As Tears Go By

Wong Kar-Wai's directorial debut announces itself as a stylish crime film in the lineage of Scorsese, which is to say it is fundamentally uninterested in the social consciousness markers that would emerge as cultural preoccupations decades later. The film concerns itself with the ritualized codes of masculine honor among Hong Kong gangsters, the anguish of conflicted loyalty, and the romantic complications that arise when a mid-level criminal falls for his cousin. These are the proper concerns of a 1988 crime melodrama, and Wong pursues them with visual sophistication and narrative economy.

The female character exists almost entirely in relation to the male protagonist's emotional state. She is beautiful, sympathetic, but ultimately passive, a romantic object rather than a character with her own interior life or agency. The supporting male characters are permitted depth and contradiction; she exists to be loved and worried over. This is not a progressive choice by contemporary standards, but it is also not remarkable for the era or the genre, which inherited its gender dynamics wholesale from decades of Hollywood crime cinema. The film shows no interest in interrogating these dynamics, nor does it demonstrate any awareness that they might warrant interrogation.

What remains striking about "As Tears Go By" is not its social consciousness but its visual language and emotional precision. Wong crafts meaning through composition, color, and movement rather than dialogue or preachy commentary. The film does not lecture; it shows. By the standards of contemporary progressive cultural sensibility, it barely registers. By the standards of cinema, it remains accomplished.