Philippines and Argentina are rendered as strangely familiar locales.

Representing Place in Wong Kar Wai’s Cinema: From Urban Maps to Songs of Memory

I saw a photo of Hong Kong: a harbor with scattered small wooden boats on the sea, and behind them, the dense, majestic skyline of skyscrapers surveying everything. Why does Wong Kar Wai’s cinema reject this image?

When we speak of horizontality and layered vision in modernity, we’re not only talking geography or geometry, but also about uniformity and the coexistence of multiple surfaces within a single plane. Music boxes and fishbowls, airport escalators, and alleyways littered with garbage.

The main setting is almost always linked to another place, one that acts like an emergency exit. Unlike American films, desire is seen and achieved—or more accurately, desire is fused with the characters’ living spaces.

The sensation of simultaneity or omnipresence in Wong Kar Wai’s cinema dissolves the distance between our world and his culture. The orientalist weight of elements fades. Yet Hong Kong is not America. Remnants of a culture foreign to us remain.

Cinema is self-sufficient, a production of imagination that seeks to replace reality. Space has entered the mind. Space is everything. Like the massive shopping mall that makes Chungking Express possible. The Chungking Mansions shopping center is a perfect example of a rhizomatic network: a system that extends beyond its borders to absorb other spaces.

Taking Chungking Express as the director’s production hub, a horizontal mapping of his cinema becomes possible. Nothing exists outside Chungking Express, because in this journey there is no boundary between inside and outside. Characters occupy spaces independently of narrative, interacting freely beyond classical storytelling.

From Ashes of Time onward, a disjointed style emerges whose range of techniques makes it impossible to find unity in representation.

He denies the rigid architecture of skyscrapers, presenting a space always intertwined with humanity. Place, in the truest sense, is made up of songs: the mambo of Days of Being Wild, the rock of Chungking Express, the pop of As Tears Go By, and the tango of Happy Together. These songs become places of memory, carried from one film to another, creating new stories to tell.

Source: Why Every Man Is Not an Island: A Hypothesis for Mapping Wong Kar Wai’s Cinema by Carlo Chatrian