When Ashes of Time first emerged in 1993, critics rifled through disparate cultural references to make sense of what they had seen. What if Samuel Beckett had made a martial arts picture? What if Bruce Lee had been Ingmar Bergman’s muse? What if someone shoved the respective brains of Sergio Leone, Andrei Tarkovsky and Patrick Tam into the same wonderful jar?
It all proved a bit much for the film’s distributors who had imagined that director Wong Kar Wai had been off making a regular epic martial arts picture. The central conceit – rogue samurai sit around the desert philosophising and pining for lost loves – might have sat well with post-Tarantino, Sopranos-literate audiences but in 1993, most folks scratched their heads and wondered why the kung-fu guys were talking so much.
It did not help that the film, long before anyone had seen it, had been dubbed Hong Kong’s Heaven’s Gate. Wong himself acknowledged its difficult three-year gestation period by producing a spoof version and by retreating behind a handheld freewheeling camera for his follow-up project, Chungking Express, which he shot in six weeks.
Certainly, Ashes of Time can be difficult. There are actors playing different characters. There are marauding bands of horse thieves that we never properly understand. But it is also beautiful, poetic, mysterious and gripping, an engaging entanglement of insights into memory, love and cynicism. All this and sword fights, too.