BUENOS AIRES ZERO DEGREES

Perhaps the only fixed points around which everything revolves are nostalgia and memory: this guardian of emotions. By directing the endless adventures of the heart, the convulsions of a love which is often extinguished before it is even born, Wong Kar-wai talks in a fundamental way about the individualΥs relation to experience, about the domination of the past over the present, about the "elimination" of identity, about intimacy through distance (the distance of the gaze), about memory (as stationary time) and about time (as a continuous flow), about the weight of memory and catharsis, and about liberation from the bonds of the past. An event (experience) and its reverberations, and its reflections in a person's memory: it is nostalgia which Wong is filming and it is from its domino that the film's heroes are called upon to escape. As they sink into a deeply subjective universe, where the experience and the memory of nostalgia imprisons their existence, they struggle to express their emotions as clearly as they can, externalizing all the tempests, all the troubles of the heart, and confessing the passions of the soul. It is not surprising therefore, that each of Wong's films invariably ends in a confession. The character who, almost silent throughout the film, has suffered the torments and suffering of love, is now freed through the act of confession: Maggie Cheung as Peach Blossom (in Ashes of Time) gazes sadly at the sea, filled with nostalgia for her lost love; the weeping of Lai Yu-fai (in Happy Together) heard on a cassette-player at the end of the earth; Chow Mo-wan's whispering at the wall of the ancient temple (in In the Mood for Love), are unique and unprecedented moments of liberation. Dimitris Babas